Chapter Sixty-one
The Aurora/ Unseen
June 30, 1908.
Tayshet Station, Irkutsk Oblast. Russia
In spite of the upheavals that were shaking Mother Russia in those days, life seemed to go on at its usual pace that morning. The sun of the oppressive Siberian summer was brightening the landscape, painting the nearby fields a yellowish green and making the railroad tracks shine with a golden glow. A military airship could be seen in the distance, the area didn't have too many of those. Most of them were in the big capitals of the Tsarist Empire.
A normal landscape as every morning, with the exception of the invasion of mosquitoes coming from the Biryusa River that was taking place those days. In fact many insects and animals seemed to have moved from the north to the south in the last week. But people had hardly noticed that and had gone about their daily business.
And that morning was no exception.
Travelers gathered at the station, some waiting for their trains to arrive, others bidding farewell to loved ones departing on the trans-Siberian route eastward. In other wagons the unloading and loading of the daily cargo had been completed. The same routine as every day. The murmur of conversation mingled with the soft rustle of the wind through the trees, creating an atmosphere of calm and tranquility.
Except for the damn mosquitoes.
Professor Satou Nobuyama, sitting in one of the seats by the window, clicked his tongue and with a newspaper swatted one, which had come dangerously close to his arm.
"Those bastards are the size of a dog!" Satou said angrily to one of his friends, sitting next to him, and unfolded the newspaper again. They were in one of the upper-class wagons with seats facing each other and a small table.
He and his traveling companions had just returned a couple of days ago from the north. In his case he had just taken the trip as a vacation. It had been a bad idea. He had not imagined that the insects of the taiga in summer could be so aggressive. But the trip had been interesting anyway. Although anthropology was not his area, it was not a bad thing to change the environment either.
His Russian wasn't very good, but it was good enough to get the local and national news. There seemed to be trouble in the capital and those discontents and protests were spreading to many cities.
The issue of the date always confused him a little. He was used to the Mejian era calendar which was in the year 41, according to the Gregorian in the year 1908. Russia was also in 1908 and the same month but, because they used the Julian calendar, there was a time lag of several days. That day's newspaper said the date was June 17.
"We're done," said a voice approaching, along with another man. The two men sat down on the seats in front of Satou and snorted wearily.
The group was now complete and it only remained to wait to say goodbye to the city.
They had arrived from the long journey from the north looking like a pile of rags in the city, but in the two days they had taken to rest from the trip at least they had been able to clean up sufficiently in one of the hotels and shave off their weeks of beard. Oddly enough, the beard had helped them avoid getting so many insect bites on their faces. Something to keep in mind when traveling in such wild areas.
The four had gone through some hardships on the trip there and back, because they had had to travel with rented mules. More in the case of Satou Nobuyama, because he had never gone with those animals. But they had been through so many adventures with the animals that he even felt a little sorry to say goodbye to them.
"Is the luggage well secured?" Satou asked.
"Yes, don't worry."
"I was more concerned about the insect sample issue. I hope they arrive safely as we move farther north," remarked the one sitting next to Satou.
"We have several days to get to Vladivostok, and before that we will have to get to the other train before we get to Manchuria," Satou said, while trying to remember what some words in the news meant that he had never read before.
"I'd like to stop in Manchuria."
"Don't even think about it," warned one of his friends in front of him. "Better to take advantage of the ticket, rather than get off early."
"Yes, that's right, I already want to be back home."
Satou smiled inwardly. Yes, that trip had been enough.
What had he expected to see? That what he had seen as a child would come true?
While the other three were talking, Satou closed the newspaper and looked out the window, trying to relax. Not far away there were children playing.
Regardless of the place or time, children were still children.
It had been so many years since he himself had played near the train tracks with his friends in Shinjuku.
The city of Tokyo had modernized and, little by little, the green spaces had receded with the development of the city.
Not only had he grown older, but the city had also lost the luster of its youthful years. But the children were still children. They still saw monsters or yokais in the nearby forests, although the legends had also gradually faded away.
Satou narrowed his eyes. Hadn't he and his friends sometimes seen supernatural creatures when they were little? Where were those ghosts of samurais, ronins, or demons hiding in the hills?
