Fair Semblances: An Allegorical Fantasy (Chapter 12)

Our underground wayfarers had not made it more than a few paces down the broad thoroughfare leading out eastward from the magnificent throne room before their attention was arrested by another small but very significant-looking room to their left. The entrance, perhaps twenty feet high, was much smaller than the main entrance to the throne room, which was more than a hundred feet in height; but other than that, it seemed to be a precise replica, with the same winged leopards stretched out over an arched doorway. As this was only the second time they had seen such an entrance, they decided to step into the room it opened up upon, to see if they could discover anything useful.

When they had come into the room, the three travelers could immediately discern that it must have been some sort of temple, built in honor of the ruling king and queen of the city, and the leopard-god that was everywhere so prominently displayed. A perfectly semi-spherical dome was stretched out over the room some thirty or forty feet above the floor, and the torch was constantly catching the gleaming points of light that were embedded in it, in the exact pattern of the stars in the nighttime sky. These reflective points of light seemed to be jewels of various kinds, for they sparkled some with a white light, and some with a green, or blue, or red, or yellow. Mishael couldn’t remember for sure, but he thought the pattern was exactly the same as in the chart of the midnight sky at the summer solstice, which he had had to study in his astronomy class.

At the bottom of the dome, where the surrounding wall met with it and held it up, was a band of smooth marble, etched out and inlaid with silver and gold, in the stylized form of twisting leopards and lions. After looking upon these etchings for some time, Mishael suddenly realized that they were not just decorative, but that they were laid out in the fashion of some cursive script, and were in fact meant to be read, if one could decipher the language; but he supposed that the task must be entirely impossible now, as the city had lain dead, with its entire civilization exterminated, for so many centuries.

On the portion of the wall directly opposite the arched entrance, there were two statues of the same royal man and woman that had likewise stood as statues behind the ivory thrones. They were standing on pedestals of about four feet in height, and each one was bearing up one side of a great treasure chest, sculpted in stone, with the lid just cracked open, to accommodate the reception of gifts from the worshipers; it was impossible to determine where the gifts which had thus been offered up would have landed, for nothing but empty space could be seen through the crack. The ubiquitous winged leopards were on either side of them, stretching out their wings above them, apparently in token of their divine blessing and protection.

After looking around, the companions were about to leave again, finding nothing of any use to them, when Mishael let loose an exclamation: “Look at the torch!”.

Gilead and Ariel immediately turned to look, and saw that its flame was very noticeably drawn toward the northern wall, where the statues stood, as if a strong draft were sucking it in.

“There must be a passageway beyond those statues,” Mishael continued. The three of them turned back to the wall, to scrutinize it more closely.

After examining the wall, and holding the torch up next to it, they determined that the crack in the sculpted treasure chest must open up to some passageway, which is in fact the result they had expected to find; but they also discovered another draft, which strove to suck the flame of the torch through the open mouth of one of the winged leopards. Exploring this cavity with his fingers, Gilead found that it concealed an iron lever which, after some deliberation, he pulled. It took all of his strength to turn the lever, and somewhere far below, right at their feet from the sound of it, they heard a reluctant groan, as if some iron plate that had been far too long in one position were being forced to a different resting spot. When Gilead pulled the lever, they were all three looking up at the statues, expecting to see some change; but before they saw any movement, and quite unexpectedly, they instead experienced the all-too-familiar feeling of fine sand piling up against their feet. They looked down to see several streams of sand shooting out forcefully from the pedestals on which the statues were standing, and when they looked up again, the statues were noticeably lower. They appeared to be sinking down into the pedestals.

After a little reflection, they figured out what had happened: the statues had been resting on a bed of sand, which filled the interior of each pedestal, and which had been kept from escaping through the decorative cuttings at its base by a plate that had been positioned on the inside of its walls, and which was connected to the lever in the leopard’s mouth. The bases of the statues had fit so perfectly with the inside walls of the pedestal that the entire statue and pedestal had appeared at first to be of one piece; but in reality, the two were not connected at all, so when the lever had lifted up the plates on the inside of the pedestal, the sand was released to flow through the cuttings, and as it escaped, the statue had sunk down until it rested on the floor, about four feet below its original height.

As the two statues sank, together with the sculpted treasure chest, which had been one piece with them, the crack above the chest grew wider and wider, until it became an entrance of about four feet tall by four feet wide to another room behind it. Hesitantly, the companions stepped through this newly-discovered door, to see what lay beyond.

* * * * * * * *

No sooner had Mishael, Ariel, and Gilead stepped into the room than they heard a terrific crash behind them, and spun around to see what was the matter. Apparently, the tile of the floor that they had stepped on had also been connected to some lever, which, when it had been tripped, let a massive rock fall down behind them that cut off any avenue of escape through the temple. They were now trapped inside the room behind the temple.

