But no one had come any closer to it, to them. For most people, filthy and flooded with light, glowing like a graveyard, the place where they lived had no place, at least not while they were alive.
The light burned white as the tallow candle flickered. It was hard to explain why she had come to the colony.
Originally, Akuma did not give the event any importance. Many still lived within pretty close reach to the rock.
He did not pay attention until it became clear that time had headed to her.
He prepared the basket and the device went down from the colony.
The man who wanted to come up seemed very ill. His skin, unusually whitish for the East, shone from the open seams of his hairy robe like a fresh lime under the scorched rays of the ever-climbing sun.
They dropped the basket and the man climbed into it.
Nuts and bolts began to tremble and after several efforts, he was above.
In front of Akuma had arrived the first European to visit the East centuries before our history tells it will happen.
Chapter Seven
The men were hunched into the ink-silver puddles that illuminated the arched corridors that stood rampant before them.
Watching the radar displays in their hands, they had an image of the web-like maze of ventilation shafts, offices, workshops, auditoriums, dining rooms, and bedrooms in the complex. They had stopped to inspect their copper jumpsuits, probe their oxygen bottles, and check their guns. Ready to move forward, they strode like powerless mummies, shuffling in their heavy shoes.
Oppressive silence reigned in these spaces, sucking up and muffling any sound except for the patter of water. It seemed like someone would invade at any moment. Deprived of illumination, the spaces in the building looked like dens of skates and squid. The abandoned submarines especially looked like rotten barrels, scattered in an old tipping technique.
The corridors were sometimes stretched and expanded. At other times, they narrowed–all of it was very much like a digestive system. Chandeliers of coral, a forgotten alchemy left in this oblivion, shined from the cave niches.
Sometimes, the men found themselves in large canteens that had been filled from end to end with inlaid marble tables that gleamed like coals. Buried and scattered along them were silver utensils, hundreds upon hundreds of them. They stood dark, yet polished, as if they had just been used in a revel.
They also passed by rail cars that had been overturned; their composition was rusty or corroded. Most of them were still filled with small gold coins and red-black beads. Blind and deformed, these riches had been abandoned in the name of something bigger.
As they continued their venture, doorway after doorway revealed bedrooms that had been barely yawned open. Like tightlipped mussels their interiors smelled of stale, moldy basements and had preserved only a sour, tart flavor. Often countless slivers of sheets had rolled up on the beds, as wet and cold as snakes.
The men were not happy about this emptiness. It seemed to them that at any moment hordes of enemies would arrive. This feeling only grew as they were accosted by the acoustics of strident cries.
The seven men grasped their pneumatic guns, resting their fingers tighter on the trigger with each atypical noise. They ventured even deeper, arriving in what looked like a hatchery for reptilian monsters. The incredible size of the bridal chambers showed the work of expert miners who had dug with such subtlety into the continental shelf that the room seemed to be carved from the very depths of the ocean.
Great tension radiated from their arms, and they stiffened at every sound. Frequently, they found themselves shooting at the rats that were there. They agonized over the fallen pieces of plaster bas-reliefs, which stood as grim evidence of claimed hunts, reminding the men that they didn’t know who was the hunter and who was the prey.
Soon, the halls more clearly separated themselves. The small ones that had been for the personal needs of the many thousands of citizens of Thule gave way to the public ones—and a necklace of carved stone galleries, markets, training grounds, gathering squares, and amphitheaters began to rotate before the admiring gazes of the men.
In stretches before them clung armories filled with polished armor, shields, and all kinds of guns arranged in neat rows. There were rows of shelves filled from top to the bottom with billions of canned food containers. Fireflies with flickering clouds of light appeared from behind the counters and libraries with spiraling and curling staircases went down into the depths.
With every new step, they were approached their goal and the passes became more diagonal. The air became stuffier and suffocating, reminding this crew of a smelly homeless animal with its matted fur.
The narrow galleries located to their left and right had only been shaped into niches now. Thrown together into rusted groups, tools spoke of their interrupted work as they had been digging new sectors in this once great human kingdom.
Sometimes the holes expanded, leading to oval halls. These were the temple premises for long-forgotten gods, carved in sparkling mica like the salt statues, chandeliers, and iconostasis in the mines of Wieliczka in Krakow, Poland.
But despite the apparent desolation that permeated the underwater city, as if by magic, it had not ceased to function at all. The ebony-black air ducts were blowing warm but clean air, the lighting worked, and the tremulous hiss of the drainage system accompanied the churning moisture; the entirety of the complex tangle of support systems were in place.
Therefore the men kept moving. They stopped occasionally to rest and squished miles of paper that had been strewn across the floors. Maybe those papers held the annals of all sorts of the great kingdoms whose inventions have reached our period of time. Who knows, perhaps the literature and music of underwater bards were now nothing more than festering corpses.
Sometimes, the men dozed, spiraling into wild daydreams as they stared at incomprehensible characters until they thought that somebody’s life had been laid out before them.
