Need Yesterday's Explorers Have Explored So Well, And What Is There Left In This Mapped And Measured World?
When Dirant reviewed the next area, he judged it less amenable to development than the guest world for the respectable reason than it had already been developed. Though disappointed in that regard, he said, “The very existence of a next area is a cause for thankfulness,” and the fact he was able to speak and to hear himself consoled him all the more. Gathering and comprehending those impressions did not happen instantly; upon completing the process, he thanked any gods who happened to be listening even if they had not helped him on the grounds that he hoped they would in the future.
All that was done while collapsed on the floor. He stood, an operation which tasked him less than he feared, and surveyed the walls, without which the ceiling so long the object of his scrutiny had little excuse for its presence. Those two features combined with the floor to define a room. Another comfort, to be inside so sensible a composition of architectural elements.
The room's dimensions resembled those of the Ertith chambers in the great ziggurat at Iflarent's Hideout, but its decorative character differed entirely. Rather than painted scenes or fragments placed adjacently to create a composite, reliefs decorated the walls much as they did many a towering building in Dittsen except on the inside. They depicted people; any analysis more detailed than that waited upon an academic who had cultivated the appropriate faculties and knew of a publication in need of submissions.
In place of the Archive's niches, shelves attached to one wall held papers, and not the faded blue sort. “This is an unfamiliar alphabet,” Dirant said. Thought alone would have sufficed, but he continued to derive reassurance from verbal expression. “Nevertheless the writing appears legible. Paperwork has its own dignity, to alter the quotation, and since I am capable of literary allusion I must be fully recovered. This relief also is more understandable than I first believed. Are these not the detailed humans whose reluctance to appear in Ertith's art permits inventive speculation? Here is a child entering a house while three people crouch under a table made unusually tall to accommodate the scale of the figures involved. Certainly that is a fairy story my mother told me.”
“I concluded the same, Mr. Dirant.” That agreement added to Dirant's relief for two reasons. First, that Taomenk Genarostaf was safe, and second, that someone agreed with him. The nature of the present situation (one would not risk censure to call it a predicament) prepared Dirant to learn that every person who plummeted from the guest world perceived his surroundings in a unique way according to the dreadful crimes of his past. Several tragedies reduced their immoral protagonists to such a state, and he was not sorry to avoid the role.
Taomenk continued. “I have concluded not a single other thing so far. Evidence is what's needed. Have you come across anyone else, or? You are the first I have seen. A better companion I could not ask for, but you understand.”
“Thank you, Mr. Taomenk. So much do I understand that I propose to seek our companions forthwith.” For all that it would have been more precise to speak of them as former companions, Dirant refused to do so, and neither did the other correct him.
The two men commenced a search for people rather than the meaning of the reliefs, and the person who questions the need even to mention that has perhaps not met a certain type of academic. The results argued for emulating that type, since at the end of their search they had no third person and no deepened understanding of the pictorial evidence, a total waste.
They did gather additional material for a list of compiled differences between those chambers and the Ertith ones they half resembled. The spiral staircases, for example, belonged to a far more advanced era and taste. The couches and their pillows stuffed with the down of birds which, so far as those two could determine with their limited ornithological expertise, did not exist, added to the exotic flair.
Dirant summarized the findings. “It is important that I remember the lesson which states something new to me is not therefore new. Saying that, a lively trade in these turquoise-feathered birds must be carried on if they are present in Egillen. They do not, it does not, and this place is unlike the continent we know.”
“It's time to go up,” Taomenk responded.
His comment would have seemed a non-sequitur to anyone unfamiliar with another of that complex's divergences from Ertithan practice. The explorers had come across no horizontal exits or underground passages, but only a staircase reaching toward the sky which had not even a slab to cover the top. The blue rectangle visible from below promised egress and adventure, but the prospect of crossing the line between building and outdoors worried them as it never did at home. As Taomenk implied, however, there was nowhere else to go.
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“Youthful enthusiasm demands I climb first.” Dirant started up the stairs, reflecting that he perhaps had told a trifling lie. His authentic motivation relied on his conclusion that if one of them stuck his head up and suffered decapitation immediately thereafter, Taomenk probably had greater skill in reattaching parts to their frames than he did. Ommes referred to such a situation as “a tall cliff or a taller cliff,” he believed, while for his part, he would rather struggle to swallow the entire Onbehemmiror River than the Ontoffemmiror if forced to choose.
