Perhaps those Nazi pseudoscientists had been right and our world was a convex sphere trapped in an infinity of rock and what we perceived as stars were points of light gleaming through from the cold fires which burned within the rock.
That I was experiencing full proof of their theory was no comfort. Without question we explored an infinity of rock. But had that rock once lived? Or did it merely mock life? Had it been made up of organic creatures like us? Did it strive to shape itself into the life of the surface as, in a less complex way, a flower or a tree might strive through the earth to reach the light? I found it easy to believe this. Anyone who has not had my experience need only find a picture of the Carlsbad Caverns to know exactly what I mean.
Pillars looked as if they had been carved by inspired lunatics so that you saw every possible shape and face and monster within them, and each rock flowed into another and they were endless in their variety, marching into the far darkness, their outlines flickering into sharp relief and dark shadow from the white fire flung up by that enormous phosphorescent river as she heaved herself endlessly into the heart of the world. Like Niagara turned into moonlit Elfland, an opium-eater’s dream, a glorious vision of the Underworld. Did I witness the landscapes and the comforts of the damned? I began to feel that at any moment those snaking rocks would come alive and touch me and make me one of themselves, frozen again for a thousand years until brought to predatory movement only when they sensed the stray scuttling of creatures like ourselves, blind and deaf and lost forever.
The beauty which the river illuminated inspired wonder as well as terror. High above us, like the delicate pipes of fairy organs, were thousands and thousands of hanging crystal chandeliers, all aflame with cool, silvery light. Occasionally one of the crystals would catch a reflection and turn whatever color there was to brilliant, dazzling displays which seemed to travel with the water, flickering, through the haze, following the currents as that huge torrent endlessly roared, flinging its voice to the arches and domes above even as it fell.
I could not believe that the system could go so deep or, indeed, be so wide. It seemed infinite. Were there monsters lurking there? I remembered an engraving from Verne. Great serpents? Gigantic crocodiles? Descendants of dinosaurs?
I reminded myself that the real brutes were still somewhere behind us. Even Verne, or indeed Wells, had failed to anticipate the Nazi Party and all its complex evil.
No doubt Gaynor and his ally, Klosterheim, had more ambitious motives than helping the Nazi cause. My guess was that if the Nazis were no longer useful to them, the two men would no longer be Nazis. This made them, of course, an even greater threat to us. They believed in no cause but their own and thus could appear to believe in all causes. Gaynor had already showed me both his charming and his vicious side. I suspected there were many shades of charm and, indeed, viciousness which others had seen. A man of many faces. In that, he reflected some of Hitler’s qualities.
I cannot explain how I inched down that long, slippery pathway, much of it with Oona’s help, constantly aware of the broken bones in my foot but, thanks to her potion, in no severe pain. I knew my ruined body couldn’t support me for much longer.
We at last reached the extraordinary bridge. It rose from the surrounding rock with that same sinuous dynamic as if something living had been frozen only moments before. Against the glowing spray its pale stone columns were outlined before us in all their cathedral-like beauty. It reminded me of a fantasy by the mad Catalan architect Gaudi or our own Ludwig of Bavaria, but far more elaborate, more delicate. Flanked on both sides by tall spires and turrets, all formed by the natural action of the caverns and again bearing that peculiarly organic quality, its floor had not been naturally worn but smoothed to accommodate human feet. The delicate silvery towers marched across the gorge through which the glowing river ran in caverns “measureless to man, down to a sunless sea.” Had the opium poets of the English Enlightenment seen what I was now seeing? Had their imaginations actually created it? This disturbing thought came more than once. My brain could scarcely understand the exact nature of what my eyes witnessed and so I was inclined, like any ordinary lunatic, to invent some sort of logic, to sustain myself, to stop myself from simply stepping to one unguarded edge of that great bridge and leaping to my inevitable death.
But I was not by nature suicidal. I still had some faint hope of getting medical assistance and a guide back to the surface where I could do useful work. The roar of the water in the chasm below made it impossible to ask Oona questions and I could only be patient. Having rested, we began to hobble slowly across the bridge, I using my sword as a rough crutch and Oona using her carved bow-staff.
The foam from the torrent below engulfed the bridge in bright mist. I slowly became aware of a figure, roughly my height, standing in my path. The fellow was a little oddly shaped and also seemed to support himself on a staff. Oona pressed forward, clearly expecting to be met.
When I drew close, however, I realized the figure who waited to greet us was a gigantic red fox, standing on his hind legs, supporting himself with a long, ornamental “dandy pole” and dressed elaborately in the costume of a seventeenth-century French nobleman, all lace and elaborate embroidery. Awkwardly removing his wide-brimmed feathered hat with one delicate paw, the fox mouthed a few words of greeting and bowed.
With some relief, as if escaping a nightmare, I lost consciousness and fell in a heap to the causeway’s quivering floor.
CHAPTER SEVEN
People of the Depths
U nable to accept any further assault on my training and experience, my mind did the only thing it could to save itself. It had retreated into dreams as fantastic as the reality, but dreams where I appeared at least to have some control. Again I experienced the exultation of guiding not just one great sinuous flying reptile but an entire squadron of them. Racing up into cold, winter skies with someone held tight against me in my saddle, sharing my delight. Someone I loved.
