瓦泰克

There's a young man, beautiful to look at, living in a palace of gold and lacquer, who only has to reach for a thing to have it. That isn't enough for him, so he climbs a tower, story by story, eleven thousand steps in all, each one holding a warning no one else can see. When he reaches the top, he sells himself, to the abyss cracking open beneath his feet.

His name is Vathek, and he is the only protagonist this book has, but by the time you finish it you'll see he's less a hero than a specimen laid out on a dissecting tray. This isn't a book about how he wins. It's about how, step by step, he sets his own heart on fire with his own hand.

Vathek is a short Gothic novel written in French in the 1780s by the Englishman William Beckford. The first English edition in general circulation appeared in 1786, a year ahead of the French original. It stands among the earliest of English Gothic fiction and Orientalist fantasy, and the Romantic poets who came after, Byron and Shelley included, never quite shook its shadow when they wrote of Satan, cliffs, and hell. Its publication came with a small deception: the first English translator, Samuel Henley, passed it off as translated from an Arabic manuscript, pretending it was really an ancient book dug up in Baghdad, a sign of just how badly people of the time wanted this story to look like it hadn't been written by a European.

Beckford was barely past twenty when he wrote it, and the story goes that he wrote it in one sitting over three days and three nights. True or not, that young man's recklessness is impossible to hide. The prose is ornate, extravagant, almost showing off, as if determined to press the reader down under layer after layer of silk and spice until, gasping for breath, you finally lift the carpet and find embers underneath.

The story is set in the Abbasid Caliphate. Vathek is the ninth Caliph, claiming descent from Harun al-Rashid, a real historical figure, though the palace, the tower, and the underground kingdom are all Beckford's invention. Vathek was a beautiful youth, later grown fat and given over to sensual pleasure; he also has one terrible eye that can strike a man dead in his rage, so he must keep it deliberately checked. His mother, Carathis, Greek by birth and a master of sorcery and alchemy, is an ambitious woman, not a loving one. She pushes her son toward the abyss, smiling the whole way down.

Around Vathek circles a cast of characters each with a different fate. The one who tempts him is a hideous, mysterious merchant, the Giaour. The one who makes him feel love for a woman for the first time is Nouronihar, a noble girl he seizes along the road; she was already promised to her cousin Gulchenrouz, a boy as delicate as porcelain. And there is one crucial mirror figure: the prophet Soliman, chained in the underground palace and burning, unextinguished, for who knows how many years, King Solomon himself. This once-wise king carries a visible flame burning in his chest, a trailer for what awaits Vathek.

The rules of this world run like this: it's a stage of Oriental fantasy dressed in the trappings of Persian and Arabic miniature painting, sumptuous robes, spices, venomous insects, talismans, sorcery, subterranean fire always burning somewhere in the distance. But underneath, its bones are an Enlightenment fable: knowledge has a price, the senses have a limit, and the cost of crossing either line is not a legal penalty but the soul itself.

The story opens at the point where Vathek's fall begins. Outside his capital, Samarah, he builds five palaces, one each dedicated to sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, living in each in turn, each more unrestrained than the last. They are the showroom of his appetite, and later, looking back, the gentle country he can never return to. Still unsatisfied, he raises a tower outside the city as well, eleven thousand steps high, climbing it step by step purely to study the stars and forbidden knowledge. His mother, Carathis, keeps her cauldrons burning and her venomous creatures caged in that same tower, feeding his ambitions until they grow, little by little, into action.

The turn comes on the evening a caravan enters the city. A merchant with a twisted body and a face that frightens everyone, the Giaour, arrives with his wares: one chest holds scimitars carved with strange symbols, others hold food so rich that whoever tastes it can never let it go. Vathek touches one of the blades and cannot look away. The Giaour isn't selling merchandise. He's selling an address: the underground palace of fire, where the treasure and dominion of the sultans who ruled before Adam still lie hidden, and whoever goes there will see everything and possess everything. What is the price? The Giaour never says it outright. But the symbols carved into the blade already have: faith.

Vathek is won over, and wants to offer the Giaour a gift to mark the occasion. He summons fifty boys of noble birth, tells them they'll be accompanying the merchant on an outing to make an offering, and leads them to a cliff's edge. The boys, told nothing, wait for his command. Vathek waves his hand. All fifty children are pushed off the edge. None survive. It's the most horrifying page in the whole book, carried by fifty children's smiling faces. Not a drop of blood, but those smiles chill the spine worse than any blood could. Up to this point Vathek was fat, greedy, arrogant, but still living inside the rules of the ordinary world. After this push, he crosses a line there's no walking back from.

