CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The next day came early. The two men woke up in the hour before dawn and after having their fill of good food for breakfast, they readied themselves for their long trip to Pomperaque.
They made up a list for the rations supervisor to fill for them before they were to leave Alugean. The list was common to them both and they were comprised of field hiking packs full of dried meats, fruits and vegetables, two four-litre water sacks and two electric lights.
When Lloyd and Boyce finished giving Burman and the library steward the final details of how and when they would be notified about their own advance on Pomperaque, they left the city, hailed with luck from each worker within.
It was an unusually hot day and it wasn't yet nine o'clock in the morning.
Not far from Alugean, they took their first break by a stream and sucked back a few healthy gulps of water from their sacks.
There wasn't a cloud in the sky and the air felt thick to breathe as they slowly advanced south.
They took to walking in the shade of the trees that were all around them on their path, and only after Boyce noticed a dragonfly fanning itself on a boulder, were both of the men aware that there was a strange lack of insect life.
The men didn't speak. Boyce just pointed to the big beautifully coloured insect and Lloyd knew what was on his mind.
It seemed, to the men, that they were stopping every few minutes to drink their water but they did indeed walk a long distance, losing sight of Alugean several hours into the afternoon.
All the vegetation around them was dry and brittle, especially that which was under foot. The trees and shrubs, however, were still green and were waxy looking, and sap ran sown the bark of some of those trees.
Their feet burned and it wasn't until the late afternoon that they finally came across a stream that was to give them some relief.
They stayed at the little river for an hour, partaking of its fresh and crystal qualities, and Lloyd caught, with his bare hands, a couple of good-sized fish for their supper.
They built a fire and a shading lean-to by the water's edge and there roasted the fish, then ate them.
When they finished they speculated on the distance that they had travelled and they looked at their maps, putting them fifty-five kilometres from the library at Alugean. This surprised both of them and Boyce joked, remarking that the entire walk must've been down hill.
They knew that they had several hours of sunlight available to them, but both agreed that the time would be better spent in search of a proper shelter, where they could sleep that evening.
They doused the fire and scattered the materials of the lean-to, limiting the evidence that someone was there, in the chance that someone was following them.
Although no one followed, their caution spurred them into a steady pace that allowed them to gain a good distance with each passing hour.
It wasn't until dusk that Lloyd caught sight of a large hole in a hillside, which was overgrown with trees and other vegetation.
Since the sun was sinking quickly, Boyce agreed to Lloyd's decision to check it out as a possible shelter for the evening.
It indeed was a cave and it was incredibly large, and the floor of the cave was relatively smooth, as far down as they could see.
Their curiosity was sparked by the looks of the cave opening, and they couldn't see any ledges or nooks until they went further into the cave. Then before them they saw a huge hole, that stretched into darkness. Normality, Boyce threw a rock into the hole but it was never heard hitting the bottom.
There was light in the cave since the entrance faced towards the west and the setting sun. They each took out their electric lights anyway, but the beams of light could not illuminate the other side, if there was another side.
To their right was a large road, seemingly joined to the smooth surface that ran through the entrance, so they began to walk on it.
"I wonder where this leads?" Boyce thought to ask, not expecting to be answered and especially with Lloyd's remark.
"Hell, maybe?" he replied.
This annoyed Boyce, but more from not really having a concept of what hell was supposed to be. He could not imagine that which had been described in legend since the dawn of man _ both times.
He sometimes shone the light onto the wall to their right and Lloyd shone his straight ahead so that they wouldn't fall into nothingness if the road was to suddenly end.
"Maybe we should head to the entrance, Lloyd. We have been here for some time."
"I thought I saw my light reflecting off something just ahead. We'll head back after we check that."
Boyce nodded to resuming and as they neared that which was returning Lloyd's light, Boyce shone his on the wall again and lit a large black, cube that didn't look like it was made of stone.
"What is that?"