And there stood my doppelgänger again. Reaching towards me. The woman had vanished. I was no longer riding the dragon. My double came closer and I saw that his face was contracted with pain. His red eyes were weeping pale blood. At that instant I no longer feared him. Instead I felt sympathy for him. He did not threaten me. Perhaps he tried to warn me?
Slowly the vision faded and I knew a sense of extraordinary, floating well-being. As if I was being reborn painlessly from the womb. And as I relaxed, my rational mind slowly came awake again.
I could accept the existence of an underground kingdom so vast as to seem infinite. I could accept and understand the effects of its weird formations on my imagination. But a fox out of a fairy tale was too much! In my feverish attempts to absorb all those alien sights, it was quite possible I’d imagined the fellow. Or else had become so used to the fantastic that I had failed to recognize an actor dressed up for a performance of Volpone.
Certainly the fox was nowhere to be seen when I opened my eyes. Instead, looming over me, was the figure of a giant, whose head resembled a sensitive version of an Easter Island god. He looked down on me with almost paradoxical concern. His uniform alarmed me until I realized it was not German. I hardly found it extraordinary that he was wearing the carefully repaired livery of an officer in the French Foreign Legion. An army doctor, perhaps? Had our journey brought us up into France? Or Morocco? My prosaic brain jumped at ordinary explanations like a cat at a bird.
The large legionnaire was helping me to raise myself in the bed.
“You are feeling well now?”
I had answered, rather haltingly, in the same language before I realized we were speaking classical Greek. “Do you not speak French?” I asked.
“Of course, my friend. But the common tongue here is Greek and it’s considered impolite to speak anything else, though our hosts are familiar with most of our earthly languages.”
“And our hosts are what? Large, overdressed foxes?”
The legionnaire laughed. It was as if granite cra
cked open. “You have met Milord Renyard, of course. He was eager to be the first to greet you. He thought you would know him. I believe he was friendly with an ancestor of yours. He and your companion, Mademoiselle Oona, have continued on urgently to Mu Ooria, where they consult with the people there. I understand, my friend, that I have the honor to address Count Ulric von Bek. I am your humble J.-L. Fromental, lieutenant of France’s Foreign Legion.”
“And how did you come here?”
“By accident, no doubt. The same as M’sieur le Comte, eh?” Fromental helped me sit upright in the long, narrow bed, whose shallow sides tightly gripped even my half-starved body. “On the run from some unfriendly Rif, in my case. Looking for the site of ancient Ton-al-Oorn. My companion died. Close to death myself I found an old temple. Went deeper than I suspected. Arrived here.” Everything in the room seemed etiolated. The place felt like certain Egyptian tombs I had seen during that youthful trip with my school to the ancient world and the Holy Land. I half expected to see cartouches painted on the pale walls. I was dressed in a long garment, a little on the tight side, rather like a nightshirt, which they call a djellaba in Egypt. The room was long and narrow, like a corridor, lit by slim glasses of glowing water. Everything was thin and tall as if extended like a piece of liquid glass. I felt as if I was in one of those “Owl Glass Halls” of mirrors which were such a rage in Vienna a few years ago. Even the massive Frenchman seemed vaguely short and squat in such surroundings. Yet strange as everything was, I had begun to realize how well I felt. I had not been so fit and at one with myself since the days of my lessons with old von Asch.
The silence added to my sense of well-being. The sound of water was distant enough to be soothing. I was reluctant to speak, but my curiosity drove me.
“If this is not Mu Ooria, then where are we?” I asked.
“Strictly speaking this is not a city at all, but a university, though it functions rather more variously than most universities. It is built on both sides of the glowing torrent. So that scientists can study the waters and understand their language.”
“Language?”
That was the nearest translation. “These people do not believe that water is sentient as animals are sentient. They believe everything has a certain specific nature which, if understood, allows them to live in greater harmony with their surroundings. It’s the purpose of their study. They are not very mechanically minded, but they use what power they discover to their advantage.”
I imagined some lost oriental land, similar to Tibet, whose peoples spent their lives in spiritual contemplation. They had probably come here, much as we had come, hunted by some enemy, then grown increasingly decadent, at least by my own rather puritanical standards.
“The people here brought you back to health,” Fromental told me. “They thought you would rather wake to a more familiar type of face. You will meet them soon.” He guessed what I had been thinking. “There are practical advantages to their studies. You have been sleeping in the curing ponds for some long time. Their bonesetters and muscle-soothers work mostly in the ponds.” At my expression he smiled and explained further. “They have pools of river water, to which they have added certain other properties. No matter what your ailment, be it a broken bone or a cancerous organ, it can be healed in the curing ponds, with the application of certain other processes specific to your complaint. Music, for instance. And color. Consequently, timeless as this place is, we are even less aware of the familiar action of time as we know it on the surface.”
“You do not age?”
“I do not know.”
I was not ready for further mysteries. “Why did Oona go on without me?”
