The Badakhshan treasure can become the same majestic pillar of historical science, like the tomb of Tutankhamun, the Roset stone or the city of the dead Herculaneum.
In 2007, in the village of Novy Put, located in the south of Gorno-Badakhshan (Tajikistan), a disaster struck - someone got into the habit of carrying sheep at night. The village is located in a secluded place, to the nearest villages forty kilometers of practical off-road, any stranger turns out to be the object of close attention, and there have not been such strangers lately.
They know each other well, and I’ll determine who’s preparing for dinner, and therefore the thief would be found quickly if he was among them. But, definitely, the thief was not from the village, and it could not be otherwise. A predator, then? Snow Leopard? The beast is very rare, listed in all kinds of red books, but this does not mean that people will allow him to steal cattle with impunity.
The senior shepherd of the village, respected Zhuran, could not understand anything. People looked with all their eyes, trying to find the thief of the sheep, but they did not find anyone and nothing - only traces of blood, and there are few of them, as if the predator killed the sheep and carried it to the lair,
The dogs refused to follow the trail. Actually, the Pamir shepherd dogs are not pathfinders, but something else surprised: the shepherd dogs suddenly turned from fearless dogs into timid, frightened dogs, although no animal, not even a snow leopard, can cope with a Pamir shepherd dog, especially three.
Then Zhuran himself led the dogs along the bloody trail, taking with him two nephews. The footprints led upward, where there is no grass even in the Pamir summer, but there is eternal snow. Shepherds rarely climb so high - the work is hard, there is no time left for walks, except that occasionally, moving to a new pasture, to shorten the path, you have to cross the border of eternal snows, and even then by the very edge.
The mountain roads are difficult, and where Zhuran and his nephews walked, there were no roads at all, but there were no insurmountable crevasses and abysses. The path turned out to be difficult, and nothing more. A few hours later, having rounded a not very high rock, the shepherds found the entrance to the cave. There, judging by the desperate reluctance of the dogs to continue their journey and the rare drops of blood, the path of an unknown predator led.
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Zhuran's nephews and he himself were armed - in Gorno-Badakhshan in XX! century it is much easier to get a Simonov carbine or a Kalashnikov assault rifle than a factory-made baby carriage. However, Zhuran was in no hurry. First, he told his nephews to move away with the dogs and wait. Half an hour later, he chanted a spell that pacified the spirit of the mountains, and only after that he went into the belly of the mountain.
The entrance was small - a little more than a meter, and opened, apparently, after the recent earthquake. Zhuran entered the cave, squatted down and waited until his eyes, after the white radiance, got used to the darkness. The nephews had already begun to worry when they heard Zhuran calling them to him with pre-agreed words - otherwise they would have thought that it was evil mountain spirits, with the voice of their uncle, beckoning them to certain death.
Fearing both evil spirits and their uncle's anger, they nevertheless followed him. Zhuran was already humming with an old but reliable German flashlight with a dynamo inside (Juran's father brought it from the front - a trophy). In the light of a dim ray, it was clear that the cave was not large, and there was another passage in the depths.
“Evil spirits don't like the noise of electricity,” Zhuran encouraged his nephews.
The dogs preferred to be near their owners, but growled and grinned at the dark passage in the depths of the cave.
No bones, scraps of skins or any other traces of the disappeared sheep were found in the cave. But on both sides of the long passage there were two figures - medieval knights in armor. Next to each was a silver vessel, thirty liters each. All this was so incredible that Zhuran himself and his nephews again began to ask evil spirits for peace - and naturally, Zhuran put down the flashlight with a dynamo for the lapel of his robe in order to observe the solemnity befitting the occasion.
And then it happened: a shadow slipped out of the far manhole and threw itself on one of the nephews, in the blink of an eye biting off the poor man's hand on the elbow. The dogs rushed to protect the people and blocked the escape route for the villain, Then the creature jumped out and disappeared into the snow. People managed to make out the monster. Most of all, it resembled a giant monitor lizard or a whitish crocodile, about three and a half meters in length. Sharp teeth filled the monster's mouth. The reason for the missing sheep became apparent.