Lloyd stopped and looked at it, then went over to it. He touched it and set his fingers into a groove that he found on the side.
"I don't know, but — " he pulled on the groove and half the cube, which was hinged, flew open. "It seems to be opening!"
There was a row of six small levers and beneath those was one large dusty one. Lloyd tried to move it but it didn't budge.
He sighed then dropped his pack to his feet and drew from it a small axe, gave the lever a good slam them tried it and he pushed it right around until it stopped.
There was a sudden rush of air followed by a screaming whirling sound, and the entire place became lit with dim yellowish light.
They turned to face the direction of the light and were totally flabbergasted by what they saw.
In the utmost of awe, both stood with their mouths agape and were silent as their eyes combed the entirety of the huge pit that extended far below them, with the road on which they stood, spiralling in a terraced fashion down to the very bottom.
Throughout the immense hole, there were huge machines; dormant and silent. Only God knew for how many years this place had been abandoned.
Lloyd saw that which had reflected his light earlier. It was a huge yellow hauling machine, several dozen meters away from them and covered with faded writing. It had many large, black wheels and a gigantic load bin, still filled to the limit with whole rocks, many of them larger than either of the two men.
"This is a mine!" Lloyd began to explain to this companion. "It's odd, though, that this place would be mined like this?"
"Why do you say that?" Boyce was puzzled.
"This style is called an open-pit mine, yet it's in this small mountain. That is why I think it's odd. Shafts are usually dug for mining in mountains or for something that is found very deep!" Lloyd pointed to the floor of the pit, maybe a kilometre below them.
"I would like to go down there, but we don't have the time. Let's get back." Boyce suggested.
The shrieking whirl suddenly stopped and there was no more drafty air flowing about them and the lights went out.
"I suppose that we'll have to go back now?" Lloyd chaffed, picking up his pack.
They lay back on the flat, even floor of the cave, using their water sacks as pillows.
Bluish starlight filtered into the cave and it was barely enough to let them see one another.
They stared up into the dark of the ceiling and thought about what they had just found.
"What a strange and fantastic place!" said Boyce.
"Have you noticed that this entire road, that runs to the floor of this mine, has been carved right out of the rock?" Lloyd was formulating a theory about the odd method of building such a place.
Boyce remained quiet, knowing Lloyd well-enough by now, to let him continue with his thoughts.
"They must've used lasers, like ours!" he continued. "How else could they make it's surface so flat and even all the way down?"
"I was thinking, Lloyd … wouldn't this great hole make an interesting city — like the Alugean library?"
They both were quiet for a moment, reflecting on Boyce's idea, until
Lloyd resumed.
"I'd wager that both places were made by the same people!"
The silence that came next lasted until morning when Boyce and Lloyd were snatched from their dream states by the shrill cawing of some crow on a boulder outside the mouth of the cave.
Bleary-eyed, the men got to their feet and stretched until they were fully awake, but still relaxed.
"What a noise to wake up to!" Lloyd complained.
"Oh, leave it be. It's not hurting anything!" Boyce gurgled.
"Besides, at least we can get an early start today."
They left the cave and sat on the big rock that the crow had vacated. They took some food out of their packs and filled their bowels with the fuel for a rest.
Their curiosity and sense of awe had made them go back into the mine.
They were in there
only briefly while they took some notes and made some calculations approximating the overall dimensions of the mine.
They marked the location of this sight on their maps and then proceeded on their journey back to Pomperaque.
Not very far from the mine there was a wide, rapid-moving river that they had to cross before they continued their trek overland to the Dark Forest which spanned most of the northern part of the Virgin Mountains. It was a part of the land where no one lived since it was too hostile for any groups of people to settle. Only hunters and criminals roamed those desolate areas.
Lloyd and Boyce tried not to think of what lay ahead. They were given the choice of what routes to take and they chose the shortest and most perilous way.
They were beginning to see more wild life now, some larger than they had ever seen before.