The world had gradually become detached from those legends. Or were they still there? He, despite being a man of science, could not rule out the possibility that that magical world was still there, perhaps hidden or mutating into something else.
His anthropologist friends used to say that myths do not disappear and that they simply transform into something else to suit the times.
Perhaps that was so.
Satou remembered a legend his mother had told him about the marebito and the yokais.
There was a legend that said that around 1870 one night, a mother and her son had encountered a procession of supernatural beings. Perhaps it was something similar to the Hyakki Yakō procession, but no. That legend had something different.
The mother and son were afraid that the yokais would kidnap them to take them to their kingdom. But that did not happen. One of the little yokai had approached the mother and child and told them "don't forget us". The mother had asked why he had said that, to which one of the older yokai took the little yokai and replied: "We will leave this world. We will no longer be here. Terrible years are coming."
The legend had different variants, but many said that since that day the supernatural world had been disappearing step by step.
Satou had asked his friends about the story, since they were much more versed in folklore than he was. The answer had surprised him.
It was not a Japanese legend.
In fact his friends had encountered it in many places. But what was surprising was that the story had begun to spread around the same time it had happened in Japan.
It was a strange thing. Because given the distances and means of communication more than three decades ago, it was impossible for a story to have spread in such a way as to reach remote places.
Had all the storytellers and folklorists agreed to spread that story around the world at the same time?
Satou looked at the children again. They looked as if the morning sunlight was shining on them more brightly.
Maybe it was true. Perhaps with the advancement of the industrial era that world of magic, occultism and fabulous creatures had been gradually retreating from the earthly world.
Or who knew. Perhaps, as his friends said, the stories would be reborn as something different and would evolve at the same time as a humanity eager to believe that there could be a hidden world beyond the everyday.
Maybe the children would in a way be the ones to push the adults to tell them new stories, and the world would once again be populated with a plethora of processions of new supernatural and spectral entities.
Satou was so lost in his childhood memories that he was surprised when he received a smack on the arm of one of his friends.
"What the hell is that?!!!"
Satou gasped.
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All around him many of the passengers on the opposite side had turned to the side where he and his friends were sitting.
No. They weren't looking at them.
Everyone's eyes were fixed on the windows on that side facing north, where the sunlight seemed to have dimmed.
Outside, people had their eyes raised to the sky. The children who had been playing until a couple of seconds ago had stopped and were also looking up at the sky.
It can't be, thought Satou and looked out the window once more.
It was at that exact moment that the sky lit up in a way they had never seen before.
Everything turned white. The sun had disappeared and had been replaced by that blinding light to the north.
Satou had not seen it, but many others had. Before that blinding light there had been a few black and purple flashes over the north at low altitude, and then the light appeared.
It was as if a giant photographer had pointed his camera at the earth from space and that blinding light was the flash produced by the magnesium. It was silly, but it was the first thing that came to Satou's mind.
The brightness decreased little by little and after ten seconds it had disappeared. Nevertheless the sky had changed, the morning blue had given way to something else.
They could see northern lights in the distance.
That was impossible at that latitude. No. It was impossible at that hour.
But beyond that, no one had ever seen auroras like that. It was as if the sky had somehow transformed into the surface of a pond. The aurora had circular shapes, with ripples scattering in all directions from a particular point in the north. Not to mention that there was a color they had never seen in auroras.
That was the color black.
Satou remembered the theory of the color spectrum. No matter how hard he tried to remember, he had never read of an aurora where the black color spectrum was found. Theories said that the sun's interaction with the gases in the atmosphere was what gave auroras their color and that the Earth's own magnetic field might be involved. Other theories said about the effects of the Earth's itself, but there was no proof yet of that piezoelectric effect. But the black color was the absence of light. That had to be impossible.
Unless they were not auroras and it was a completely different phenomenon.
"Are those auroras?" asked one of Satou's friends. All four of them had their gazes fixed on the north.
"It can't be! It's summer!" replied another.
"Forget about summer. What latitude are we at?" the third of them remarked.
Many of the train passengers stepped out of the wagons and stared at the sky in astonishment.
Satou and his companions also got out of the wagon and contemplated the spectacle.
Outside they could see better. The sky was divided by concentric green and violet and black stripes that reached from the north to where they stood forming a circumference of what could be hundreds of kilometers in the sky.
