Amelia looked back one last time to intake the beloved snowy and icy landscape covered in the golden light of the midnight sun. She had devoted her life’s work to the Arctic, but now the Batagai sinkhole had enlarged to dangerous proportions and the levels of methane released were increasingly hazardous. At the Artic Station in Sakha, her realm of fire and ice – she smiled at the Game of Thrones episodes that she and colleagues had binged – was quickly becoming steam and swamp. Last summer they had weeks of 29C weather and the Batagai site had literally stretched open and belched out gas. The situation had become untenable, and the scientists were being evacuated.
The short flight landed at an improvised runway near the sinkhole. She hadn’t seen the Batagai in about three summers, as her research now focused primarily on atmospheric changes. But it was her team that had caught the spikes in methane readings, clearly corresponding to the increasing ice cap melt at the station.
As she set foot on solid ground, her guide came to meet her.
“Welcome to Hell!” he bellowed cheerily, revealing a gap in his teeth. He took Amelia’s hand and barely brushed it with his lips in a gesture of nobility. “I hope your journey was pleasant?” He didn’t wait for an answer, signaling instead that they should both don breathing apparatus to reduce the effects of the methane on their lungs.
Amelia asked whether the Batagai had been spewing up more gas. “Not only gas,” Tygan replied. “He’s also coughing up precious metals.” As the senior geologist on site, he worked for the Federation and had grown up in the region. He also knew his stuff. With his hands on his hips, he surveyed the tundra spread before them.
“We call these sinkholes ‘the Gates of Hell’,” he said, gesturing dramatically. And they certainly looked it, Amelia thought: Huge craters of rock covered in black fossilized material in the middle of the endless green-brown steppe, itself once frozen.
Amelia studied the Yakut for a moment. Tygan was tall and solidly built, his chiseled features highlighted by unusually blue eyes. He laughed deep from his chest, but his smile somehow seemed menacing, even if he was warm and friendly. Amelia followed him as they made their way to the edge of the Batagai. She gasped. Only a few years ago, the sinkhole was a mere gash in the smooth tundra. Now it literally seemed that the earth had fallen from under their feet and she was standing at the entrance to Hell. This was heightened by the flames erupting from the ground where the most methane was being released into the atmosphere.
“It’s 5 kilometers at its widest point,” he noted.
She saw Tygan studying a huge stone jutting from the sinkhole. On it was an inscription in a language she did not recognize. “What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s a kisileekh, a scrine stone.”
“What does it say?”
“‘When you see me, weep’. Legend has it that when the Batagai disgorges a scrine stone, we will be in for hard times indeed.” He did not smile.
Amelia stared at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well,” said Tygan, “in a very old Sachan epic, the Hero Badzei went down to the underworld to find out where the reindeer and cattle had gone. His people were starving, and the plentiful fields were freezing over as the winters became colder and colder. The god of the underworld, Arsan Duolai, told Badzei that one of his angels had been flying over Yakutia when a Sacha hunter shot it down. All the precious metals that the angel was carrying– gold, platinum, diamonds and much more – fell to the ground. The hunters ran to collect it. But before they could, Arsan Duolai froze the ground and all the precious metals under it.”
She had heard this tale told during the eternal winter nights back at the station. “Aha, so that’s where the diamonds come from.”
“No,” said Tygan, “they are from the compressed remains of the reindeer and cattle.” Amelia could not tell whether he was joking.
“So what happened next?” she asked.
Tygan continued: “Arsan Duolai told Badzei that he had stolen all the cattle and reindeer as punishment for killing the angel. And that he was going to turn Yakutia into a frozen wasteland for all its people.”
“‘But how will my people survive?’” Badzei asked the god of the underworld.
“‘Tell them that they can come live with me and feed on cattle for the rest of their days in my underworld. Or they can stay where they are and die.’”
“With that, Badzei returned to his people and spoke of his conversation with Arsan Duolai. Half of his people went to the underworld. To make sure that no-one would try to rescue them, Arsan Duolai turned them into evil spirits that would poison the air that we breathe – and wrote his warning on the scrine stones you just read. Those that stayed above ground froze to death.”
Tygan drew Amelia’s attention to the human-like rock formations of the kisileekh. “Take a closer look.” Amelia leaned in.
“Those are my ancestors, the ones who froze,” said Tygan.
Later, as the plane bumpily took off from Batagai, she let her thoughts drift towards the future. She was leaving her career in science for the commercial sector and had accepted a job in Finland. She would be a site supervisor for an atomic waste disposal site buried miles below the earth’s surface. They had tried to stop the ice caps from melting; now she would simply attempt to limit the damage. Her colleague Sacha said that since he couldn’t change it, he would go with it and planned on developing real estate along Arctic coastlines.
She looked out the window and saw Tygan’s tiny figure below. She saw a flare-up from the sinkhole and would have sworn that he was staring straight at her.
–
Douglas MacKevett was born in New Orleans and spent his formative years playing baseball in Texas and working odd jobs in Bakersfield. In 1991, he spent half a year in Siberia and has lived abroad since. Moving from Chiapas after the Zapatista invasion of 1994, he sought the safety of Switzerland, where he currently writes, teaches and resides.
© 2025, Douglas MacKevett
Halfway Down the Stairs 