by Rhys Hughes
The whisper came again, “Ug!”
Squinting, he tried to work out the right direction. Then he stumbled to the far edge of the mesa and looked down. At first he reeled from what he saw, the sheer drop, the immensity of height and space, but then he saw a dreadful outrage in progress. A theft.
A stranger was stealing his woman! A rival.
Halfway down the face of the cliff, the hairy brute had thrown Ra-Kel over his left shoulder and was climbing down with only his free hand and two legs, a tricky feat considering the unreliability of the handholds and footholds. Ug wailed and clenched his fists.
The stranger paused and looked up, his immense black brows visible even from this distance. It was Og! Og, whom Ug had once treated as a brother, whom he had pulled from a quicksand after he had been chased by a sabre-toothed tiger into a swamp…
“Og!” bellowed Ug ferociously.
“Ug!” mocked Og as he flashed his teeth upwards.
“Ra-Kel!” shrieked Ug.
“Ug!” answered Ra-Kel, her tiny fists pounding the back of her captor but with no discernible effect at all.
Ug was frantic with frustration and worry, with intense concern for his mate and for his honour. Shooting pains riddled his pride, biting him like mosquitoes. He had to rescue her! How? He thought about dropping a rock onto Og’s head and splitting his treacherous skull, but then Ra-Kel would be lost to the immensity of death.
He had to climb down and confront Og on the ground. An idea jumped into his mind, almost as if it was an edible animal, and he trapped it there, examined it, grinned with the joy of the catch.
Running back to the egg, he entered and fumbled in the yolky shadows for the coiled sinews, his fingers closing on them, extracting five from the hiding place like the innards of an endless pig. He loped back to the edge of the mesa and looked over the side again.
Og was making slow progress. He still had far to descend.
Ra-Kel was whimpering softly now.
Ug tied the five sinews together to make a rope.
Frantically looking around, he located a projection of rock that stuck itself out a few inches into the void. He tied one end of the rope around it with a knot his father had taught him and then he dropped the tangle and watched it unwind, the far end striking the dusty ground with an audible slap ten seconds later. A mythical snake.
Taking a series of deep breaths, Ug abruptly pushed himself into space and dangled. His large hands clutched the sinew and burned as they slid down and for a terrifying moment he thought he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from sliding all the way to the bottom at a speed comparable to a fall. He gripped tighter and braked slightly.
Then he worked out that if he wrapped one of his legs around the rope, he could control his descent even more accurately. He passed the level of Og and snarled at him. Og jerked his head up with a frown but Ug already was below him, the pain of his blisters truly forgotten in the swelling and joyful fury of triumph that suffused his being.
His feet struck the ground with a force that jarred the bones in his hips and he keeled over, grimacing through the agony until it began to fade, to become a comfortable ache, like a frost burn.
The sun flared high overhead. That huge yellow ball had been in a bad mood lately, flinging arcs of fire over itself. Ug could almost hear the sun hissing in the sky as it cast shadows with very sharp definition from every solid object, including himself as he stood up.
He bunched his fists and waited for Og to reach the ground.
“Ra-Kel!” screamed Ug in anticipation.
“Ug!” she responded as she came lower, still on the left shoulder of an ugly brute, a treacherous rival, a predator…
Og jumped the final few feet, landing upright.
Ug bared his teeth and charged.
To Ug’s amazement, Og didn’t brace himself to absorb the impact but turned and ran. He was fleet of foot, even with a woman on his shoulder, and easily outpaced his pursuer. Ug was vaguely aware of the entrance to a cave at the base of the mesa that passed in a blur as he forced himself to increase his speed. He howled in frustration.
But his ululation achieved nothing.
Og didn’t race off across the plain but circled the massive outcrop, the mighty cliff, keeping close to the root of the sandy rock. Panting, Ug held his aching side and found his vision blurring.
But he didn’t give up. He bit his lip, tasted blood.
