Traveler from an Antique Land

Was he a madman, a consummate actor and prankster taking advantage of the similarity of facial features, or truly the person he claimed to be? To this day, I do not know for sure, but that encounter changed my life in a way. Until that day, I had been interested in English literature and was planning to make it my career, but the strange meeting sparked in me an interest in the Mexican culture. As a result, here I am, sitting in the verandah of a quaint old villa on the outskirts of Yucatan, drinking my morning cup of coffee and enjoying the beautiful view while my wife prepares the breakfast.

And I am remembering another morning.

On that fateful day several years ago, I was nineteen years old, had just finished my first undergrad year at the University of Western Ontario and was spending my summer vacation with my parents.

One morning, bright and early, I jogged to Harris Park and sat down on a bench near the water fountain. For some time I enjoyed the morning breeze playing around me and letting me cool down after the exertion of the long jog. Then I pulled out the copy of “The Devil’s Dictionary” from my backpack and started reading it. A little while later, I heard someone approaching me. I looked up and saw a man. He stopped near me, looked at me silently for some time then said: "Would you mind if I sit here with you for a while?"

That was a strange question. The bench was big enough for three people and I was not hogging it. He could have just sat down if he wanted to. It looked as if the man wanted to talk to me and the question was just his way of breaking the ice.

I looked at him carefully. I consider myself a pretty good face reader and this is what I guessed about him from his face: sharp, cynical and yet kindly, not given to pampering fools. Come to think of it, did I really guess all that or is my older self creating false memories? Oh well! At least my memories of his physical appearance are not false. He sported a distinctive moustache and a short beard; he was quite handsome and had a slightly tanned complexion. His age seemed to be somewhere around a sturdy sixty but I later surmised that it must have been around seventy two if he was who he claimed he was. He looked tired.

Normally, like a typical male specimen of humanity, I rarely notice people’s clothes or remember them if I do notice them, but somehow, I distinctly remember his dress. He wore brown trousers, a brown safari jacket and a panama hat. He carried a knapsack on his back.

"Not at all,” I replied.

He sat down beside me on the bench and there was silence for a while.

“Good to see that book is still around and still being read,” he said, pointing to The Devil’s Dictionary, “and you must be an intelligent young man to be reading it.” He had a strange smile on his face, as if he knew something that I did not.

“Thank you,” I said, for the want of anything better to say.

“My name is Ahmed,” I said, extending my hand.

“Ambrose,” he grasped my hand.

He removed his hat. His hair were receding in the middle. There was a nagging familiarity about his looks.

“New to this place?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Looks like you’ve been traveling a lot.”

“You don’t know how much.”

“What do you do?”

“Once, I was a writer. Now I am a traveler.”

I looked at his knapsack. “Traveling salesman of some kind?”

“No. I am a time traveler.”

“What?”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Of course, I don’t. You are pulling my leg.”

He gave me that enigmatic smile again. “Just for fun, assume that I am telling the truth. What questions, if any, would you ask me then?”

I thought it over. This could be fun. Whatever he was, he was an interesting person.

"Okay, first question. How do you know our language so well? Is it spoken in your time too?"

"Yes," he said. "I am not that much removed from your time."

"Does it mean time travel is just around the corner?" I asked him.

He did not respond but he looked amused.

Then I asked him: "Tell me something about your time."

"Hmm?" He seemed to fall into a reverie. "Those were quite good times, you know," he said at length, rather wistfully, “even though my two sons died and my wife apparently cheated on me. Hope my daughter did well. Wish I had enough time to locate her.”

"What year do you come from? How far ahead in our future?" He turned and looked at me in a strange way.

"You don't understand," he said gently. "Time travel to the past involves paradoxes out of man's control."

"I know. Science fiction is full of them."

"And because of these paradoxes," he continued, ignoring my interruption, "time travel to the past is out of reach of common man within the boundaries of the normal universe."

Comprehension did not come immediately. "But - but - that means..."

"Yes, I think you understand now. I come not from your future but from your past.”

I assimilated this information. A thousand questions raised their heads in my mind. "Time travel was known in the past?" Somehow I was starting to take this man seriously.

"Yes."

"Then why is it not known today?"

"Even in those days, time travel was known only to a select few. Time-travel is physically not possible but it is possible metaphysically and is performed using esoteric methods. With time, and wars and disasters, humans totally lost the esoteric knowledge of time travel,” he paused, “as they seem to have lost several valuable things."