They knew that they were nearing the Dark Forest because of these signs. The forest was home of every kind of titan-like animal, many of which were devilishly ferocious.
They came over a rise and there they rested because, across the small aspen rose an escarpment a few hundred meters in height. To keep on schedule, they had to scale the escarpment walls by evening.
Overhead, a black bird was circling, quickly nearing the ground with each successive round, until it finally came to rest in the top of a tree between them and the cliffs of the escarpment.
It cried out in dry sounding quavers and flapped its wings in a silly-looking manner before it dropped itself off the tree and flew over to the cliffs.
"Funny!" voiced Boyce.
"What?!" Lloyd asked him, thinking that maybe he did something worthy of being made fun.
"That's the second raven they we've seen today, and I wasn't aware that they were indigenous to this area."
Lloyd didn't even notice the bird until Boyce pointed-out its presence to him.
"Maybe it's lost?"
Boyce shrugged at Lloyd's suggestion. He watched the bird fly over the scarp ahead and he sighed with envy.
"Too bad we don't have wings to fly over that thing!" Boyce said about the escarpment. "I don't feel up to the climb."
"I can do without it, also, but we can't go around it; that would take too long."
Boyce looked at Lloyd with a perplexed expression.
"Why did I agree on taking this route, anyway?"
Lloyd grinned and closed his pack while he spoke.
"It's shorter, for one thing." Boyce began. "I wonder, at times, if we will make it there, by taking this way?!"
He drank some water then slung the sack around his neck and shoulders, and Lloyd did the same with his pack.
They both got on their feet and looked at the escarpment then started in its direction, pacing themselves steadily and surely until they were quickly on the other side of the aspen, and were standing at the base of the escarpment's towering cliffs.
"Looks high!" Boyce's brief comment drew a look from Lloyd until he finished his thought. "But — we can't turn back now!"
He laughed for a moment then looked up.
"You know, if someone told me, back when I was a boy, that I would be climbing an impossible rock when I was twenty-one, I would have laughed in their face." Boyce continued to laugh, watching for Lloyd's reaction.
"At least you're young, my friend. I'm nearly twice your age, so this trip is that much harder for me!"
"Strange," Boyce began. "this thing, Fate! It made us friends through your hardship, kept us as friend through my own, and now we're going to a place where we will engage in battle… and maybe die, together."
Lloyd gave him a strange look of disgust and shook his head.
"If I didn't know you better, I'd swear that you were still reading
Djenaud Smarte." he said to Boyce.
"Knock, knock …" Boyce smiled and then gave Lloyd a pat on the back.
"Who'll go first?"
"I will have to go first. I've done more climbing." answered Lloyd.
"Watch where I put my hands and feet and climb up the same way."
Boyce nodded in silence and Lloyd gave him a concerned looks as if to calm him.
They began to climb the escarpment which was almost a straight vertical rise of brittle rock. Several times Lloyd lost his footing on the rocks that flaked off with every inch that they climbed.
They had set for themselves two goals, the first being a wide lege about half-way up, and the second was the flat summit itself, where they were to sleep when the evening came.
By late afternoon, after a slow and painful climb that almost claimed them both, they reached the ledge and took off their packs.
Boyce looked down over the edge and he felt a chill go through him.
"If I wasn't so tired, " he said. "I think that I'd get sick."
Out of breath, Lloyd laughed and looked down himself.
"You never … you never get used to it, Boyce." He lay flat on his back and saw how far they still had to go. "We can't rest here for too much longer or we'll lose the strength to finish the rest of the way!"
He lifted his arm towards the summit and let it drop down again.
"I would rather have gone by caravan." Boyce sighed.
Exhausted, Lloyd grinned and slowly rose to his feet. He helped Boyce up onto his and they put their packs back on and started up the cliff-face, gain.
As it was Lloyd's experience in climbing a few times before, the second-half of the climb was a little easier for him.