Following the monster, the shepherds rushed out, but he was no longer there. Perhaps there were other passages to the cave, but I did not want to look for them at all: evening was approaching, and it was still necessary to return to the village. If this monster is not alone, and if it hunts at night, then everyone will have a very, very difficult time. Zhuran skillfully bandaged his nephew's stump, and before heaping stones at the entrance to the cave, he nevertheless looked into the silver vessels, and then launched his hand.
Zhuran did not become greedy, took only a dozen heavy coins, the approximate damage from the loss of sheep. The spirits of the mountains see that it is not self-interest that drives them, but the only sense of justice. The nephew's hand was not subject to payment: he had a machine gun, and the fight was equal. Then the hole in the cave was filled with stones and set off on the way back.
The coins were different, but Zhuran had never seen a single similar one, although in the mountains, on especially solemn occasions, respectable people still pay with gold minted in the 19th, 18th and even the 17th centuries.
Zhuran ordered his nephews to be silent about the cave, knights and vessels with coins, and they did not dare to disobey. If they find out in the village that a treasure and a large treasure have been found, someone will certainly let it out, and then the militants will come, take it away and will not believe that this is all. Therefore, the old shepherd told the villagers only about the snow dragon, which bit off his nephew's arm up to the elbow and disappeared into the crevice.
They believed in the dragon unconditionally - the stump of the hand convinced the most distrustful, moreover, in the mountain villages of Badakhshan, legends about terrible creatures inhabiting the bowels of the mountains have been circulating from olden times.
About what happened in oblique, and even in the highland dialect, Juran wrote to his son, who teaches at a university on the East Coast of the United States. He responded to his father's call and soon, having crossed the Afghan border, found himself in a village (this path is considered the least dangerous among the mountaineers). His father and cousins took him to the cave. After clearing the blocked entrance, we went inside. The son used not an old trophy flashlight, but more powerful American lighting fixtures.
Everything remained as before - knights, silver vessels and a hole in the depths of the cave, leading to the bowels of the mountain. My son took photographs and videos (of course, using modern digital technology), but, like his predecessors, he did not go further up the hill. Twice from the passage protruded the muzzle of a giant monitor lizard, but only just - it was enough to direct the bright halogen beam of the flashlight at the monster. The American son asked to shoot in the cave only as a last resort. Fortunately, it didn't come to that.
The son also took coins out of the vessels, took them off with a photo and video camera, and then put them back, leaving only a few pieces for himself. It was both illegal and dangerous to return to America with centners of jewelry; tempting the nature of the mountaineers with gold without special need is not worth it. It is enough to bring proof that there is a certain treasure, and only then seek subsidies from private foundations for its full examination.
Laidge Malik (as the son of the venerable Juran Americanized his name) safely reached his new homeland, where he held a press conference, after which, taking a year off at the university, he went on a lecture tour across the United States, raising funds for a large-scale expedition. He declares that the Badakhshan cave (for well-known reasons, without giving exact coordinates) is nothing more than the threshold of the legendary Shambhala.
When mystics and occultists say that Shambhala is in the mountains, they are literally right. Shambhala is a relict country of the relic race of the Great Old Ones. How huge this country is, one can only guess. Once underground cities covered entire continents, perhaps they remain so to this day, but rather, they have long been touched by the abomination of desolation, and the feral descendants of the Great Old Ones, the Snowmen, only imitate the activities of their ancestors.
Lige Malik accompanies his lectures with photo and video materials, but the greatest impression on the scientific public is made by the conclusion of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology experts that the coins presented for analysis by Lige Malik are at least forty thousand years old. One of the coins, specially selected by Malik and made from an alloy of iridium and osmium, was subjected to neutron bombardment, which helped to reveal the exact isotopic composition of the alloy, which made it possible to date the coin.
No Paleolithic technology made it possible to obtain an alloy of such super-refractory and rare metals as osmium and iridium, therefore, in academic circles, the attitude towards Lige Malik's message is expectant. Most consider an expedition to the Gorno-Badakhshan region highly desirable, but there are certain difficulties associated with political nuances.
S. Naffert
“Interesting newspaper. Magic and mysticism №9 2013