The sun beat down in boiling waves.
Sweat made Ug’s eyes smart, as if nettle juice had been squeezed into them, and he wiped both with a hairy forearm. He staggered, the bloated bursting sun seeming to pulse inside his head. Loops of fire leapt from the surface of that relentless orb, chiding tongues of unbearable energy. With a sickening gasp, Ug turned the next corner.
He had completely circled the mesa…
Back to the spot where he had descended, and Og was waiting for him, and so was Ra-Kel, but the result was hideous.
Og had made a noose from the end of the long sinew, the rope that Ug had used to descend from the top of the cliff, and had placed it around the neck of Ra-Kel. He was holding the woman up in his burly arms and Ug knew that if he let her go, Ra-Kel would hang.
Ug didn’t know what to do. If he attacked Og, then his woman would choke to death. If he ran to help her, Og would take the opportunity to kill him while he was distracted. He stood still.
But Og made the decision for him. He let Ra-Kel go.
Her scream was cut off, turned into a gargle as the noose tightened and she dangled in mid-air, her feet a few inches above the ground. Og moved aside and beckoned at Ug, mouthing obscenities. Ug ran at him like a bull and Og danced nimbly aside, laughing.
He was standing near the entrance to that other cave, Og was, and with his hands on his hips he was grinning at Ug, mocking him, while Ra-Kel kicked ineffectually in her death throes.
Then something large rushed out of the cave.
A bear! The bear from above…
Ug was sure it was the same beast that he had chased out of the egg. It must have climbed safely down the cliff, using its claws to grip the stone, moving into this new home, making a life for itself here; but always ready to take revenge on humans, those who had evicted it, persecuted it, hurt it with the sharp edges of broken pebbles.
Og didn’t have time to turn, to see what form his death had taken. The bear broke his neck with a single swipe.
Ug ran to help Ra-Kel. Then the sun stopped spitting.
Everything lurched, faded, congealed.
The sinew snapped. Ra-Kel sprawled to the ground, to the sidewalk, a pavement of neatly fitting slabs. Ug crouched over her. “Are you alright? I think the sunstorm has finished now…”
Ug remembered the way things really were.
The mesa was a skyscraper. An experimental rocket had landed on the flat roof and the chimp inside had managed to open the capsule hatch and escape. Here it was now, lurking in the shadows of the lobby entrance. It made a series of rude gestures at Ug.
The parachute fabric, the cords attaching it to the capsule. Everything had been interpreted differently, hadn’t it? The chimp had been a bear. It wasn’t possible, was it? Just because a violent solar storm had jammed all the communications satellites in orbit…
The man on the ground stood and dusted off his suit.
“Oglethorpe!” bellowed Ug.
“Yes, it’s me. The solar storm is over.”
“It was a quick Stone Age, thank goodness. I suppose we’d better get back to work now,” said Mr Ugolino.
Mr Oglethorpe nodded. They both glanced at Raquel.
She rubbed her bruised throat.
“We ought to file a report about this too.”
“Later. The accounts take priority. The auditors are arriving tomorrow and there can’t be any irregularities.”
She nodded. Then she squinted. “Was it painful?”
“Being killed by a bear? You bet!”
They went inside the buildi
ng and took the elevator to the top floor. A mammoth that was slow to change back lumbered past them in the widest corridor, knocking over the water cooler.
“The sun regularly has Earth-sized storms on its surface that end up ejecting dangerous radiation and particles into space. Mostly these dangerous bits of energy head off into deep space. But what would happen if the Earth got in the way? You could kiss goodbye to the Internet and your electricity supply. Banks and governments would not be able to function. Satellites would be blinded.” – The Doomsday Handbook
The Anvil Cloud
I made the dreadful mistake of parachuting into an anvil cloud. I won’t try to justify my decision. It was simply wrong.