But the traveling and vague anxiety remain covered by the sediment in their minds, which had been narrowed by the underground gates. The men simply did not have the opportunity to think too deeply on such things.
They moved further into the depths and finally reached the accommodation of Thule. Its halls were filled with bundles of tubes in which the compressor blades chopped through air and water. The area was shrouded in cobwebs that wound miles high and long. From somewhere within the room, a grinding gramophone began to play music.
At first, the subtle cracks of music stroked, scraped, and shuffled like pebbles in a sea wave. Then the melody gradually seeped like oil; it was a smell choking the throat with the poison of its hopelessness.
The gramophone played stories of the birth, rise, and fall of a world. Interwoven in every sound was a fortune of all-consuming loneliness, something that contained its own beauty.
The song floated along as if it were rinsing all the folds of the soul. It was also piercing cold, like the shivering drops of bitter alcohol that had concentrated within it a thousand unspoken things. It’s difficult to tilt the scales of dreams and memories.
Listening to the song, the group sunk into its weeping vibrations; they seemed to explode within them like a distant summer thunder.
They remembered things long forgotten—memories suppressed in the depths of their minds, dim reminiscences that whispered of favorite places and people.
It was the melody of desolation and grief, cried from the shreds of a soul and bringing to mind its sister: sadness.
The men approached, strode into their sadness, and the dripping water tunnel answered with its own endlessness.
It became even darker, slippery and greasy like eyes that had been gouged out, and the echo from of the music continued beating.
Finally, after walking through all the cavities of the great Kingdom of Thule, the crew had caught up to its center.
Here, between the walls and illuminated by thousands of tons of lava, the command center of the und
erwater city flowed from the ceiling and was ventilated by hundreds of turbines that looked like overgrown mushrooms ; it bent at the end like a diamond sitting in a bubble over an inferno.
The men looked at each other, and the song echoed like a war drum over the earthen pit.
Chapter Eight
The palace complex of Knossos stood over the hill of Kephala lonely and unsatisfied, an achievement of a civilization that had been curse by the ragged, thin Moira. It now stood like an upcoming horror, devoid of any form of life but somehow still exuding the air of a predatory organism.
Before the men, like white sleeves tucked into an oblong shape, were levels upon levels of houses. They were miserably bleached containers, looking like little more than the faceted eyes of a torn apart cocoon covered in the mucus of imago.
Beside them, on the deserted sidewalks of hewn slabs, various objects had been left as offerings. There were rows and rows of flattened, ugly amphorae and canvas bags. They had been stacked as dikes and impaled on poles along with entire clusters of fruits—food ordered and left to boost the monsters.
The city stood empty like a cell whose white grid fins spread out along the backbone of a vampire returned from the land of the dead.
Desolation combined with the cry of rancorous crows. Their cawing cut through the sky like a black globular lightning bolt, creating the feeling of a wolf that is stalking its prey and crawling from place to place. It seemed as if each resident had become a wandering shadow that was disappearing and reappearing in the holes of the city’s stone bosom.
Outstretched cypresses still stood with their once proud branches now little more than atrophic limbs. Gushing fountains carved in the form of long-forgotten dusty books told the tale of mythological creatures—of satyrs and centaurs with glazed eyes. They used to recount the presence of life, and had now fallen silent.
Crossing the cobbled streets, past marketplaces with flying canopies that billowed silently as ghosts, the men of the Behemoth started to climb Kephala Hill.
They carried with them reinforced carbon bows that had been stored in the zeppelin and from time to time would stretch the glowing spider cords of fiberglass.
The men looked like the invaders of the past, before the time of the Trojan heroes. They remained hidden and were still in danger of being slaughtered by their reawakened enemies who numbered into the thousands.
They seemed to be at an amusement park in which the machines—the dotted sun-white bulbs on Ferris wheels, the shooting galleries, the bumper cars, the roller coasters, and the carousels—would move when announced by music. Except, here it seemed that they were powered by monsters.
With each passing step, the company climbed the acropolis, the abandoned city, the citadel of Knossos.
Thus after a few minutes of their a hypnotic, dizzy walking, with faltering gaits that resembled the slow movements of an alcoholic, they arrived at the top of the slope. The complex of buildings with their high colonnades stood in front of them.
We cannot hide the fact that there was some beauty in Knossos but covered as they had become with fallen leaves and old tops, the columns were warmed by the oozing beams of sunlight and through the vegetation roasted reptiles.
The fire in the pools along the alleys looked like floating disks and were a bad omen. Here someone or something was giving them a notorious final warning.
Entering the porches decorated with frescoes, the men faintly smelled urine; it irritated their noses and lined the area, enhanced even more when they entered the hall to a room.
It was not the smell of hot manure, golden-yellow and sprayed on dusted hay and fresh milk. Instead, it was the stench of a male mixed with sulphuretted hydrogen that is coming from a tank full of sludge.