Before moving any further into the interior of the room, and so possibly initiating more lever-tripped reactions, they paused to look around. What they saw was a fairly small chamber, perhaps twenty feet on all three dimensions, by all appearances cut into solid rock. At the northeastern corner of the room was a low, narrow opening, perhaps two feet wide by four feet tall, which seemed to lead downward by steps. On their left, the floor sloped sharply away, beginning its plunge just beneath where the opening to the sculpted chest on the other side had been; and when they followed the slope of the rock with their eyes, they could not believe what they saw: there, in a massive pit, about ten feet in diameter and who knows how deep, was a pile of gold and silver jewelry, precious stones, and other assorted riches such as they could never before even have dreamed up. The temple behind the rock door had apparently attracted many of the wealthiest worshipers from the rich city-state of Zoar, who had been wont to express their devotion and seek divine favors through sacrifices of gold and silver; and the pit had been designed to collect that great store of wealth. Obviously, the entrance in the northeastern corner, which Mishael suspected led to the royal quarters that they had already surveyed, was intended to give some person or persons access to this treasure house of devoted items.

After surveying the room for some seconds, Gilead finally spoke up, in a tense, hushed voice:

“Let’s walk directly to that small opening on the other side, and stay away from this pile of tainted riches. I have a strong feeling that it’s cursed, forbidden, and I fear what the result should be if any of us were to touch it.”

Gilead and Ariel then began walking gingerly toward the opposite corner of the room; but Mishael held back for a few moments, and then slowly, heedlessly, stepped toward the sparkling pit of treasure. He was just to its edge when Gilead looked back and saw him stooping down to examine something.

“No!”, he barked out in a commanding tone; “Don’t touch it!”.

But he was too late.

When Mishael first touched an ornately wrought golden bracelet from the pile of cursed treasure, picking it up to examine it more closely, he immediately felt the ground shudder beneath him, and was at once overcome with a sense of impending doom and overhanging evil. He threw it back into the pit as if it had been on fire, but to no avail; the ground continued to quake beneath him, ever more violently, and the air grew more and more tense, until he felt as if his head would implode from the heavy atmosphere enveloping him and weighing him down on all sides. For a matter of some seconds he stood there in this fashion, nearly paralyzed with fright; but then, out of nowhere, there came a hand from behind him, snatching him back and throwing him away from the sinister pit. Gilead had returned to seize him away before the gaping pit and now heaving floor had swallowed him up forever.

He was none too soon, for the pit had already been cracking apart and leaving a wide fissure down the middle of the room, and ominous, bloodthirsty sounds were now emanating from its depths, and becoming louder and more bloodcurdling every instant. Gilead and Mishael struggled to get back to the narrow doorway in the corner, but walking across the room was like walking across the middle of the sea in a raging tempest, and the stone floor kept rising up before them and casting them down to their knees. Finally, they were within an arm’s length of the beckoning doorway; but just then, a huge shadow shot up out of the pit, looking as if it were half corporeal and half phantasmic, and shrieked out with the shrill, spine-tingling screech of a wounded puma, or else of a woman being tortured; the creature’s shape was that of a winged leopard, and it was so huge that the little room could scarcely accommodate it. Looking at the terrified companions with eyes of blazing fire, that seemed to illuminate the entire room with an evil, flickering light, he let out another, louder shriek, and leapt at them as if to swallow them up whole. Ariel screamed in terror, and Mishael and Gilead instinctively flung themselves away from this horrific apparition, both half-dead and almost insensible with fright.

As near as the two young men were, by now, to the narrow door in the wall, they both managed to dive headlong through its inviting frame before the leopard-demon seized them; and then, colliding with Ariel, who was already on the other side of the door, they tumbled head over heels, and one on top of the other, down the steep stone staircase to which the door opened. For a few moments they lay there at the bottom in a confused heap, half petrified with fear and a little dazed from their rough-and-tumble exit; but finally, coming to their senses, they extricated themselves from one another, and scrambled on their hands and knees down the damp, dark passageway which stretched out before them, to the south.

They were none too soon, as the fissure which had begun at the pit just then lengthened, and with a resounding crack, the entire staircase split apart, and the stone floor beneath it, where the three friends had lain in a daze, crumbled away into the huge chasm for a gap of about twenty or twenty-five feet. Up above them, they could still hear the leopard-demon shrieking with rage, in pitches that rose high above the sound of the crashing rock; at their feet, the chasm that had opened up so suddenly was still widening, and the floor beneath them was pitching and reeling, only not so much as it had been up in the treasure room; behind them, all access to the northern portion of the tunnel, which Mishael had supposed must lead to the royal quarters, was cut off by the vast chasm; and before them, the dark tunnel opened up with a black and menacing aspect. As threatening a mien as this tunnel had, it was quite obviously the only pathway left to them, however, and so, without pausing to deliberate, they took off in a sort of hesitant sprint, holding their hands in front of them, in case of any unseen impediments, for Gilead had long ago dropped the torch he had been carrying, and they were thus left quite in the dark.