His head, still intact when it poked above the staircase, reasoned that though unanticipated danger might still exist, that was always and everywhere true; he perceived no greater cause for anxiety there than on any other roof. “The view is broad and so far safe,” Dirant called down, and soon he and Taomenk both looked over a scene which had the power to incite wonder in lovers of novelty and despair in the advocate of maintaining a consistent aesthetic across a single object.
That object might be as small as a portrait or as large as a city as it was in this case. From the highest point of a ziggurat, as they at last could prove it was after merely suspecting it before, the observer could see ahead and behind imposing masses similar to the Drastlif type of temple. To the right sprawled a single-story palace the walls of which enclosed a dozen courtyards, each governed by a majestic fruit tree, while to the left uneven stones piled thick and high surrounded a hall which represented the earliest stage of social organization according to lectures Dirant had attended. Ommes sometimes recreated them in their modern architecture from a nostalgic impulse. Huts of packed clay resembling the best efforts of ancient, non-Ertith settlements dotted the spaces between more impressive structures, and the unpretentious thatched houses alongside them looked as grand in comparison as one's handsomer brother at a family meeting.
Like any productive community, the jumbled city contained structures intended for economic purposes. There was a well suitable for a local legend about some ancient king who threw down his spear where the gods directed and saved his people with the water that sprung forth, and the mill looked to require a line of brawny men for its operation. A whip for the overseer's use was draped over a convenient peg. Some obviously artificial mounds may have been ovens, whether for food or pottery.
All in all, the view presented such a mixture of times and places that it might have been compiled from the memories of a student who invariably dozed off during his history lessons, often awaking with the conviction that he had napped for perhaps five minutes when in fact twenty had passed. That the place should be wholly unpeopled would have bewildered the visitors if not for their reaching it through the guest world.
“Is this a resort conceived with a specific theme of 'the breadth of culture?'” Dirant wondered.
“It just may be a model,” Taomenk mused. “Real geniuses can delve a subject to its deepest without putting hands on it, but I need to set it up, tear it down, and set it up again to start understanding it. I'm not alone there, you understand.”
“Suppose then you were such a modeler. Where would you yourself live?”
Taomenk shook his head. “That's not what we want. It's a workplace in the daytime. One with a good view and good instruments. That tower, say.” He pointed out a brown brick protuberance a good distance away. “Shorter than this ziggurat to be sure, but windows are better than an open roof at stopping papers from blowing away.”
Thus he set their destination, though how to progress beyond their starting point, they had not yet ascertained. After searching every side for flights of stairs such as architects typically insisted on setting on the outside of their ziggurats, twice, they submitted to the regrettable necessity of making their way down by hanging from the edge of each floor and dropping down to the next in a knee-rattling procedure. By the time they reached ground level, their intentions of supplicating the designer or mayor of the place for aid in returning to Cowsick Point had given way to a more truculent attitude.
Their hostility wore off long before they reached the tower. The eerie quiet of streets devoid of traffic, though expected, sapped all violent emotion from them and replaced it with unease. A silent city seemed all the more desolate than a plain or hill, no matter how remote, and the confused array of elements disconcerted far more when they walked among it rather than gazing down from above as a child does on his toys or a judge on someone else's legal difficulties. There was that, but something else bothered Dirant while eluding recognition. Passing by a plaza, he realized what it was.
“Is there wind?” he stopped and asked.
“Ah. I wondered at the lack of windmills.” Taomenk halted too. Both listened and held up fingers, even going so far as to lick them (each saw to his own rather than adopting an exchange of favors). They heard and felt not even the slightest breeze.
A revelation of that kind reduced the remainder of their aggressive impulses to nothing. Taomenk began debating with himself what bridges and other projects he might complete if free to ignore the confounding influence of the weather, and soon his splendid vision of gargantuan construction efforts across the whole of Greater Enloffenkir entranced both so that only their knees remembered what the hardships inflicted on them.