People whispered as they pointed to the sky.
https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/42dd80f9-5ac6-42d5-8ccc-bcea020b6152/dhi16hw-29e4d4ec-8556-4162-93f8-c76144917429.jpg/v1/fill/w_1063,h_752,q_70,strp/nevermore_enygma_vol_5_chapter_61_by_hasegawakein_dhi16hw-pre.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9OTA2IiwicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvNDJkZDgwZjktNWFjNi00MmQ1LThjY2MtYmNlYTAyMGI2MTUyXC9kaGkxNmh3LTI5ZTRkNGVjLTg1NTYtNDE2Mi05M2Y4LWM3NjE0NDkxNzQyOS5qcGciLCJ3aWR0aCI6Ijw9MTI4MCJ9XV0sImF1ZCI6WyJ1cm46c2VydmljZTppbWFnZS5vcGVyYXRpb25zIl19.15fKLT6mvA76K673HwaV-1mts1YDtwmLgVpdynMgRMg [https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/42dd80f9-5ac6-42d5-8ccc-bcea020b6152/dhi16hw-29e4d4ec-8556-4162-93f8-c76144917429.jpg/v1/fill/w_1063,h_752,q_70,strp/nevermore_enygma_vol_5_chapter_61_by_hasegawakein_dhi16hw-pre.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9OTA2IiwicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvNDJkZDgwZjktNWFjNi00MmQ1LThjY2MtYmNlYTAyMGI2MTUyXC9kaGkxNmh3LTI5ZTRkNGVjLTg1NTYtNDE2Mi05M2Y4LWM3NjE0NDkxNzQyOS5qcGciLCJ3aWR0aCI6Ijw9MTI4MCJ9XV0sImF1ZCI6WyJ1cm46c2VydmljZTppbWFnZS5vcGVyYXRpb25zIl19.15fKLT6mvA76K673HwaV-1mts1YDtwmLgVpdynMgRMg]
The monotony of the morning had been broken.
One of Satou's friends was talking to an old man and they were exchanging a few words in Russian that Satou could not hear.
Suddenly his friend turned to him. "Satou, weren't there auroras like this in Japan too? In 1859?"
Satou frowned and so did the others. "Yes. I remember. It was an astronomical event but not only in Japan, it was in a good part of the world that they were seen."
One of Satou's friends scratched his chin. "I think I read it. The astronomers in London were saying something about a disturbance in the sun if I'm not mistaken."
"Could that be it?"
Satou looked up at the sky again. It looked like a gigantic iridescent pupil that at that moment was looking down on the world from very close.
It terrified him. He shook his head. "No. It can't be the same. The northern lights don't manifest themselves that way. While they do exist in circular shapes, that's different. It's as if it emanates from that point."
He was explaining to them for a few more moments, when he had to stop. He didn't know how many minutes had passed since the first flash, but it hadn't been more than a few minutes.
A hot wind came from the north, blowing with a violence that lifted a few hats and knocked some of the witnesses on the station to the ground.
Almost at the same time the sound came. A sound similar to that of thunder although much greater. It was as if a lightning flash had occurred just a few meters away from them. Given the violence of the heat wave and the sound they could estimate that it must have been terrifying at the scene.
Then, a few seconds later, a sudden tremor shook everything around and the people on the spot looked at each other in fright. The telluric movement lasted for at least thirty seconds which seemed like an eternity until finally everything stopped.
With the exception of those lights everything seemed to have returned to normal.
There was talk, speculation, some even cried believing that the end of the world had come. Others spoke of legends of the Evenki natives, where it seemed to have happened.
The end of the world never came. And whether it could have been some kind of curse or invocation from the northern tribes was more a matter of superstition.
That wave of heat, sound and tremors were all the effects that those present at the station could feel.
As the minutes passed, the black color of the pseudoaurora disappeared little by little, while the waves of color seemed to persist a little longer.
The show for the passengers lasted about thirty minutes more. Many expected those lights to fade quickly, but it took a few minutes as the sun rose until it almost disappeared completely.
The station seemed to return to normal and the daily rhythm returned, although now there was something to talk about besides the usual topics.
