Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight

by Mathew Joseph Holt

The road leading from the city to the top and from the quarries we broadened and regraded. The site was cleared and leveled and the basal walls, six hundred and eighty feet square, started. The height is to be three hundred and fifty feet and the wall angle is approximately forty-seven degrees.

During the building there was much sickness and many deaths from starvation and hardship, for all of which I was held responsible, and until the laboring-people swore at and called me Santa, The Terrible.

Each day the pyramid grew in size; and each night seemed slightly colder than the one preceding it. It was reported that the snow on the distant mountain peaks was deeper than ever before.

We now used the lower stories of the pyramid as a storeroom for fuel and grain and were forced constantly to maintain a heavy guard to keep the half-starved populace from stealing our supplies. I had executed more than a dozen who were caught attempting to steal food stored for their betters.

The warm ocean current shifted to the west. The sun was overcast by clouds. The earth trembled. The snow line crept down the mountain range. The land seemed slowly sinking into the sea. The people shook from fear and cold.

It was necessary to push the work, and, in their terror and to satisfy their hunger, the whole population labored on the pyramid.

One night, when the pyramid was three hundred feet high, a light snow, the first, covered pyramid mountain. A few weeks later there was another and the next morning there was thin ice.

A swift-running mountain river separated pyramid mountain and the city of Theni from the foothills of the distant range. Gradually the current disappeared. The river became a salt lake, then a bay of the great western sea.

One night there was an earthquake, in which we feared for the destruction of the pyramid, and in which a number of the houses of the city toppled over on their occupants.

In the morning it was observed that the mountain on which the prophet's people lived had settled until the place where the ship rested was but a few feet above the level of our new sea. The mountain on which our pyramid had been constructed and the adjacent plain on which the city was built had risen materially in altitude; at least such seemed to be the case.