Boyce had also found the next part easier to scale, losing his hold only briefly, near the top.
The skies were beginning to take on a purple-orange colour as the sun fell behind the clouds far on the western horizon.
Summoning the rest of their strength they finally reached the flat summit.
It wasn't until an hour passed, and the sunlight was gone, but for the dimness left over, that the two men stood on their feet and cleared an area on which to sleep.
The skies were turning to black velvet, with the diamond stars covering every space and some galaxies were seen lingering far behind some brighter stars. Directly overhead, a galaxy of fingernail size seemed to slowly pass over as they both lay back and watched it.
Meteorites streaked across the sky ever-so-often and Boyce told Lloyd that they were angels racing one another through the heavens.
It was a clear and beautifully warm night, and a splendidly colourful borealis shined in the north-western sky.
Neither one knew when they fell asleep, and neither one woke up until noon the next day, barely noticing that they were being baked by the sun.
Every bone in their bodies cracked and there wasn't one muscle excluded from feeling the brunt of their climb.
Nothing much was said between them while they ate. When they were through, however, Boyce praised God, and turned to Lloyd.
"I just thought of something." he said and Lloyd waited, interest shining from his eyes. "We could have cut holes into the rock face with our lasers! The climb wouldn't have taken us half the time!"
"I considered that before we started to climb." Lloyd admitted to
Boyce.
"Why didn't we, then?"
"It would have been too simple and you would not have valued the skill of the climb if we made it without the hardship and sweat. Climbing this escarpment is much the same as striving for a goal in life — you do understand what I am trying to say?" Lloyd finished.
"Yes, Lloyd, I do! You are teaching me things that you haven't promised my father you would teach to me. Nevertheless, I am grateful."
The two men spent the day on the escarpment looking at the land that stretched for miles on each side of the precipice, but their main interest was in the land that was set directly ahead.
The Krolalin Mountain Range was before them, with the chain of desolate old mountains at the head of the Virgin Mountains.
They sat on the southern part of the escarpment and stared at the awesome sight. It was a mammoth forest canopied by clouds.
There was the river before them, flowing through a channel that it dug out of solid rock over its many years of erosion. Its banks sloped up from there, on each side, with short underbrush on this side of the river and the forbidding Dark Forest, on the other side.
Lloyd had Boyce hand him a pack and from it he took a dark cylindrical case that he opened. He pulled out from it an instrument of glass and light metal.
He pulled the instrument apart and put it up to his eye, pointing it in the direction of the river.
Boyce quietly watched him for a while.
"Is that one of those distance aids for the eyes?" he queried.
Lloyd smiled taking the thing away from his eye and showing it to him.
"It's called a telescope. To see further an clearer you pull it out, like this." he showed him and Boyce knew right away what it could be used for. "It is compressed for easier packing and travel. A very handy toy, I might say!"
He handed the telescope to Boyce and told him to look at the river near the huge rock and tree, an he did. He saw a cable there, stretched across the river from one rock to another on the other side.
"That's what we're crossing on." said Lloyd.
Boyce gave him an odd look as if asking him, 'why?'.
"We can't swim through that tempest. The current would rip us to shreds and we couldn't control a float on her either." he said. "That wire cable is all we have."
"Who put it there?"
"I don't know, really. All I know is that when I was maybe nine or ten, some hunters came to my father with new of its existence. We came with a couple of Virunese to see it and it didn't look in very good shape." Lloyd took a breath that shuddered slightly. "I had to carry a thick rope to the other side and back in order to strengthen it until some others were sent to replace it with a new cable."
"Why did you have to carry the rope?" asked Boyce.
"I was the smallest and therefore the lightest, but I could feel the thing under my weight the further I went." Lloyd smiled reassuringly and took a gulp of water. "I've been over it a dozen times since then."
Boyce continued to look through the telescope at the other side.
The Dark Forest didn't look any more welcoming closer up and Boyce wasn't looking forward to going through it.