It penetrated from behind the walls, causing all sorts of images to spring in their heads, as if a bull had just been unleashed and was running toward them, having jumped away from the adolescents. The snakes in the hands of the half-naked girls that were painted on the walls seemed like they would come to life at any moment; the men were certain their black shades would live in a monstrous way.
The beautiful rooms furnished with brick-red ceramics and furniture in curved, rounded forms created the feeling that somewhere hidden within them lay the placenta from something that never should have been conceived, born, and allowed to mature.
But the men, led by Tammuz, went from door to door, looking for the source of the stench, while like a slippery snake or parasite, it slipped under the branches of the water and hypocaust system.
Tapping on the walls, they came to the central throne hall—a small room with a suspended two-edged ax. Its corners had emanated the strongest sources of the smell even though it had been masked by the thick baked bricks that formed the walls of the room and the jars filled with fragrant water distributed around it.
Once they understood that it would be very difficult to break the masonry, they leaned on the brownish-wood sandstone throne and fell silent.
Entangled between horror and the task they had undertaken, the men realized that life is a winding road upon which we leave pieces of ourselves.
They had to go forward.
And there was no way for them to do so.
Out of anger and frustration, Tammuz pounded on the handles of the throne. The carving in the form of a salamander echoed like thunder coming off of a mountain rock.
Tammuz smiled like a breathless child, ready at any moment to cry. As always, fate had given her answer. Then he motioned to the men to each take one of the bronze axes that hung like meteoritic iron on the wall. He wedged the ax under the throne. The other men followed his example.
They heard the scrape of retractable levers. The throne moved. Beneath it, stained in silver, gaped a hole with winding unrailed stairs leading down into the womb of the Earth.
Waving their arms, the men began their descent.
Chapter Nine
Like a swarm of ghosts, figures surrounded the man with the hairy robe, trying to convey their messages and extract information that is difficult to accept because of the barriers between the worlds.
“Who are you?”
“What on earth happened to you?”
Questions rained down one after another, accumulating as the fog does, cast over fields and forests.
The man was silent and waited for the unleashed stream of questions, for the human curiosity, to stop.
The patients clustered around the linen-white lean body. It was strange to watch them embrace vanity with their (seemingly) immortal souls dressed as they were in their simple hemp shirts, which hung like robes or cloaks on their bodies.
“He is the white devil, I tell you,” said one of them whose disease had dried him like a rolled up yellow-brown newspaper.
“Nonsense, this will be a new disease,” added a second, who did not look any better.
“Everybody is talking nonsense. I’ve heard that north of us lived the Ainu, and there are more paleface people such as begotten snow,” said a third, wincing all the while like the upper twigs of a tree.
The man stood still in the meantime and looked at them. He began to speak unknown languages; they were not the familiar Asian speech, throaty and gurgling.
After several exclamations resembling an adjustable radio, sparkling and elongating, the new arrival adapted and began to speak with that cold, clear focus of a computerized machine.
“I’m here because I need your help,” he said, choosing his words among thousands.
“Who or what are you? We know that if we announce you to the authorities . . . .” interrupted one of the sick.
“Nothing will happen because no one will get close enough to believe infectious ones,” completed the man, stretching his face into a lifeless smile. “In your lands people called me ‘Takeshi’ and I’m here to offer you the chance to regain your health if you go with me,” he said.
“My friend, we do not know much, but we know that these things happen with the good and the evil
ones. We are suffering from leprosy.
“Let’s forget about it. You came here by accident. Leave now and we can guarantee that we will take your secret to the grave,” Akuma said, shouting above the rest.
Takeshi smiled. His protruding cheekbones with their pink hue trembled, and he ran his hand over his right arm, as if stroking an animal hidden there.
“Trust is the only sign of life on the roads that are pointed straight ahead. I thought that of all the people in the world, you would want to be healed. But apparently I was wrong.”
There was silence.
“Yes, we would give anything to be healthy once more,” Akuma replied, breaking the silence with a quiet voice that came through the wall of pain that brick by brick, grief by grief, mud by mud, had created a swampy castle from which there was no escape.
“Then what’s stopping you from believing me?” asked Takeshi.
“As you have already answered: ‘me.’ It is terrible when a person loses the meaning of his life, but the real fear is to not be himself at all,” Akuma said. “Don’t think that you are the first that has promised to help us. We have met many such as you. There were those who had strayed from the stormy North Aleutian islands. They came as shamans. And there were priests of the desert steppes of Mongolia, and also the Brahmins from the Malabar Coast in the far south of India.
“We are tired of waiting to meet our God, and there is nothing worse than a tired soul, my friend. It hopes only to sleep the eternal sleep so that it may sink into nothingness forever.”
“Then each person, be he good or bad, is the answer to the prayers of someone else. Maybe I’m the one for you. I need people who have almost broken all their ties to life to agree to go with me,” said Takeshi.
“I told you that . . .” Akuma said.
“You need a little proof to believe me. I know this, and so I will show you,” Takeshi finished, and rolled up the sleeves on his right hand which he began to shake to show that it was broken.
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