The Foot
SOMETIMES, QUITE OFTEN in the wake of a red moon, Nuzob, greatest of the Lithians, would find herself woken in a different part of the land than where she had fallen into slumber. She liked to wander at night, after all it was her sense of adventure that had inspired those who set their lives at her feet in a frenzy, but she was perhaps unaware. If only it were the age of cartographers and we had more to decipher than the records of poorly-travelled scribes who held account of what they saw first, and what it meant only after. In her sleep she would travel eons and miles, and the grounds she left behind were fertile to history, where they had once been barren.
In her perambulation the temper of that moving mountain was such, that she often sought the driest earths and the greatest desolations to inhabit, and by the sheer magnitude of her movement, the mass-migrations that ensued would populate any stretch of nothing with beasts and plants unimagined, and render those muted plains with life, so there was no semblance of silence left to be found, but raucous, persistent tremors, the kind of constant ground-shaking by which only the enduring seed will blossom, while the many that fail are lost in her path.
Despite her stumbling, she left no trace.
She was here and there, like an old vagrant moving unnoticed in a crowded street. More than a destination, it was freedom from the viscosities that bind you and me to our tracks that made her come and go. It was the freedom to dabble, to err, colliding without resistance, evading without friction. Even the cheetah would be jealous, his legs would carry him in vain to where she stood waiting. The peregrine falcon would see that she had descended before him, and his prey lay cold in her talons. And the nimble rainbow trout could not evade her, not in the strongest of currents.
Truly, to turn such a stone and uncover what lies beneath it borders on blasphemy. You would lose yourself in these musings. It is simply not a dance to be learned.
They surveyed the inscription on the cavern walls, writing that was near outdated. Up ahead, there was a fork in the way. Amal knew they were lost.
“Downward,” Sirhan spoke in an unusually soft voice, “only if your work is done and you walk with heavy arms. Upward only with a heavy heart, a bitter grudge, or the taste of remorse fresh on your tongue.”
The dim light that their torches could muster barely spread, it was drowned by the black basalt rock encircling them. It smelled of wet earth here. Twice already they had lost their bearings and circled back in search of a familiar sight. Somehow, they had been swallowed by Nuzob, far from any path they knew. Amal sighed.
“Down then.”
They descended into the bowels of the place. With each dead end their pace quickened, and even Amal was now struggling to find calm, wondering where this would end. The air thickened around every corner. All they could hear were their own muffled steps and the increasingly sharp huffs as they drew breath. Corridor upon corridor they entered and exited again, burrowing deeper and deeper into the rock. The world above them was a distant memory, the sun a fleeting thought.
Then, just as the next step would have them despair, embrace their fate, they saw it, the unending hope that was a faint red glow. There was a scraping sound of metal on stone.
It was the warmth of another soul stranded in a sea of nothing.
“Amal,” Sirhan whispered. That was the first word either of them had spoken in an eternity.
“Sirhan,” the young man responded, reaffirming the existence of his own voice.
They nearly fell into the next corridor. Eager and tired, they strained their eyes, but it took time to adjust. They had come upon an old, shrivelled man, crouched beside the tunnel wall, working the dark volcanic rock by the shine of an enormous candle which might have been lit when he was born. Its molten form resembled a crouching, hulking figure, an observer. The man was hunkered, in much the same manner, over his work at the base of the wall. He did not speak as they entered, nor did he turn around. While he knelt in silence, the vivid chatter of his tools never faltered. The stone at his feet was edged away at, unperturbed, being shaped into a kind of frieze. His hands, calloused and resembling the stone more than the candle, held hammer and chisel, worked briskly, but with great care. His eyes lay in deep caverns of their own, set with a brow like knotted tree bark. More unsettling was the flashing gleam of white that appeared every time he finished a section of his work.
“All done,” he said.
He shuffled ever so slightly to the side, rather shifted his weight, and carried on. The candle sat hunched over in a new position, had shuffled along with him. Amal and Sirhan observed this curious man for a bit, but their gazes wandered on in the direction he had seemingly come from. It took some more time before the unannounced visitors’ eyes had become accustomed to the darker regions of the room, where the old man’s accomplishments lay.
It was feet he was carving from the rock. Hewn into the black, sponge-like texture of the rock was an eternal succession of them. Set in the unfinished walls of Nuzob’s vast foundations sprang about these slender limbs, unbeknownst to the weight above them. They appeared as he created them and went on, far off into the lightless reaches of this passage. From the ankle down they stood, each identical to one preceding it. Yet if you looked at one, and then another, more distant foot, they were nothing alike. From human feet to lions’ paws, or the webbed feet of a duck, or a boar’s hoofs, there was anything the mind could conjure.
There was a real fragility to these feet, an incredible understanding of anatomy, and peerless craft. What this old man knew about them, about the essence of their tenderness, their urgency, the language of their shape, spoken in the subtle deviations of form, was present in every stroke. It was an unspoken understanding that perhaps no one had, or ever would share with him. Only the candle had been there to see it all.
As the onlookers’ awe grew, they were suddenly gripped by a cold wind rushing past them. The candle flickered, but the old man never wavered.
“All done,” he said.
This time he did not sidle on. Amal and Sirhan only now came to realize they were facing a dead end yet again. For an instant it was quiet again, like it had been before they had happened across this wonderful old man.
Then a hand, like a giant, pale spider, came from the darkness of the tunnel. It came for the old man. Amal felt the weight of the mountain as he raised his hand. The poet opened his mouth, but the wind had taken all the words from him.
“All done.”
He sighed, came to his feet, trembling. A cursory look at his work. A smile. He had just found his balance when the hand came and took him. The candle flickered once more and with the hand’s withdrawal, died.
There was nothing left to see.
In the darkness, they heard shuffling noises. Scattered thoughts after the hand had come and the artist left. His work broke into panicked leaps, then gradually calmer strides. Then it was as if an army had begun its march, and the mountain trembled with each booming step. Time to move on.
It was night, and Nuzob went for a stroll.