The Dark Forest was densely overgrown with titanic sized trees, the diameters of which ranged from one to ten meters in thickness. They were extremely tall, too. So tall in fact that most of the forest ceiling was constantly hidden in the clouds, which never seemed to dissipate.
No one knew the actual height of the trees in the Dark Forest because of the clouds. Over the years, folk lore and tales had formed about their origin and formation. Mythical civilisations of evil gremlins were said to have built a city up in the trees and kept it shrouded from human eyes by the soupy canopy of clouds. The same lore explained why the entire forest teamed with hostile life; that which was the gremlin king's way of venting his anger on the world and on mankind.
"We'll stay here today and sleep. Tomorrow, when fresh and strong, we'll go down there and carry ourselves across to the other side."
Boyce bore a pensive smile to what Lloyd had said.
"Lloyd?" he began. "Exactly how will we get down from here? Will we have to climb?"
Lloyd grinned at Boyce.
"It's easier climbing down!" he answered and watched Boyce's facial colour draw away. "Really! — We will climb down part of the way."
He got on his belly and leaned over to the edge of the cliff and motioned to Boyce to do the same, and he did. He pointed to a large ledge that was about the width of a forearm, which continued on to a piece of this big rock where there was a gentler slope and a path down to the base.
Boyce shrugged and smacked his lips as he looked beyond the path and straight down to the base of the escarpment, strewn with rock and dotted with dry bush.
"That's still a climb!" he said.
"I would guess twenty meters! I like to think of it as a morning exercise."
They rested on the summit through the rest of the day and talked about their past decade together, as friends, and they discussed the great city of Pomperaque and what it would be like when they finally reached it.
Their second night came to them on the scarp, hardly different in its beauty than the night before. The only noticeable change was that of the full moon, which was big and bright.
Each man was silent and rolled about in his own thoughts.
Boyce laboured with the vision of Brook and Dearborne's executions, being played repeatedly in his mind while his uncle, Manguino, watched with murder-hungry eyes.
He wiped the tears from his eyes and took the telescope that was beside Lloyd and put it up to his eye. He aimed the instrument at the moon and was amazed at the details that he saw on its surface.
Lloyd had his eyes rivetted on the moon, as well. His mind played with him, showing him the memories of Mercedes' suicide mingled with that of his own beloved Charnan's death. His tears never formed, though. With his, at one time's ease to mourn, all he had now was the respectful love and praise for her.
He never married since his betrothal to her, and rarely did he ever have relations with women. The only woman since Charnan, who interested Lloyd in the slightest, was his father's maid-servant, Torella.
She drew and teased his desires from him, until with her scalding passion gave her body to him, before she left the Bartlett household with a wandering artisan.
He never found out whether it was Torella's desire to leave or his father's desire to expel her; so to keep him from fraternising with the lower-classed help.
Lloyd's second love was removed from him and since that time he had never again engaged himself with thoughts of love and passion.
He was deeply depressed and Boyce's voice was the welcomed hammer that shattered his flagonful of thoughts.
"Have you ever wondered about the moon's perfection, Lloyd?" asked Boyce and Lloyd responded with a questioning mumble. "There are large holes on the moon and mountains, larger than any in Krolalin."
Lloyd turned on his side, faced Boyce and reached for the eye-glass.
He looked at the moon and agreed with what Boyce had said.
Boyce continued. "It's strange how it looks so warm and beautiful by our own eyes, then so
cold and empty with the telescope. The stars, also! They just hang there, each a sun like our own!" he finished and they both sighed.
"It's truly beautiful!" Lloyd added.
"Remember our studies, Lloyd? Wouldn't it be some life to sail between those worlds?"
Lloyd expelled some air and he sounded in agreement.
Soon, the men fell asleep and travelled the uncertain routes between the stars in search of those precious things that they had lost in their youth.
Those harmonious dreams were fleeting, yet blessed moments of comfort given them by the love of God.