"Masterton, Graham - The Djinn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

"It is said by many that when the days of the N'zwaa were almost at an end, they gathered in the temple where they had once worshiped, and with ritual and song, they stored away in scrolls, in sarcophagi, and in jars the dreadful secrets that had given them sway for so many centuries. It is also said that he who discovers the secret of Nazwah the Unthinkable ma) become the most powerful man in the known world and beyond; yet that he must be prepared to pay the price. For as the courtesan exacts a levy for her carnal services, so does the magical apparition of Nazwah the Unthinkable demand its fee, and for many that fee may be well beyond their means."

-Legends of the Persian Sorcerers, Volume IV, Chapter IIL

"Archeologists working on the site of an ancient temple at Naswa, Iran, are now convinced that 'a careful selection' of the priceless artifacts that were once buried there have already been removed by thieves.

"The temple was supposed to have been the site of a savage cult of genie worshipers who, according to legend, were all-powerful in the region for at most three centuries. Their rites involved the invocation of demons and human sacrifice, and as Professor W. F. Collins of the British Archeological Fellowship recently remarked: 'They were, on the whole, a rather unpleasant bunch.'

"But what is worrying the fifteen-man team on the site of the dig is that many of the most precious jars and scrolls they could have hoped to have found have already been expertly stolen-possibly as long ago as the 1930s. The thefts considerably reduce the archeological interest of the dig, and Professor Collins fears that many of the items may have been destroyed or exported to other countries.

" 'We know that many of the artifacts were actually there,' he said in Isfahan yesterday. 'The temple was almost completely buried in a landslide of eroded mud about forty or fifty years after the genie worshipers abandoned it, and one can still see today the impressions made by many of the pieces when the mud dried around them. In particular we are missing what appeared to be a complete set of scrolls, a selection of ritual knives and swords, and two jars-one a small incense pot and the other a very large jar with decorated sides.'

"What particularly puzzles the archeologists is that many very valuable items have been left untouched. These include the discovery of a woman's body, mummified by the mud so that her skin and hair remain preserved. So far Professor Collins has been reticent about this find, and would make no further comment until he had seen the results of carbon-dating tests and physiological studies."

-The London Sunday Times, October 12,1968


Kensington, London

May, 1969

Dear Inspector Kashan,

I promised to let you have the results of the tests on the cadaver found at Nazwa as soon as possible, and here they are. You will probably be relieved to hear that you do not have a recent homicide on your hands, although there are some facets of the woman's death which would make an unusual (if rather grisly) investigation.

The body is contemporary to the abandoning of the N'zwaa temple and is therefore at least twenty-five centuries old. It is the mummified cadaver of a young woman of about nineteen or twenty years old-not a particularly beautiful young woman if the preserved skin is anything to go by, but judging from her jewelry and hair, she was the daughter of quite a respectable family.

It is the way in which she met her untimely end that we find most extraordinary, and we cannot find any record of similar deaths anywhere in our historical texts or libraries. She died as the result of the introduction into her private parts of an object of enormous size, which compressed her internal organs into her rib cage and probably led to instantaneous death. What the object actually was, we cannot guess. It was introduced with sufficient force to separate the pelvic girdle into two halves and push the entire visceral content of the body into a quarter of its usual displacement.

Perhaps by looking through your own historical records you might find some similar death recorded, but my colleagues and I are resigned at the moment to leaving the poor woman's death an unsolved mystery.

Yours sincerely,

L. Pope

"It is truly said that truth is often found in bottles; but it is even more truly said that out of old bottles come old truths."

-Persian Dialects, p. 833.