Fair Semblances: An Allegorical Fantasy (Chapter 11)

After all the events of the past several days, the travelers were hoping for nothing more than an uneventful journey the rest of the way to Lebben-Or; but even in this they would be frustrated by a most unexpected occurrence, which would utterly change the course of their quest, and provide them with no little uncertainty how to proceed. Looking back some time later, they would realize that this vexing obstruction to their plans was in fact the one thing that saved them from certain failure; but at the time, being utterly unaware of this fact, they saw little reason to derive any comfort from what seemed to be just another impediment that would take a great deal of energy and not a little good fortune to surmount.

What happened was this: about four or five days after leaving the Springs of Elim, during which time they had been making good progress toward the south, where the beautiful city of Lebben-Or awaited them, the three friends were discussing the similarities and contrasts between the city of the High King and the outwardly beautiful and bewitching consortium of Fair Semblances; and Gilead had just posed the question to Mishael, “When exactly did you become convinced that Fair Semblances is actually a counterfeit coalition, operating under the control of Vrak?”

As he heard no answer for a few moments, he assumed that Mishael, who was following along in the rear, was thinking through the events brought about by his expedition through the Impenetrable Thicket, and deliberating over the precise moment of awakened conviction. But finally, after the silence had gone on for too exorbitant a length of time, he looked back to see what had occasioned this lack of any response. What he saw, to be precise, was nothing.

“Where did Mishael go?”, he inquired, turning his gaze to his sister, who had been walking along directly behind him; “He was here a moment ago”.

“I have no idea,” Ariel responded in surprise, turning to look back upon the regions they had just traversed; “There’s nowhere he could have gone”.

Ariel was right: at this particular moment, they were in an unusually flat and unbroken plain, with none of the chasms or outcroppings of sandstone that had dotted the desert almost everywhere else. As far as the eye could see, there were just the level sands and fine dust that they had become so accustomed to. To walk far enough away to escape observation, in such a place, would require a matter of a couple hours, at least, and it had not been five minutes since they had last seen Mishael, right there with them. No matter what spin they put on the situation, it still seemed inexplicable, even impossible. Finally, for lack of any better idea, they turned around and began to retrace their steps.

They had only gone a couple dozen yards when they noticed something they had not seen before: there, directly in the path behind them, was a very small hole that had opened up in the sand. On the side of it farthest away from them there was an absolutely smooth plane of stone going down vertically into the ground, which was far too perfect to have come about from the simple forces of nature; and on the nearer side, the sands were still sloughing away as if they were in an hourglass, and creating a bowl-shaped depression in the sand, or actually just a half-bowl, as the far side ended abruptly in the smooth plane of hewn stone. The whole affair gave the impression that the sands had been covering an entire building of rock, which still retained some vacant spaces inside; and that, being disturbed by the footsteps of the company, the conglomerate of compacted sand beneath had given way, and had begun to trickle down through a window or door in the building, to fill up the empty spaces that remained inside. The opening was small, but it seemed just large enough to accommodate a human body.

“Do you suppose he’s down there?” Ariel inquired anxiously.

“Well, I don’t see where else he could have gone,” Gilead replied, in a tone of mingled incredulousness and frustration. “I wonder how far down it goes.”

The two of them spent some time kneeling down as close to the opening as they dared and calling Mishael’s name at the top of their lungs, but they heard nothing in response. They could not see very far at all into the depths of the shaft, and they feared to approach its mouth too closely, lest the treacherous sands should suddenly give way and send them plummeting below. Finally, they lit a torch, and perching on top of the stone wall that bordered the ever-widening rift, they leaned down and peered as far as the light of the torch could reach into the gloom below. It was evidently a very deep hole, but they could make no accurate guesses as to where it ended. It was impossible to throw down an object and count the seconds before it struck the bottom, for the trickling sands would just catch it up and send it sliding down noiselessly instead of falling through the empty air. Finally, when they were just about to give up, and try to come up with another plan, they heard a very faint “Hallooo” coming up from beneath them, sounding surprisingly far away.

“Mishael!”, they both called out again, as loudly as they could manage. And a few seconds later, the very faint response, which they could barely make out:

“I’m down here!”

