Manuscript Found in a Police State - Brian Aldiss

A trail of prisoners wound slowly upwards along a mountain track until it reached the outer gates of Khernabhar Prison. There it waited in bright sunshine until the gates rolled open. Goaded on by their warders, the prisoners moved into the enclosure beyond.

The gates closed behind the prisoners, and were bolted. They stood in a courtyard formed between wall and cliff, the cliff of the great Mount Khernabhar. Offices stood in the courtyard, stern but dejected, their windows blank and dusty. A trough stood in one corner of the courtyard, against the rock; the prisoners were allowed to go over to it and drink.

Axel Mathers moved over with the other prisoners. He scooped up water and poured the first handful over his face; then he drank. As he sucked the water from his hands, he stared down into the trough, where water ran clear and deep.

The interior of the trough was rough. Pebbles and small plants could be seen, lucid under the water's disturbed surface. Although sun shone full on the trough, the liquid was brilliantly, cold, cutting at a man's throat as it went down. It spurted into the trough from a fissure in the rock, spurted out of Khernabhar itself, spurted from the intestines of the great mountain. Because he knew the terrible legends of Khernabhar, Mathers found himself cocking an ear towards the fissure, half-expecting to hear human cries issue from it.

He still could not believe that the sentence of the Dictator Hener's courts was to be carried out - oh, yes, the others would serve their term, but surely for him some last minute reprieve would come! For him! He found that his every gesture was heavy with deliberation and that everywhere he cast his eye in that dreary courtyard he saw beauty. The very shards of rock tumbled from the mighty, rock-face were miraculously cast and coloured. Everything was rare and beautiful - the dust, even the dust, because it would never be seen again!

He looked in the girl prisoner's face, reading there the same anxiety to draw in every memory of the world of light. He knew her first name: Joanna. Like him, she was sentenced for crimes against the State. She wore a ragged skirt that stretched down to her ankles, a long-sleeved blouse, and a poncho. Her thin face, her dark hair, were streaked with the dust that had accompanied them from the last ugly village on the plain. Yet she was attractive, the line of her nose, the line between her nose and mouth, the line of her mouth, possessing a mysterious and painful logic which was beyond words. It was easier to look at the trough, the dust, the stones, than at her face.

The party - it comprised twenty-one prisoners - was allowed to sit in the dirt and wait. Every minute spent here in the sunlight was precious. Mathers sat next to the girl while the guards who had made the trek up from the plain argued with the guards of the prison. Poor oafs - each side envied the other its job! The guards from the plain had brought drink to sell to the prison guards; the prison guards complained that the prices were too high. Slowly, cretinously, they bandied their dreary small change of language and a minor language at that, hardly spoken outside the boundaries of the nation, not even universally spoken inside! Yet were the guards not to be envied? Would they not all, over the next years, be allowed their stupidities, their drunks, their randies, even their deaths, under the ever-changing sky?

The bargaining was concluded. Bottles and money changed hands. There was coarse laughter and most of the guards moved towards the guard room. The guards remaining got the party to its feet again and moved it forward. Driven on by their curses, the prisoners pushed through inner gates, the mountainside moving in above them. Mathers looked up -- saw a tribe of monkeys away above their heads, free to scamper over the slopes. He saw the shoulder of the mountain swing overhead, saw the sun, saw the sun eclipsed by mountain. He caught, the expression on Joanna's face. Impulsively, they grasped each other's hands.

All the prisoners were clasping each other. No longer was there need for the guards to curse them. Shadow had fallen on them: they had no further will to resist. Now they heard the moan and grumble - rock itself, complaining - of Khernabhar Prison!

That voice! It came from ahead, yet from all sides. They were moving in a tunnel now, and so had opportunity to note the sound well, to analyse as the least intelligent among them must have done - how it seemed to comprise many of the noises of the animal kingdom, squeaks, squeals, moans, groans, bellows, chirps. They might have been entering some hideous underground farm in which everything from crickets and birds to sows and bullocks and still mightier animals were confined, yet there was no noise but rock moving on rock. Nothing lay ahead but rock. There was no destiny but rock.

The corridor widened into an underground chamber. No daylight reached this far: the darkness was broken by torchlight and by a long gutter which ran with a tarry substance that burned. This tarry substance dripped into a tank sunk in the floor of the chamber. Guards were dipping wooden brands into the tank.

Now the noise was louder; its full melancholy din beat upon them like the wings of some vast and weary creature in flight - some reptilian prehistoric bird that screamed as it pulled its weight over lands unknown.

