Where We're At: Parts 4.4-4.5: Against the Day

Kit, Auberon

• Yashmeen writes to Auberon (and sends the letter via Kit) that TWIT is no longer acting in her interest; they're not protecting her and they're not telling her what they have planned for her. They're leaving Switzerland and about to head for Buda-Pesth where she foresees danger and sorrow. They're still after Shambhala. ("[L]ike those religious charlatans who claim direct intercourse with God, there are an increasing number at the TWIT who presume a similar intimacy with the Hidden City; and who, more disturbingly, cannot separate it from the secular politics of present-day Europe." At Gottingen, she was useful to a group of Bolsheviks; the Russia-England alliance makes her useful to British intelligence; she doesn't know why TWIT wants her. "It is as if I possessed, without my knowledge, some key to an encrypted message of great moment, which others are locked in struggle to come into control of." She wonders about who he's been serving all this time. She dreamed about him last night--he said he wasn't what she's imagining him to be. She dreams (or has visions of) The Compassionate.
• Kit travels by steamer and mostly by train (the Trans-Caspian railroad) across Russia and eventually ends up in Kashgar.
• Kit meets Auberon Halfcourt and tells him that he believes that Yashmeen's being manipulated into breaking from TWIT--which would also be why she was removed from Gottingen. Auberon is living well in Kashgar; he's neither lost nor in need of rescue.
• Auberon's Russian counterpart is Colonel Yevgeny Prokladka. His staff, all in exile from points further west, control vice in the city. Klopski runs surround movies (?); Zipyagin controls prostitution; Chiungiz is his aide. Years ago Volodya had planned to use the Bol'shaia Igra to steal a huge jade statue.
• Mushtaq reports to Auberon that the Bol'shaia Igra is over west Taklamakan, "where its mission is obvious to the lowest camel-thief." Auberon replies that they can't exactly shoot the balloon out of the sky.
• The local prophet, the Doosra, thinks it's his destiny to control all of north Eurasia; he's armed; remote outposts on the trading route are falling to him(?). So, add a local power to England, Russia, Japan, China, Germany, and Islam who all were concerned with the area.
• The Doosra's representative asks Auberon (for England) to give the city to them.
• Auberon and Prokladka commiserate that the region will belong to Islam; neither Russia nor England can fight successfully for it.
• Mustaq had left Auberon when he rescued or kidnapped Yashmeen years ago.
• Lt. Dwight Prance is a Renfrew scholar who's there to do something with the Chinese. Someone will perform in some strange tongue and mesmerize them all so that by the time anyone can act it will be too late.
• Kit and Auberon talk. Auberon can't get back west; his being in Asia isn't his own choice. Auberon sees Kit as lost, so why not use him to establish relations with the Tungus (as in Tungu reindeer dance, from the Chicago expo) living east of the Yenisei--he's not been expressly forbidden by headquarters to do so. Kit agrees to go, and Prance will go with him.
• Auberon arranges for Kit to have an audience with the Doosra; Kit's to report back.
• The Doosra speaks fluent English with a "University-nitwit" accent.
• The Doosra says that Kit should seek out his (the Doosra's) master in the north and he will answer Kit's questions; Kit should come back and relay the answers to the English and the Russians. The Doosra is sending his henchman Hassan along for the journey, as protection.
• After poring over Yashmeen's letter and feeling unworthy, Auberon takes off into the mountains somewhere and arrives weeks later in Bukhara looking for a guide to Shambhala (as have been many Germans lately).

(page 767)

Kit
I don't get this section at all.

• Kit would not understand until he saw Lake Baikal why it had been necessary to travel there "and why, in the process of reaching it, penance, madness, and misdirection are inescapable."
• (Prance doesn't go to Baikal; he stays behind in Irkutsk.)
• Hassan tells Kit that he's (Kit has) already spoken to the Doosra's prophet--and there's Baikal, "part of a supernatural order included provisionally in this lower, broken one." Kit realizes that he should have started the journey through the Tushuk Tash, the arch; Hassan, who calls it the Prophet's Gate, disappears.
• The journey had begun by heading for the Tushuk Tash. The arch/gate is continually crumbling, "shedding pieces of itself from so high up that by the time they hit the ground they'd be invisible, followed by the whizzing sound of their descent, for they fell faster than the local speed of sound."
• As Kit passes through the gate he's overwhelmed by a wave of sound, a vision. He dreams of this moment repeatedly as they journey. The last time he dreams it, a voice he should know tells him "you are released."
• Once past the gate, Kit, Prance, and Hassan travel along the silk road, one oasis to the next. "[T]his space the Gate had opened to them was less geographic than to be measured among axes of sorrow and loss."
• Hassan gathers wild-growing marijuana to use for trade.
• They (Kit and Prance; Hassan took off at Lake Baikal) arrive in Irkutsk and it looks and feels like the San Juans, a mining town, to Kit. Kit's instructions from Auberon are to see Mr. Swithin Poundstock, a British nationalist in import/export. Poundstock's minting his own coinage, using old Chinese coins and black-market-but-real coin stamps to create British gold sovereigns. He shows them a map of eastern Siberia and shows them where they'll be operating--"the three great river basins east of the Yeniusei--Upper Tunguska, Stony Tunguska, Lower Tunguska." They're populated by clans that have been at war with one another forever.The key regional figure, moreso than even the Doosra's superior, is the shaman Magyakan, who's active in the Lower Tunguska tribe (Illimpiya).
• They arrive in Yeniseisk and start looking for Magyakan.
• Prance explains that differences in the major religions are nothing compared to how the major religions align against Shamanism, everywhere. "Every state religion, including your [Kit's] own, considers it irrational and pernicious, and has taken steps to eradicate it." It's not okay with the religions for humans to "be in touch with the powerful gods hiding in the landscape, with no need of any official church to mediate it for them."
• Prance is working for some organization in Whitehall.

( p. 778)