After some brief deliberation with his sister, Gilead then called out again to Mishael, to the effect that he would throw down a torch and a sealed tin of live coals with which to light it, and that he should look out for them, and see if he could use the light to get a better grasp of his position. He then threw the items down the hole, and several seconds later he heard Mishael calling out, “I’ve got them”.

Gilead and Ariel then waited in silence for a few moments, until they heard Mishael’s faint voice again: “You’re not going to believe this! I’m inside an incredible palace: in the wall next to me is a tall narrow window, where the sand is coming in, but I can’t see the other side of the room, and I can’t see the ceiling at all, even though torch lights the wall up for at least a hundred feet above me.” His voice was very faint, and they could not make out every word, but they got the gist of what he was saying, and Gilead heard very clearly, and with a sense of despair, that phrase “at least a hundred feet above me”.

“Why don’t you walk carefully away from the wall, and see if you can find anything else,” Gilead cried out; “any sign of a staircase, or some other way of getting out of there again.”

For quite a long time, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, Mishael was silent again. Finally, they heard him once more:

“I made it to the other side of the room, it must have been a quarter of a mile at least. There are passageways and halls leading out of it in several directions, but no way to come up any higher.” Again, Gilead heard enough to get the general idea, but no more.

“Just wait there,” Gilead called down; then he turned to Ariel, and began to share his analysis:

“Well, the one thing we cannot do is leave him, for that would be to fail at once in our quest. The best thing we could do is bring him back up, but I don’t see how that’s possible: we simply don’t have enough of our makeshift ropes to get anywhere near the bottom of the hole, and there is no grass here that we could use to make more. So the second best plan, and I think the one we are constrained to follow, is for us to go down to him. It’s altogether likely that we’ll become hopelessly lost in the tunnels of which he speaks, but at least we’ll have some chance, no matter how slight, and if we leave him here we have none. And besides, the very fact that the air is apparently still good down there indicates that somewhere there is some other opening to the outside world, if we can just find it. The hundred foot slide down the sinkhole is a little unappealing, but at least we know it can be survived. What do you think?”

“Of course we can’t leave him, “Ariel agreed resolutely; “so if going down to him is our only option, then going down is what we shall do.”

“Stand back!”, Gilead shouted out, nodding approvingly at his sister; “We’re coming down”.

A few minutes later, Mishael heard the hollow-sounding thumps of the water-gourds striking the stone floor, and shortly thereafter, first Ariel and then Gilead came tumbling through the open window and into the light of Mishael’s torch. They were both a little unnerved by the hair-raising plunge, but thoroughly unharmed.

“You’re not interested in making this easy on us, are you?,” Gilead quipped with a relieved laugh, taking his right hand and pressing it firmly between both his own, in a gesture of reassurance and hearty friendship.

“I just figured we might not ever be this way again, so we might as well take in all the sights,” Mishael returned good-humoredly. But beneath the good spirits and camaraderie, there was an almost palpable feeling of discouragement, bordering on despair.

In the meantime, far above them, a fire-breathing wyrm sped along the surface of the desert, just where the companions had been a few moments earlier, scrutinizing the ground for any sign of them. Finding nothing, it let out a chilling scream of rage. Hidden away beneath more than a hundred feet of sand, the companions heard nothing.

* * * * * * * *

The room that the three seekers found themselves in was truly impressive; they could tell that much just from the flickering light of the torch. The high stone wall stretched to both sides, running east and west, and the vast, sunless depths of the cavernous chamber sprawled far out of sight to the north. The only direction they couldn’t go was south, which was, of course the direction toward which they were interested in progressing.

After shaking off the sand and apportioning the water gourds to each of the three, Gilead made a suggestion:

“Let’s make a circuit of the entire room, holding close to the wall, and note every passageway leading out from it. Perhaps we will find something that suggests a way out; or if nothing else, we might find a tunnel leading south, which will at least put us in the right direction. Barring any other hopeful features, such as a staircase or ramp leading up, we might as well follow a southward tunnel and hope for an exit somewhere along the way.”

Having thus made a tentative plan, Gilead then lifted the torch high above them and scanned the wall. It was a smooth plane as far above as he could see, and also as far to their left, as they were facing the wall, or in other words, to the east. To their right, however, there was some projection just barely visible, about a hundred feet away. Noticing this, Gilead decided to set out first in that direction for their survey of the room, and Mishael and Ariel followed along.

