Tuesday, 5 February 2008

Sandstone

For the knowledge of the self-apart-from-God
is an abyss down which the soul can slip
writhing and twisting in all the revolutions
of the unfinished plunge
of self-awareness…
D. H. Lawrence, Only Man

Of all the horror in the universe, some had come his way. It was, in a sense, quite simple – natural, even. Why should he be spared? Yet he didn’t know what chain of events, what actions or mistakes of his had led him to the present situation – to this ghastly and nevertheless perfectly real, inescapable moment in time. Was it only by chance that he had ended up there? He couldn't help feeling there was something more to it – some subtly ironical, implacable force or necessity behind things. The place itself had a familiar air about it, as though he'd seen it or been there long ago – in his childhood or in a forgotten dream. But he couldn't tell what the place was exactly, what it had been originally, before they had put it to this use. A natural canyon? A crater? Some sort of quarry? Perhaps a huge dig, a colossal pit awaiting the foundations of a building? He vaguely remembered having walked (on his way there?) across a vast, sandy plain, and seen scattered heaps of rubble and abandoned-looking construction materials, broken, jagged pieces of masonry and timber, and also what might have been remnants of bones, and somewhere on the steep walls of the pit he'd seen dark openings like caves. Was it, then, some sort of building site? A man-made thing? He couldn't tell. He had no clear recollection of his arrival there, and from his present position he couldn’t see much: in front of him – barely an inch from his eyes – the grainy, terribly real texture of the stone, reddish, made up of thin laminations, interbedded with darker, glassy fragments of rock. If he rolled his eyes upwards, he could see the wall of the pit stretching above him towards the white-hot, dazzling sky; and even without looking, he could sense that same wall dropping down below him into the abyss.
Yes, he’d known this place – the red stone, the white-hot sky, the gigantic pit. He’d been here or somehow seen these surroundings before, possibly a long time ago. And those soldiers who at some point must have escorted him across the sandy plain, and who were now pacing the crest above the pit as they would a rampart, he had known them long ago, too. He knew their closed, hard faces, their eyes shaded by helmets, the evil they radiated from a distance. He recognised the place and knew his guards like someone might recognise the place and the faces and the moment to which he has been ultimately led by fate, step by step, with the logic of his whole life pushing, propelling him forward, and now relentlessly pulling, sucking him down into the void.

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