"What valuable things?"

"Values, for one."

At that time, I thought it was a corny statement. At that time I was young.

Shading his eyes with his hand, he looked at the burning orb in the sky. "I have very short time before my next jump," he said. "Already, the time to leave is drawing near."

"You are going back?" That made me think. "Wait a minute. Didn't you say that traveling back in time is not possible?"

"Yes."

"But if you are going back to your time from here, it means you are traveling to the past."

He smiled, and there was something both mocking and sad about his smile. "Whatever gave you the idea that I was going back to my time? No, my young friend. I am jumping forward some twenty years in your future."

I then had to ask the next question.

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why have you left your time? What made you undertake this one-way super fast journey into the future? What is the purpose?"

This time, he was silent for quite a while. It seemed as if he was finding it difficult to give words to his thoughts. At last, he spoke.

"I have to leave you soon, so I will try to tell you about it as briefly as I can.

"In my time, a great scholar studied the sun. He found out that the sun was cooling down at an incredible rate. If this cooling rate went unchecked, we would have a dead sun on our hands within a matter of a dozen centuries or so.” He paused and I pounced in.

“Several decades ago, some scientists believed that stars cooled down with time but later discoveries about evolution of stars proved this wrong. Stars don’t cool down.” You see, I knew my astronomy even though I was not a science student.

He looked at me with what I thought was a grudging approval.

“You are generally right,” he said. “But the universe is not devoid of anomalies and our sun turned out to be an anomaly. It was really cooling down.”

“Who was this scholar and how far back was this?”

“That was in the early twentieth century and you would not recognize the name of the scientist. He was a recluse, living in a small village near Chihuahua in Mexico. Now don’t interrupt. I don’t have much time left.

“About the cooling down of the sun, after a lot of pondering on the matter by some of the greatest minds of our times, a decision was reached. There was one way to prolong the life of the sun. First of all, a tremendous source of energy was needed. It was a known fact even in my time that time travel to the future is accompanied by the release of great quantity of energy. So if someone were to start jumping forward in time, each jump would generate energy. The only problem was how to channel this energy to the sun. Once this problem was solved, there was a call for volunteers. Of those who volunteered, I was selected. So here I am. With my every jump into the future, there is a release of energy and this energy is siphoned off to the heart of the sun via a rune I carry. Here, let me show you." He undid the top buttons of his shirt and pulled out a chain that hung around his neck. Attached to the chain was what looked like a metal ball with strange markings on it. I looked at it, silently.

He turned the object around in his hand. “Round,” he said, “like time itself.”

He gave me a deep, studying look. “I don’t show this rune to everyone. Neither do I tell everyone my story. I like you, particularly seeing that you have good taste in literature.” He pointed to the book in my hand.

“So when did you make your first jump?”

“It was in the December of 1913. Mexico was in turmoil and Pancho Villa was busy capturing Ojinaga.

"I have left my times, my world, my friends, never to return to them, ever moving onwards, with no time to call my own, no home to look forward to. I have sacrificed a lot to prolong life on this planet. I hope the life on this planet does not disappoint me."

In spite of the bright morning, I felt a darkness fall on me as I tried to imagine the loneliness of this person, if what he was saying was true.

“Where do you expect all this to end?” I asked finally.

“At my death or at the time of the big crunch, if it is not very far off in the future.”

He paused, then said, "Farewell, my friend of a few moments. It was nice meeting you and talking to you. I find you intelligent and sensible and I think I can count you among those people who perhaps will not disappoint me. I may see you, or hear of you again, in twenty years from now. God be with you." He got up and started walking down the path.

Just then I looked down at the book in my hand. The back cover was facing me and it had a photo of the writer. I realized that this was the source of my sense of familiarity with the traveler. He looked quite like the writer in the photo, except that the writer did not have a beard.

Suddenly, all those bits and pieces of information that he had given me came together in my mind: a writer, was pleased that I was reading The Devil’s Dictionary, had a wife whom he suspected had cheated on him, had two sons who died, had a daughter too. A writer who was in Mexico in 1913, and had vanished without trace in the Mexican wilderness.

“Wait,” I blurted. “Are you truly Bierce? Ambrose Bierce?”

He turned, gave me a nod, walked down the path and seemed proverbially to vanish into the rising sun.

THE END