The Infinite Library (52 page)

I awoke on a landing at the very top of a long, stone-carved stairway that wound down along the inner wall of what appeared to be the inside of a colossal cylindrical shaft. Behind me was a sealed black stone door that I could not budge despite all efforts, and judging by my attempt to rap upon it, it was solid and so gave off no report of an echo. The stairway itself jutted from the stone wall as though a natural continuation of the very wall from which it was attached. Attending this endless stairway was an iron rail, positioned on the outer part of the steps, a little less than hip height. Seeing as there was no way to budge the monolithic door, I decided to make the perilous descent down these mysterious steps.

I should say that it has been over a year since I embarked upon this treacherous descent. The shaft itself does not narrow or billow, but is a chasm about a concert hall from one end to the other. Neither have I encountered any others here, or sounds of any kind (save, perhaps, for what sometimes sounds to my overwrought ears to be a kind of distant phantom moaning). However, it is during those fleeting hours of sleep that the enigma of this stairwell reveals itself to me in taunting and staccato fragments…a cavalcade of symbols and images, accompanied on occasion by horrific music whose scale I cannot yet identify (it has some elements of an Indian use of rounded 5ths, but with some distinct Persian accents).

The steps themselves are about as wide as a man lying prone, but are very short (about six inches out and down per step). This makes descent a tricky affair as, one may reason, one misstep from haste or fatigue would inevitably mean a fatal and uncontrolled plummet since there are no effective handholds save the railing which would be difficult to grasp while tumbling ever downward. I immediately realized the challenge this posed and both cursed and admired whatever cruel engineer designed such a place. When the demands of sleep overtook my body, I transformed my tunic into a harness that I attached to the iron rail. The first few weeks of having to accustom myself to sleeping in this wretchedly suspended and confining manner were unbearable, but I adapted in time.

Along the walls is a cryptic yet garishly ornate frieze, very much in a style that fuses Aztec relief with Persian miniaturism. There is an ominous quality to this epic frieze which wraps around like a stone ribbon all the way down. A rolling inscription follows the very endless descending lengths of this infernal stairway, and the images themselves—nightmarish hybrid creatures of monsters and men—stare menacingly from this visual allegory. I could not place the creatures depicted, nor what sort of god or gods would let spawn such aberrations and abominations of flesh. One recurring image was that of a conch shell decorated to appear like a human skull, and it was this ghastly contrivance that I was certain held an arcane and perhaps ultimate significance in relation to this entire construct. I somehow began to reason that this motif was the very key to this carved, architectural narrative. This conch-skull was a regular, unwelcome visitor in my episodes of dreaming. What it signified was being revealed to me slowly, a surfacing of meaning as if being pulled from a deep lake of ichor.

At first I did not understand the strange curling glyphs that rimed the horrific carved images, but after much time, I was able to decipher the script. Whether some force entered my dreams and whispered its lessons to me, I cannot be sure. But dreams, they speak in images and never in words. I began to possess the sense that there was a pedagogical linearity to the images and glyphs, as though a hapless traveler such as myself was meant to learn it by steady exposure, only able to understand the upper parable in retrospect by what came after. Whoever carved this epic into the walls had surely meant to educate the traveler slowly and steadily like a Platonic series or the classic German Bildung.

I have not encountered another living soul since I mysteriously awoke here a year ago, and I have only the rambling wall-epic with its startlingly menacing faces to keep me company. I was becoming adept at deciphering the looping glyphic script, a script with some Albigensian nuance intercalated by a kind of Arabic orthographical similarities. From my modest yet growing aptitude for this uncanny writing, I read something about this colossal shaft allowing only one person to enter per solar annum. If this is the case, then there is right now another victim such as myself just beginning his hopeless downward trek, just as there is probably someone very far below at a year’s pace ahead of me who has more of the mystery resolved. He would be to me what I am to the newcomer, and the distance being so vast, there is no way to communicate our findings to one another, for the advanced individual to relay all that he has learned to spare the agonizingly slow discovery of this shaft’s meaning. And, perhaps, as a speculation, there is someone who has reached the bottom—if such a thing exists—who is in possession of the ultimate secret of this baffling shaft as to its purpose, origin, and why we have been chosen to descend through it. If only the distance was not so vast, we could construct an upward chain of demystification. Each of us are like epochs in a long and scattered history, discontinuous steps of knowledge along time’s way, disconnected moments of development toward understanding. So, here I am, envious of the one below—and further along—and having pity for the one above me. Perhaps the one further down has the same pity for me and wishes that he could spare me the arduous task of deciphering ever further, or perhaps he has come to understand the wisdom that it is better that we earn rather than be given knowledge.

Added to my speculations—perhaps already thought by the one more advanced in his descent—is that I must trust the agility and care of the newcomer so far above me, beyond the reach of my voice (for the chasm absorbs rather than transmits noise, another crafty structural design by the one or many that were the architects of this place). He is one year behind me in all respects, but should he fall and tumble, at some point his battered corpse would emerge behind me without my ability to effectively dodge it, and so another corpse would be added. But then, given that the distance is so great, perhaps by the time the tumbling body reached me, it would have already been pulped beyond danger, or perhaps would, by a swerve, drop off into the abyss at the centre of this endless shaft.

I am troubled by such thoughts as to the justification for this shaft. Is it endless? Does it have a bottom? Will I live out the remainder of my days and expire while trying to accede to the end of this winding hell? If I, in a fit of despair, hurled myself over this railing only to be freed from the fetters of surface, would I plummet forever? What is the purpose of this place, and why were we chosen? Is this place a consigned allegory for us, the scholars engaged in an endless enterprise of expanding our knowledge for naught?

I am both desperate and resigned. I continue to learn more, but one mystery compounds upon the former, embroidering further still the enigma of this place and its makers. The questions multiply, the dreams increase in complexity and intensity, but every one of our questions remain tantalizingly and torturously unanswered. Rather, I feel as though with every step down I take, I am moving ever further away from the Truth and toward that realm of complicated uncertainty. We move ever downward toward the ultimate illusion, ultimate anti-meaning, compelled by a foolish belief that we are moving towards its opposite. Perhaps only death can save us now from our misguided, idle descent into that which displaces us from all stable ground. What nature is the minotaur at the end of this long, wending labyrinth? I shudder to think that I know what nature of beast it be, and what it will mean when I encounter it...