“A matter of great urgency, I gather. She expects you to follow. A number of us are leaving for the main city, which lies on the edge of the underground ocean you saw from above.”
“You travel together for security?”
“From a habit of garrulousness, no more. Expect no horrid supernatural terrors here, my friend. Though you might think you’ve fallen down a gigantic rabbit burrow, you’re not in Wonderland. As on the surface, we are at the dominant end of the food chain. But here there is no hot blood. No conflicts, save intellectual and formal. No real weapons. Nothing like that sword of yours. Here everything has the quiet dignity of the grave.”
I looked at him sharply, looking for irony, but he was smiling gently. He seemed happy.
“Well,” I admitted, “bizarre as their medicine might be, it seems to work.”
Fromental poured me a colorless drink. “I have learned, my friend, that we all see the practice of medicine a little differently. The French are as appalled by English or American doctoring as the Germans are by the Italians and the Italians by the Swedes. And we need not mention the Chinese. Or voodoo. I would say that the efficacy of the cure has as much to do with the analysis and treatment as it does with certain ways of imagining our bodies. What’s more, I know that if the cobra strikes at my hand, he kills me in minutes. If he strikes at my cat’s neck, my cat might feel a little sleepy. Yet cyanide will kill us both. So what is poison? What is medicine?”
I let his questions hang and asked another. “Where is my sword? Did Oona take it with her?”
“The scholars have it here. I’m certain they intend to return it to you now that you are well. They found it an admirable artifact, apparently. They were all interested in it.”
I asked him if this “university” was the group of slender pillars I had seen from the distance and he explained that while the Off-Moo did not build cities in the ordinary sense, these two groups of pillars had been adapted as living quarters, offices and all the usual accommodation of an active settlement, though commerce as such was not much practiced by them.
“So who are these utopians? Ancient Greeks who missed their way? Descendants of some Orpheus? The lost tribe of Israel?”
“None of those, though they might have put a story or two into the world’s mythologies. They’re not from the surface at all. They are native to this cavernous region. They have little practical interest in what lies beyond their world but they have a profound curiosity, coupled with habitual caution, which makes them students of our world but instinctively unwilling to have intercourse with it. When you have lived here for a while you’ll understand what happens. Knowledge and imagination are enough. Something about this dark sphere sets people to dreaming. Because death and discomfort are rare, because there is little to fear from the environment, we can cultivate dreaming as an art. The Off-Moo themselves have little desire to leave here and it’s a rare visitor who is willing to return to the upper world. This environment makes intellectuals and dreamers of us all.”
“You speak of these people as if they were monks. As if they believed there was purpose to their dreaming. As if their settlements were great monasteries.”
“So they are in a way.”
“No children?”
“It depends what you mean. The Off-Moo are parthenogenetic. While they often form lasting unions, they do not need to marry to reproduce. Their death is also their birth. A rather more efficient species than our own, my friend.” He paused, putting a gentle hand on my shoulder. “You’d best prepare yourself for many surprises. Unless you decide to jump in the river or go so far you fall into the lands that are called Uria-Ne by the Mu Oorians. The Lands Beyond the Light is what we would call them, I suppose. Or perhaps just the Dark World. These people do not fear that world as much as we do. But only a desire for painful death would take you there.”
“Is that not our own world they describe?”
“It could be, my friend. There are few simplicities in this apparently black and white environment. You and I do not have the eyes to see the beauties they perceive, nor the subtleties of tone and shade which to them are vivid as our surface roses or sunsets. Soon you could become as obsessed as I with understanding the sensibilities of this gentle and complex people.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “when the time comes for me to
want peace. But meanwhile in my own country there is a ruthless enemy to be fought, and fight him I must.”
“Well, every man must be able to look his best friend in the eye,” said Fromental, “and I will not dissuade you. Can you walk? Come, we’ll seek what advice we can from Scholar Fi, who has taken a strong interest in your welfare.”
I found that I could walk easily with a great sense of energy. I followed Fromental, who had to squeeze his massive body through some of the doors, down a sinuous spiral walkway and at last into the street. I was almost running as I reached the cool, damp outside air. Yet the nature of that dreaming town, apparently bathed in perpetual moonlight, with spires so slender you would think the slightest sound would shatter them, with its basalt pathways and complex gardens of pale fungi whose shapes echoed those of the rocks, made me walk slowly with respect. As we left our elongated Gothic doorway behind, I smelled a dozen delicious, delicate, warm scents, perhaps of prepared food. And the plants had a musty perfume you sometimes find above ground. The delicate aroma you associate with certain truffles.
The towers themselves were of basalt fused with other kinds of rock to produce the effect of creatures trapped behind thick glass, perpetually staring out at us. This natural architecture, which intelligent creatures had fashioned to their own use, was of extraordinary beauty and delicacy and sometimes, when a faint shudder from the river shook the ground, it would sway and murmur. Buildings suddenly brought to life. All this pale wonder framed against the shifting glow of the blazing river and the more distant light from the lake. I suddenly saw the river as their version of the Nile, the mother of all civilizations. Was that why I made that instinctive connection with the builders of the pyramids?
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