The scare seemed to have passed. Only an anomaly of nature, many judged it, while others invoked legends and old fairy tales that almost nobody remembered anymore.
No one had ever seen it, ever. But even if no one had seen it, someone had remembered it.
Satou had seen it, though not in person.
A vision almost thirty years ago.
He had seen it one night when he was still a child. One night he had gotten two light stones wrapped in paper.
That vision of that night had become real like some others. But never anything like it. Many seemed like memories of a future still far from the past.
In the case of what he had just observed, in his vision it had lasted only as long as a few frames of a movie. But he remembered it and now he had just seen it in extended version.
It terrified him. Yes, it terrified him. But at the same time it was proof that that night he had really seen something that could be described as supernatural. Or maybe it was a phenomenon that had an explanation, but had not yet been discovered by science. He did not want to stray from the path of science that had marked him all his life as a professor. He was not willing to leave his mind so wide open that his brains would fall out of his skull.
That did not take away from what he had just witnessed.
He had to write down those strange visions, before they all disappeared as he grew older. If there was some physiological or geological phenomenon with those rocks that could explain what had happened to him, maybe it was a good idea to leave that written down and observe the course of the world to corroborate if the other visions were also fulfilled.
Satou turned his back to his friends, entered the wagon and went to the table where they had been sitting. He took the handbag he was carrying and rummaged through it.
He took from the bottom of the bag a small leather container and looked at it strangely. Then he opened it and took out the two rocks from the piece of cloth they were wrapped in.
They were those two crystalline rocks that he had obtained that night of the Tanabata festival almost twenty-eight years ago.
He took them in his hands in wonder. They were a little warm and something else. He did not know why, but they seemed a little heavier. The two rocks weighed only a few grams, although when they fell they produced a much heavier noise. That had always attracted his attention. But now they felt different. Or had he lost muscle strength? On the contrary, in the last month of his trip he had gained more muscle than he had ever had in his entire life.
He examined them closely, but they didn't look any different. They were the same as always. Only that warmth and weight he found strange.
But there was no doubt in his mind. Those two pieces of rock had made him see that many years before it happened. Could it be that all the other visions were also fulfilled?
Horrible things would come to pass if so.
Satou put the stones back in the cloth and put the wrapping back in the case.
He slumped in his seat and meditated on what he had just witnessed.
The world surely had many surprises in store for mankind.
But the truth is that if Satou had taken out those two crystalline rocks at the exact moment of that luminosity, he would have been surprised.
When the luminosity had occurred, the rocks had also glowed, inside the fabric that contained them, and their crystalline surface had moved and rotated. No one had seen it. Nor had anyone seen those blue particles that had invaded all around for a few minutes.
Nor did anyone see a beam of those particles extending in a northerly direction. A portion of those particles had moved at near-light speed before decaying, but before that they had enough momentum to reach the epicenter.
No one saw how a series of black particles had traveled in just a few minutes hundreds of kilometers from the epicenter where the event had occurred to that station.
That jet of particles from the rocks had acted as a magnet for those black particles. Or rather a forced magnet. Trying to separate the black particles from that place almost 600 kilometers away from the station.
Then those black particles of nanometric size had entered that case, passed through the fabric and entered inside those rocks, distributing themselves between both and giving them more weight.
Although those black particles had a considerable overall weight of about three kilos, it would have made no difference to the two rocks that had absorbed them. The only thing that had occurred was that in the final rotation of one of the rocks to return to its original state, an impurity had been produced that had broken off a small shard at one of the edges.
Satou never knew.
Satou didn't know. He couldn't know. And it would not be known until almost two centuries later how mass and weight acted in a different dimension, distributing the weight in a higher dimension and lightening it in a lower dimension by simplifying its physical properties.
As Satou had said, the world held many surprises in store for mankind.
The carriage slowly filled up with people again.
The train left the station and headed east with the morning sun already high.
Those lights had disappeared with the brightness of the sun. But there was something that surprised many and also Satou's group several hours later.
As night fell, once again those lights to the north reappeared. With the night they were even brighter and not only in that part of the world. In parts of Europe and other parts of Asia for some days the night skies took on a strange luminescence that dimmed as the days went by. Beyond those luminescences that black color never appeared again.
Several years later, that would be called the Tunguska Event.