They are mature thunderstorm clouds and are like sacks of thunder, rain, hail and wind, and they look just like anvils that are boiling furiously. The air inside them goes round in an endless loop.
People with a scientific interest in the weather prefer to call these clouds cumulonimbus incus because it shows they are more professional than ordinary folks like me and that’s fair enough really.
Anything that gets stuck in one can end up going up and down for a long time. Maybe the forces in the cloud will tear the thing apart, maybe they won’t. There’s no way of predicting the outcome.
Aircraft have been devoured by them whole.
I jumped out of my own aeroplane before I knew any of this. My canopy opened and I descended through the cloud, icy water lashing my face and blue lightning frazzling my nerves, and I was astonished to meet another parachutist coming back up. We passed each other.
“Hey!” I shouted.
“Hey!” he called back.
“What are you doing here? Did you get stuck?”
“Yes, an hour back...”
And then we were out of earshot. I kept falling through the chaos of cold and noise, through the wind and the thunder, and then just before I popped out of the base of the cloud, I felt myself stopping, reversing direction, going back up, lifted by malicious currents of air.
And I met the man again, for he was coming down.
“Hello once more!” I cried.
“Good afternoon. Goodbye! See you soon!”
We passed each other.
I continued to rise, but then to my bewilderment I met him again higher up. He was descending and I was still ascending and this situation didn’t make any sense. “Hey you!” I bellowed.
“Long time, no see,” he shouted back.
“It can’t be you. That’s impossible. To fall down you have to go back to the top and I passed you just now.”
“Very well, I admit it. I’m his twin brother.”
“What a mean trick to play!”
He shrugged and then he was gone. I reached the top of the cloud and my head actually poked out of the top of it and into the blue sky and I drank deep of the serenity and sanity it afforded.
But then I began dropping back into the nightmare.
As I plunged I soon saw him coming back up. He grinned. “It does get a bit boring in here. That’s why I lied.”
“I think I understand,” I answered, but I didn’t.
He went his way, I went mine.
Then his brother came up to pass me. “Hello.”
“I think it’s inappropriate.”
“Don’t be such a prig!” he chided me.
We left each other and I continued to fall. But then I saw him again and he was coming up, not down. And—
“I just want to apologise for the misunderstanding.”
I was aghast. “Fine, fine!”
“No, it’s not fine. We have been cruel to you.”
“I think your apology is the joke. I am getting wise to such games now. I don’t believe you are him or his brother.”
“True. We are triplets, not twins. It does happen.”
I grimaced and passed him.
Then I reached the bottom of the cloud and started going back up. There was nothing I wanted more now than to be alone. Strange! You’d think a man in my position would crave company.
Not me. I was ashamed of my species.
Inanimate objects seemed nobler than human beings.
And there were other things stuck in that anvil cloud, not just a brace of foolish parachutists, but toy balloons, kites, newspapers, the broken branches of trees, books, bottles, cardigans, bags.
The first brother came down and waved cheerily.
I ignored him. And the second.
I also ignored the third.
But then I met a fourth and when he shouted, “Nice day for it, what?” I found myself responding against my will.
“What sort of mother did you have, all of you?”
“She did her level best.”
I chewed my lip but he continued, “Yes, times were hard, but we never went without, not one of the four of us went hungry or cold. She was that kind of woman. A survivor and fighter.”
I felt a little melancholy after this encounter. Should I have tried harder to live and let live, to be accepting?
I reached the bottom of the cloud, started going back up.
And five brothers passed me.
I couldn’t take any more of this. It was mockery of the worst sort, of the numerical kind, and I felt like drowning myself in the rain, but I knew it would be too difficult to do that, and that I was doomed to remain in my harness and go up and down, down and up, until I became a skeleton, my bones not really connected to each other but simply moving all together at the same rate, so the illusion of an integral structure was preserved.
Then I suddenly saw something that gave me hope.
A curious sort of hope.
Black hope, if you can imagine such a thing.