After making it several hundred yards down the tunnel in this fashion, they finally came to a halt; the stone floor was quite solid and unmoving now, and the sound of the earthquake behind them had died down. They heard one more leopard-shriek, this time very faint, and after that nothing at all. They were gasping for breath, and so, determining that they were out of any imminent danger, they felt their way to the side of the tunnel, so that they might lean against the wall for a moment of rest.

After a few moments passed in silence, Gilead finally spoke up:

“At this point, I think the only thing we can do is figure out what supplies we have left, and then continue down this tunnel until we come across anything better. I don’t suppose either of you has a torch, and I’ve lost mine, so we’ll have to walk along with our hands on either side of the wall, to ensure we don’t miss any doorways or openings. But what do we have left in the way of food, and especially the water gourds? I’m afraid I lost my entire pack up in the treasure room, so I have nothing except the flint and tinder on my belt, and then my dagger too, of course.”

“I lost my pack too,” Mishael confessed; “so I have nothing at all”.

“You boys are incorrigible,” Ariel quipped lightheartedly. “It’s a good thing you have a sensible woman along to take care of you; I had the good sense not to get rid of any of my share of the provisions. I thought, after all, that we might have some use for it somewhere down the road.”

Then, after a moment’s pause, she spoke up again, “I have four of our supply-gourds here, and I think two of them are filled water and two with food. But that’s all that I have, no torches, I’m afraid.”

“Well, then,” Mishael suggested in a carefree voice, “let’s get moving”; and then he added jokingly, “We have a few miles to go before nightfall overtakes us”. Ariel’s good spirits seemed to be rubbing off on him, and for some reason, although their situation was quite grim, he did not feel anxious about their prospects at all.

So the three of them set out, Gilead walking on the left, with his hand on the eastern wall of the tunnel, Mishael walking on the right, with his hand on the western wall, and Ariel just behind the two of them, and occasionally stepping on their heels in the darkness. But they had only gone a few paces in this manner when the two boys simultaneously made a very helpful discovery: upon the wall, directly across from each other, there were hanging two torches, which seemed to have quite a bit of usefulness left. Lighting up one of them with his flint and tucking the other behind his belt, Gilead set out again at the head of the little company, much more at ease with their newfound light. As they soon discovered, the entire tunnel was equipped with torches, which hung upon the walls at intervals of about forty or fifty yards, so that this difficulty, at least, was quite satisfactorily surmounted by a stroke of good fortune.

5 Responses to “Fair Semblances: An Allegorical Fantasy (Chapter 12)”

  1. Bob says:
    November 10, 2008 at 10:19 pm

    Nathan,

    I’ve been thoroughly enjoying this series. You have a gift and I’m excited to learn more of the allegory behind the tale. This is top rate writing and could easily get published.

    Blessings,

    Bob

  2. pitchford says:
    November 11, 2008 at 9:41 am

    Thanks, Bob. Unfortunately, I’ve recently taken on quite a load of new responsibilities, so I’ve more or less decided that I just won’t have the time to continue with the book, at least for now. I’ll keep it on the back burner, though, and maybe when I’ve finished up with a few other things, I’ll try to get started again. What I’ve posted so far is roughly a third of the entire book as I have it envisioned. It will be in two major parts, and we’re getting fairly close (somewhat more than halfway, at least) to the end of the first part. But then, in my original vision, even these first two parts were only going to be the first book of a trilogy.

    Anyway, thanks for the affirmation, and I’ll keep you updated as I have time to continue.

  3. Peter Whyte says:
    November 12, 2008 at 2:51 am

    Nathan

    I’ve been enjoying a weekly fix, too, and been meaning to express my appreciation. Sorry to hear you’ll be shelving the episodes for the time being, but appreciate the problem of juggling responsibilities. Trust you’ll be able to return to it in due time.

    Peter

    PS My mother-in-law has been enjoying your Images of the Saviour in the OT.

  4. pitchford says:
    November 12, 2008 at 8:31 am

    Thanks, Peter. I do have one more chapter finished, which I’m planning to post Monday as usual. And maybe I’ll try to keep working on the story as I have time, it just might not be consistently every week.

    Thanks for stopping by.

  5. pitchford says:
    November 16, 2008 at 8:00 pm

    Update: I’ve been encouraged by the largely positive feedback to continue with the story; and so, insofar as I am able, I intend to keep posting at the rate of one chapter a week, until I am finished (after app. 40 chapters).

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