After the sacrifice, Vathek sets out with his court and his army. His destination is Istakhar, the ruins of ancient Persepolis. Beckford turns a thousand-year-old burnt ruin into the landmark marking the entrance to the underground kingdom, sending the reader along with the Caliph's caravan from a fictional heart of Arabia toward an even more fictional horizon. Along the way they stop at the estate of an emir, Fakreddin, where Vathek sees a girl, the emir's daughter, Nouronihar. She was already promised to her gentle cousin Gulchenrouz, a boy so tender, timid, and fragile he seems almost made of porcelain. Vathek doesn't ask the father's blessing or the girl's consent. He simply uses his power to take her. Gulchenrouz chases after her to the riverbank in tears, and is carried off by a band of spirits, left forever in a state of carefree childhood, the one innocent in the whole book who gets to escape.

Near Istakhar, the entrance to the underground palace splits open like a wound. Vathek and Nouronihar walk down into it together, and see crowds of souls drifting in the firelight. The first they meet is Soliman, once King Solomon, the wisest king Israel ever had, now carrying an unquenchable flame lodged in his chest. His eyes can still see the newcomers, his mouth can still speak, but nothing can put that flame out. The moment he sees Vathek, he knows exactly who he is, as if he has been waiting in that fire for him for centuries.

Soliman is Vathek's mirror, though Vathek can't read it. He keeps walking, until at last he kneels before Eblis, the lord of darkness, bows his head, receives his commands, and gets the power he's always wanted, to see everything that exists, to command the secrets of past and future. The words are barely spoken before his chest seizes with pain. Fire erupts from inside him, not burning his skin, but his heart. Nouronihar's too.

This is the ending. Not death, something crueler than death. The hearts of Vathek and Nouronihar catch an eternal flame, and from that moment they join the ranks of the countless damned, wandering the palace forever, consumed by regret, denied even the release of dying. The fire burns inside them, but they cannot die, and that is the darkest stroke in the whole book: once the crime is committed, eternal punishment means being frozen forever at the instant you realize what you've done, with no way out.

On the surface, Vathek is an Oriental spectacle; underneath, it's an Enlightenment moral fable. It's asking the question eighteenth-century Europeans loved most: can a person chase knowledge without limit and pay no price for it? Beckford answers with a fire. What Vathek is after isn't any one specific field of learning. It's the grand ambition to see everything and command everything, words big enough to make even the boldest philosophers of the century blush, and the price is himself.

What makes this book work is restraint, one word for it. It pushes extravagance to its outer limit, five palaces, spices, exotic food, sorcery, and then pokes a small hole under every feast, letting the reader catch the smell of something burning. Its real power isn't the spectacle itself, but the small delay between the spectacle and the curse. The devil never collects payment right away for what he gives you. He waits until you're used to it, and then lights the match, and what burns is the habit.

Carathis deserves special mention. She isn't a madwoman, and she isn't a mother crushed flat by her era. She is rational, and she uses that reason to do evil. Vathek's ambition actually runs two layers deep: a young man's hunger for limitless power, and a mother's hunger to seize that limitless power in her son's place. She, too, ends up in the underground palace, and even there she never stops calculating. It's the Enlightenment's coldest joke on pure reason: you think you're using your mind, when really your mind has been working for the devil all along.

One more thing worth saying: Beckford wrote this book in French, but Samuel Henley's English translation is the version that has traveled further, and the standard edition in circulation today, Gutenberg #42401, is that same translation. Henley never had full authorization at the time, and he dressed the translation up as a direct rendering of an original Arabic manuscript, which is its own irony. This was already a European telling an Eastern story, then pretended by a European to have been translated back from the East. And yet this fake Orient became the ancestor of how the English would go on writing the East. The exotic lands in Byron and the subterranean fire in Shelley both borrowed their spark from the fire burning in Vathek.

The plot is only a skeleton. The real body of Vathek is Beckford's prose, stretched to the point of near-recklessness. Knowing the ending doesn't make the text less worth reading. You still have to smell those spices yourself, hear those invisible bells ring through the underground palace yourself, before you can feel the sheer nerve of an Englishman barely twenty, daring to write an Arabian story in French, daring to write a Caliph as a beast, daring to roast an entire generation of readers over the fires of hell. The companion guide only hands you a map. The text itself is the road paved in silk, leading straight to the embers.