It was another anvil cloud.
A smaller anvil cloud but exquisite in its own way, which had somehow got trapped inside the bigger one.
I seized my chance and pulled the strings of my parachute and steered myself into it. Thus I got stuck a second time, stuck within stuckness, and up and down I went but inside the outer up and down, so that sometimes I was going up while the new cloud that enveloped me was going down and I guess that my speed relative to the ground was zero. That was a comforting thought and I allowed it to comfort me a lot.
Inside the second anvil cloud was a third.
Triplets? I had to enter it.
The mathematics and physics of my movements was now getting more complicated and would continue to do so when I entered the fourth, fifth and sixth clouds, and all the others there might be. The further I got away from the brothers, the better. But eventually the final anvil cloud would only be as big as my body. It would fit me like a shroud and I wouldn’t be able to move up and down at all inside it. I would be stuck immobile while all the innumerable ups and downs went on around me.
Then I might be able to paddle the cloud sideways and out of the muddle into freedom. A long journey but worthwhile. I just had to extend my arms and poke them out on either side and flap them gently, swimming like a man who thinks he’s a fish that thinks it’s a bird.
And that’s what I did.
I even got home safe, which is where I am now.
Drinking hot chocolate, and wiping my lips on the silk of my parachute, and staring out the window into the street.
Women with very large bellies sometimes walk past.
How many brothers inside each one?
Stuck in a womb, rotating, passing each other.
The only way you’ll ever get me back in one of those anvil clouds is if I’m completely hammered. That’s no joke.
The Apple of My Sky
Why don’t adults ever climb trees for fun? They climb mountains and cliffs and no one thinks it odd, not even if they get stuck halfway up, but the moment a grown man or woman is found helpless in a tall oak or elm then it’s a reason for mirth. Children are permitted to scale trees, and so are cats, but never adults, unless they have serious reasons for doing so, including the rescue of those offspring and pets. How unfair!
Those were the thoughts that passed through the feverish head of Mummery Tumble as he lay on his back on the spacious balcony of his Kleine Scheidegg hotel room. The hotel staff had been thoughtful enough to move his bed out into the fresh air and the view of the Alps before him filled him with both joy and melancholy, for although he appreciated the magnificence of the vista he was also frustrated by his inability to engage with it in physical terms.
“Curse this leg!” he sighed, as he regarded his bandaged limb.
The previous day, while on a simple stroll, his bag of apples had split and the fruit had rolled under his feet, sending him crashing awkwardly to the ground and causing a bone to break. So now his climbing holiday was over and he was reduced to immobility, frowned down upon by those immense icy giants that he still dreamed of befriending; for Mummery rarely conquered peaks, preferring to work with them.
Sighing for the thousandth time this morning, he placed his eye to the lens of the telescope that had been set up on a tripod next to his bed. As he scanned the face of the Eiger, adjusting focus, looking for climbers in order to monitor their progress with a mixture of envy and displaced pride, he suddenly stiffened in amazement. He removed his eye, blinked it furiously, returned it to the lens. No, he hadn’t been deceived by an optical illusion. This was real.
It was a tree. A tree climbing the mountain!
But how was such a totally unexpected thing possible?
Trees don’t move, or rather they move exceedingly slowly, pushing their roots through the soil, reaching out to touch the clouds with their branches; they certainly never scale difficult peaks with such fluidity and strength. This particular tree was clinging to precarious handholds and footholds with the tips of its twigs and roots but it had a confident posture, leaning back and refusing to hug the rock. Up it went, more efficiently than a human could.
Was it alone? No, it was roped to another tree on a lower ledge. The rope in question was a thick vine and the second tree was paying it out carefully, braced to absorb the shock of a fall. Mummery returned his attention to the leading tree. Something moved in its highest branches. What might it be? A minor adjustment of the focus revealed it to be a man with a basket picking apples! This was simply too much. How could the fellow be so blasé?