With the noise came the odour...and that too seemed to move in from the reptilian distances of buried past-time. It was an ancient and dirty odour, trailing across the back of the throat a flavour of corrupt piscine flesh, yet so great were the other pressures on this doomed gathering, that it moved forward as if merely through a growing twilight.

Now it's coming - it's coming! I have no fear. This is not death for me, not death but a new chance. At last, I have this chance to be better - inwardly to be better. Whatever happens, an inner part of me can learn to be better. If I can stand it, for my own good, as well as the good of the revolution...

One of the guards thrust a torch into Mather's hand and pushed him forward. He noticed the girl took care to remain close to him. She evidently drew some reassurance from him, looking up now and then - but more with an air of appraisal than appeal, he noted. Many things he noted: all were subordinate, mere insignificant details glimpsed under the skirts of his black cloud of awareness.

What did overwhelm his attention was sight of the moving prison itself. The guards were prodding Joanna towards it, holding him back, holding the others back behind, separating them. The visible part of the prison loomed before the girl - they were thrusting her into a cell that had already half-disappeared into squealing, grunting darkness.

It was an open cell with no front wall. A cell, then a thick dividing wall, and then another cell. And then another dividing wall and another cell. Open cells: no doors, no front walls. She was pushed into the first cell and Mathers into the next one. The prisoner behind him was being readied for the following cell.

Clutching his torch, Mathers stood glaring out at his captors, at the dingy and muddled scene - but it was a scene from life, it existed, however precariously, on the fringes of the free world, it lay but a lung's breath away from open sky and running animals and the elaborate affairs of men. As he stood there, trying to memorise even the coarse faces of the guards, the cell gave a lurch and, with grinding slowness, moved a few inches to his right, reproducing all round him the noise of tortured animals.

To step into the cells, it was necessary to walk across a narrow gap which separated cells from cavern. The cells containing Mathers, the girl, and the next prisoner ground and bumped to one side. A pause, and then they moved again, an inch, half a dozen inches, a few more, stop ... After another pause, this movement was repeated to the accompaniment of more anguished squeals of sandstone on sandstone. Already the cell containing Joanna had disappeared behind a wall of rock and could be seen no more from the underground chamber.

The cells had only another fifteen or so feet to move before Mathers too would find himself cut off from human view. He stood - crouched, rather, staring out, wondering if he should not spring forward and run for corridor and daylight. But the guards stared back, for once looking orderly and efficient, waiting for him to make a reckless move. He observed that further guards were herding the rest of the prisoners into a side-passage perhaps to wait there until the slow progression of cells brought more empty ones into view. So he was cut off from the poor specimens of humanity with whom he had shared many painful days imprisonment in the town on the plains, with whom he had made the ascent to this more dreadful place; although he had no particular friends among them, regret leapt in him as they were driven from sight.

The cells lurched again, roaring cruelly as they moved. Only a few inches, painfully uncertain, but now on his right he saw protruding the edge of the cavern wall that would eventually cover his cell and eclipse him entirely from the outside world. He looked at it, reached out to touch it, saw how the rock had been reinforced with heavy stone blocks, making a pillar. As he touched it, the vibrations and squeals began again and the cells again jolted forward. When the movement and noise died, Mathers heard the man in the cell on his left weeping. He himself knew only paralysis, and could not weep or pray. As for the girl, whose cell had now disappeared into the rock, he heard not a sound from her.

There is still time. Someone will come forward. My friends will have managed to secure a reprieve. The guards will relent. Or I shall wake.... Wake, wake, damn you, out of this nightmare...

Again the lateral movement, the pause, the movement again. He roused partly out of his paralysis to take stock of his cell. It was carved from solid sandstone, even elaborately carved at its outer end, where pillars had been fashioned in the wall-ends between cells, chunky pillars with an archaic motif binding them. The cell held a wooden bed with a mattress on, and no other furniture. At the rear of the cell was a double trough, its two compartments, one below the other, filled with water that trickled in from a groove in the rear wall; the overflow of the water ran down into a hole in the floor evidently intended for sanitary purposes. The side walls, roughly carved from the rock, were covered with the graffiti of past incumbents of the cell.

Sandstone - weathered only by the hands of prisoners, hewn eternities ago.... And, if the rumours are true, a spell of imprisonment here means ten years. Ten years... Oh, Lord, ten years, where is Thy justice?

On one wall was carved the figure of an old stooped man with a long beard, beautifully picked out in an antique mode. Mathers glanced at it in cursory fashion, reflecting that all prisoners would look similarly stooped by the time they emerged into daylight once more. He ran his fingertips despairingly over the surface of the rock, feeling the very, texture of injustice.

