The View from Tamischeira. Richard Cumyn

      In Ottawa the relentless arctic blast held the hellish frozen city in its grasp, and Lampman prayed for relief. It was so harsh, the air like ice spears piercing his lungs, that he had to swaddle his face in layers of scarves before venturing the few blocks to work. While he trudged up Metcalfe Street, he warmed himself with snatches of his favourite verse, and with thoughts of the myth lands and the possibility that they could be, of all places, in the Caucasus.

      Of all the connections Fessenden had posited thus far—present-day Terek with Erech of the Gilgamesh epic, the Dariel Pass with Erebus, Sekhet-Eli with Sakatley—it was the Alizon Valley with Eden that had a lock on his imagination. To stand upon that ground, in the lee of the mountains, and to see the Garden as the ancients remembered it, to visit such a place once before death was his abiding wish. Perhaps the grip of winter had him thinking obsessively about balmy climes. But, no, it was not that alone. For all Fessenden’s insistence upon reproducible, “hard” evidence, as the inventor called it, and upon logic, Lampman found himself sharing his friend’s excitement for discovery, for the reality underlying the myth. As he walked home at the end of the day, or in the mornings as he ran beside the Rideau River to try to build up his wind, he would think about the journey and the itinerary when they arrived. From Sevenfold Erech of the Wide Plazas, none other than Tartarus itself with its race tracks and encircling canals, he travelled south in his mind the thirty miles to Dariel, and through it, fearful, blind in its terrible blackness, he would feel his way, the voice of the Terek his only guide until it debouched at Eshmuti, the opening to the Alizon Valley.

      He had familiar landmarks in Ottawa that he associated with the Puzzle. The Byward Market east of Parliament Hill was Semochada Scheni, for it seemed that whenever he was there, surrounded by the bustle of greengrocers, butchers, poulterers, fishmongers, the crowds, the surging vitality of it, the skies were always bright. It was his Sun City, a warm oasis trapped in a heart of ice. It was Phanagoria and Phoeni and Fenkhu, all one. He wrote of a promontory overlooking the Ottawa River, which height he took to calling Bakhu, the Mountain of Sunrise, because one night he and Katherine sat there conversing until the easterly sky began to blush. The fields to the east of the city were Sek-het-sasi, for in his memory they always flamed with those first rays of the joyous day. He called a little white church where he and his love often stopped on their noontime walks, To-neter, the “Holy Land,” not for its altar and hymnbooks, but for its simple pews that afforded them rest, and especially allowed them to sit close enough that they felt the conversant warmth of their bodies. For without love, he wrote, paradise is unobtainable.