The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
The Bishops Dulcinius and Sandromes also visited the Kaghan, sometime
in the ninth century a.d., when the Khazars were embroiled in a great
war with the Arab armies advancing from beneath the Caucasus. Dulcinius—
who was martyred at Tyre and became the patron saint of the wayward, the
laconic, men who walk looking at the ground, and editors of manuscripts—
reported enigmatically to the emperor Tiberius that “the Kaghan can hold in
his hand the light of the sun and the light of the moon, but he has not yet in
his heart the light of Christ our Lord, and it is this light that I will bring to
him, making him thrice blessed on this earth.”
The original maker is unknown.
Place of origin: The Khazar state was in the Caucasus and Volga regions.
Its precise boundaries were unknown; it certainly encompassed parts
of Russia, and may also have included parts of present-day Georgia, Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh, and eastern Turkey.
Last known owner: Following the almost complete ingestion of the
Khazars by Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or simply history, the location of the
Cages passed from written record. People still spoke of them, but their size and
power grew greater and vaguer in the retelling. At the Seljuk court, the Sun
Cage became the name of a constellation and the Moon Cage the name for
wispy clouds bracketing a harvest moon on three sides. Following the dispersal
of the Seljuks, there were only disembodied echoes of the Cages, stories about
stories about an original referent buried somewhere in the desert, swallowed in
the endlessness of the steppe. Every clan of wheat farmers with ancestral memories
of conquest, every clan of shepherds and nomads who had once ruled
their neighbors remembered themselves as the original owner of the Cages and
saw their disappearance as a metonym for their lost prominence. After the
British and the Russians snapped Central Asia like a cursed wishbone, and
especially after the Russians baked these warriors and seekers into Homo Sovieticuses
in the putative historical fires (metaphorical fires always seem to work
better when there are actual fires nearby to heat up the pokers), the Cages
became the Loch Ness Monster of Central Asian historical scholarship, a
spook story bandied around the Pitt-Rivers and the Eagle and Child.
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