The projection turned out to be a magnificent sculpture of a winged leopard, whose claws touched the floor, and the tips of whose wings stretched clear out of sight, at least a hundred feet up. The curvature of its body and the arch of its wingspan were prominently toward the west, in the direction the companions were traveling, and suggested that it was intended to frame something significant. And sure enough, as they passed beyond the foot of the statue, there appeared an arched doorway, opening up beneath the outstretched wings of the leopard; but the doorway admitted no entrance, for the desert sand had completely stopped it up, and spilled into the room for some twenty or thirty yards. After continuing along across the accumulated sands for about sixty or eighty feet, they came to the other end of the arch, and to another winged leopard, curving above the doorway in the opposite direction. Apparently, this had been the main entrance to the spectacular palace.

Gilead paced out three hundred yards beyond this doorway before coming to the corner of the room. The wall was unbroken by any entrance, and was only interrupted by tall, narrow windows every twenty or thirty yards along the entire extent of the wall. After turning the corner and proceeding to the north, however, the passageways leading further to the west were numerous. The company would only venture to proceed a few yards into each of these passageways, to see if there were any sign of a way up to the surface of the desert; but mostly, they just found a variety of chambers, some large and filled with various supplies of food and grains, all of which seemed to be thoroughly spoiled by exposure to the acidic dust, or else with weapons, armor, and an assortment of other similar provisions; and some were quite small, and seemed to be living quarters, or something of the sort. After pacing off two hundred yards, they came to another arched entryway, not quite so magnificent, but also framed by two statues, this time of lions standing up on their hind legs, with their front paws stretched out over the arch, and with long tails that forked into three extremities, curling out along the wall for quite some distance. This archway opened up into an accessible thoroughfare, that led straight west as far as they cared to follow. After this doorway, they counted off another two hundred yards, similarly broken up by the entrances to different chambers of various sizes, before coming to the next corner.

After pacing off three hundred more yards along this northernmost wall, which was uninterrupted except by windows, just as the southernmost, they came to a throne of astonishing proportions, or rather, two thrones side by side. The two thrones were on a raised platform that appeared to be covered with solid ivory. There were thirty-three steps, all ivory, leading up to the top of the platform, which was a perfect square of about forty feet wide by forty feet long on the top. The thrones themselves appeared to be solid gold, or at least overlaid in gold, with the seat and back upholstered with a fine, plush purple fabric. There were armrests, also of ivory, rising up from the sides of the throne, and intricately carved with various scenes of battles, featuring hundreds of soldiers in various attitudes of killing or being killed, together with horses, elephants, and even fighting leopards and lions, decked out in armor. On the wall behind the thrones were statues of a man and a woman, each at least as high as the winged leopards had been, in splendid royal regalia, with bejeweled crowns on their brows and ornate sceptres in their hands. In the middle of the staircase leading up to the thrones was a recessed double doorway, likewise made of ivory, but with stylized patterns of lions and leopards inlaid with gold and silver, the lions all being silver and the leopards gold.

Passing through the ivory doors beneath the thrones, the travelers made their way into what must have been the royal quarters: all along the walls were scaffoldings covered with dry, black earth, and the remains of what must have been a remarkably lush vegetation at one time, so that the whole complex of rooms would have obtained the appearance of a rain forest indoors. There were also the skeletons of a great variety of birds and small mammals, and old, disintegrating peacock feathers lay everywhere. At the northernmost end of the complex was a waterfall, from which water was still pouring forth through the mouth of a pitcher, held on the shoulder of the statue of a servant girl, and running along the center hallway in an ivory-lined channel, until it ended in a large pool, just before the entrance beneath the thrones, and from there plunged somewhere below the ground. As impressive as these quarters were, however, the little company had no time to stay and admire, and they encountered no hint of any egress, and so, passing out from under the thrones again, they continued along in the same manner as before. The other half of the room could have been the mirror image of the first half, however, with the same chambers and passageways on the eastern wall, and with the one great thoroughfare, framed by lions, in the center. And so their tour of the vast hall ended with no further discoveries. Finally, after a little deliberation, they decided to head off down the eastward thoroughfare and see what they could find, if for no other reason than that it was nearer to them at this time than was its western counterpart.

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