The three men hit the
ground like a parachute jump gone wrong. Even desert sand can take on the
properties of a concrete block if approached too fast. They sprawled out on the
floor of the arena, stunned, sand and stone raining down from up above. Another
great cracking sound and Angelo looked up in time to see the needle of rock
sway and finally begin to fall – with them directly underneath.
“RUN!” shouted Angelo
and in an instant the three of them were running at top speed as the ground
rumbled and jumped beneath their feet, making it hard to keep their balance.
Then the ground began to judder as chunk after chunk of the pinnacle rock came scything
down into the arena. Hammer blows of rocks crashing all around and deadly chips
of stone zipping through the air, narrowly missing our heroes caught in the
crossfire of this stone-age battle. The noise was stupendous and a cloud of
dust billowed up to the heavens, blotting out the sun and enveloping them. And
still the thumping crunch of rocks went on and on, the little threesome
expecting some to fall on their heads at any moment.
They had traversed half
the diameter of the arena before the noise subsided and they finally felt safe
enough to stop. In a daze they looked about them as the dust settled. Huge chunks
of rock were piled high on top of each other and scattered across the arena.
“Oh shit, here he comes,”
moaned Angelo.
The snake came out of its
hole with a purpose, tongue flickering in and out, homing in on its prey. This
time there was no hesitation. This time there would be no escape. It had been
denied once too many. It was hungry and in a real bad mood. For the terrified
trio it was time to go and they scattered like a bunch of chickens running for
their lives.
“This way,” shouted
Angelo to the others who were more or less just running anywhere away from the
snake, for there was no way out or over the rocky wall surrounding the arena.
“The crevice,” shouted
Angelo, indicating the hole in the ground to Noot. Noot nodded and changed
course. “Follow me,” he said to Righteous, grabbing his arm and running like
hell towards the huge rent in the ground that the snake had previously torn
open. The snake increased its speed, eager for revenge – its prey now within
inches of its galloping nose.
And then they weren’t
there anymore. The snake skidded sideways to a halt, mystified, tongue
flickering frantically from side to side searching for its food. It took all of
a second and a half to locate their scent again and then it poured itself into
the crevice, its scaly skin sliding over the edge of the hole, and plunged in
pursuit.
They tumbled down the
hole, twisting this way and that but always going down, deeper into the earth.
Desperately trying to stay on their feet they slipped and slid using their
hands and knees to try and keep upright, but in the end the slope became too steep
and they cascaded down together in a crazy bundle of limbs and boulders and
sand.
They lay there with pebbles
and sand raining down onto them from above. Coughing and spluttering they got
slowly to their feet and wiped the dust from their eyes and mouths. Angelo took
a careful look around them. They were in a small cavern with the light
filtering in from far up above. Opposite them were two tunnels, each leading
off in a different direction.
“Righteous, there are
two tunnels ahead of us. Do you have any ideas?”
“Sorry. I cannot tell.”
Angelo turned to Noot
but he shrugged his scaly shoulders. He too had no clue. And then as they dallied
and deliberated there came a sudden whoosh of warm, foetid air from one of the
tunnels, much like a long awaited subway train about to emerge at the station.
Without thinking and of one accord the three men dived down the other tunnel
and began running for their lives again.
Behind them gleamed the
scales of the blind alley-crawler, seeking completion. Brushing aside the bones
of a thousand corpses it came rumbling on, excited to its very core and hungry
for blood. Their feet fairly flew over the earth, but not fast enough, for on
it came, closer and closer. And suddenly for the three, life became very
personal.
Everything went relatively
well for the first few hundred yards, then it suddenly turned pitch dark as the
serpent got so close that it blocked out all the light from above. Angelo,
unable to see, ran straight into the wall and sagged to his knees in a daze.
Noot hooted urgently and Righteous stopped and scrabbled around until he found
Angelo. Then, lifting him up under his arm he set off at a blistering pace. The
snake, angry and hurting from his recent wounds, surged after them with renewed
energy. All Righteous’ other senses came into sharp play now as he expertly
navigated down the winding tunnel. Behind him he heard the snake dislodging
stones and crushing boulders, inexorably grinding its way down the passage
after them.
Once again the tunnel
angled steeply downward, turning their journey into a slip-sliding, stumbling nightmare;
Righteous holding on to Angelo for dear life and Noot scrabbling at the loose
stones with his massive claws, trying to keep his balance. Down and down they
went, deeper and deeper – and colder and colder it got, and slower and slower
moved poor Noot, the chill gradually shutting down his reptilian metabolism. Not
wanting to be a drag on his friends, Noot slipped quietly behind, prepared to
sacrifice himself for the sake of his friends. But Righteous was in the zone.
No sooner had Noot fallen behind by a few paces than he sensed the empty space
where he should have been. Righteous turned and slung a muscled arm around him
as well and resumed their pell-mell journey.
Bruised and bleeding, Righteous
ran with a thousand hearts until they came to the place where all journeys end.
The cavern was lit by a
solitary spur of bone that stuck out over a deep pit, like the plank on a
pirate’s ship, illuminating everything with a soft ghostly white glow. Angelo,
now back on his feet, looked anxiously over his shoulder, expecting to see the
snake at any moment and wondering why they weren’t dead yet. Then he realized
that the only reason they weren’t, was that the snake was also a reptile and
the cold had slowed it down too. He looked down into the vast and misty pit far,
far below, and saw what he thought to be millions of large pebbles. It took a
minute or two for him to realize that he was looking at thousands upon
thousands of hibernating Ahram women, lying in row after row upon the cold rock
floor.
Noot hooted feebly,
barely able to stay awake in the extreme sub-zero temperatures.
“Noot,” said Noot in
explanation.
“He say these are the
dreamers,” translated Righteous.
“Noot,” Noot said again.
“He say…” said
Righteous, but before he could finish, a long sibilant hiss behind them
signalled the arrival of their doom. Instinctively the three edged their way
further out onto the spur of bone. Tendrils of white mist rose up from the pit
and tenderly touched their feet as they moved closer to the point. The three
men stood at the very end of the slippery shard of bone and turned to face the
blind tongue that sought their essence.
A strange quietness
seemed to settle upon the three. A certain courageous calm enfolded their feeble
frames as they were finally forced to face their fate.
At that moment, that
late moment, you discover life and death simultaneously, the one coming, the
other going; and you discover you are as far from the one as you are from the
other. You find yourself at a pivotal point, a moment where you hold life in
one hand and death in the other; when love and hate become the same
overwhelming emotion, where you can’t tell between laughter and tears, and
pleasure and pain are all the same.
And so, happily and
sadly, you give yourself to the dark divide.
Completion. Where the
road ahead and the road behind converge in Apostatical surge, and time turns in
on itself unable to see anymore whither or where or when or who – just the ‘I’
beyond the moment of the worm – forever.
Completion.
No thought or word could
convey what they felt.
Love…Love was there in
abundance. Regret…there was some, but the overall passion was Love. Fear had no
place in these giddy realms – just knowing…and being. Then the three joined
hands and stepped off the precipice into the pit.