God knows, I should not be here - I have done no wrong.... Yet however false my conviction, all men are sinners. I'm guilty of many things. Perhaps we all deserve punishment. ...

As he was setting his torch in a socket in the wall, the slow movement came again; his small world grated forward inch by inch, as if the whole mountain of Khernabhar were in action. The movement spoke of a vast and weary suffering, the last tremors of a dying man: while the negation of movement that followed spoke of death itself.

And now the fourth wall had moved across the front of his cell more than half way. His view of the cavern, the guards, the trough of pitch, was through a gap of less than six feet. He felt his spirit drifting out of him like smoke.

How much time passed, Mathers could not tell. After a long lethargic pause - the short lethargic movement, and a further narrowing of his view of the outer world. He sank down to await the stone eclipse. The vigil was punctuated by a guard coming and throwing him a bundle of food and an unlit torch, and by a struggle between the guards and the captive next door, who tried to break out; he was badly beaten about the head and kicked in the stomach before being dragged back into his cell. Mathers heard him groan occasionally.

Again the shuddering movement, the screams from the rock. Over Mathers, an annihilating numbness.

Why do I feel as I do? Nothing so terrible has even happened to me before, no, nothing ever approaching this. ... It affronts the name of humanity. So why am I possessed by the idea that this pain is something I have suffered before? When, where, could I have suffered anything remotely as terrifying? My dear mother took such tender care of me in childhood that I was never suffered to be shut in a cupboard or chest. Darkness did not scare me. I had no fears - why, then, along with everything else, am I forced to bear this burden of an unmindful familiarity?

Hardly aware that he did so, he wept for his parents, now dead, and for the life they had given him, now to be stolen away. When he looked up, the cells had jarred on again in their journey into the rock, and only the narrowest gap permitted him to look at the world, of the cavern. In anguish and surprise, he jumped up, threw himself at the gap, thrust his arm through, gesturing at the mean company of guards. He called to them, begging for mercy. They looked at each other and grinned almost enough to reveal their teeth.

The grinding began again, and the lurch forward. As the gap narrowed still further, he had to pull back his arm quickly or it would have been wrenched from him at the shoulder between outer wall and cell wall. He stopped his cries and stood quiet as the vibrating movement closed the space inch by inch. When the movement stopped, there was a gap here and there, at no place wider than an inch, to which he could apply his eye and see the guards still there in the cavern, talking among themselves, more casual now he had been carried from their view.

Later, the grinding began again, and this time it carried him and his cell completely into the rock and away from the world of men. Mathers collapsed against one wall, burying his face in his hands.

The revolution must come! Some day soon, it must come! Our country cannot bear this oppression much longer.... Help me to survive till then, oh Lord! The regime must be eradicated to the last man, and this hellish prison destroyed forever.

Sinking into the well of his thoughts, he was a long time in realising that the tempo of movement and stillness had been broken. Now was only stillness. He jumped up in vague alarm, he stood there, he waited. Silence alone greeted him, pressed hard against his ears. The world of men was only a pace or so away - yet already it had sunk below the horizons of his awareness.

Movement had stopped. How long had it continued? Certainly not more than four hours, probably not less than two: for that sound as of animals being slaughtered had commenced only as Mathers and the others were ushered into the tunnel. From the legends he had heard of Khernabhar, he knew what this cessation meant, and his eyes turned instinctively to an object that had come into view on the outer wall, the rock face that cut him off from humanity.

The object consisted of an iron ring from which hung a length of chain. Mathers went over and lifted the heavy links. The boss that held the ring was firmly secured into the rock. He let the chain drop. The links clanked and hung still. He stood there motionless, his gaze locked to the dull length of chain. The horror of his situation was with him like a dark and invisible companion. His journey into the rock had begun.

At some featureless later moment in time, he came to himself again, his brain began to function along more normal channels, prompted by recognition of sound. When he turned his attention to it, a rush of small noise came to him, an underworld of sound that at first brought him only further terror.

Later, as the journey into the sandstone went deeper, after his torches had failed and died and he was alone in the dark of the mountain, he began to identify individual sounds, to force meaning from them, to hammer them into substitutes for those other senses of which he was bereft. Foremost among these were the sounds of water.

Mathers', water supply in the trough had its own collection of delicate noises. Its drips and splashes were close at hand, and generally as regular as clocks. They were busy and comforting noises, noises whose source he could verify by touch. Frivolous noises.

The, next nearest water noises sprang from the first series. They were deeper in tone, on the whole continuous, and solemn noises. They flowed in particular under the mobile floor of the cells, as if some deep groove ran there to bear the water further yet into the stone heart of Khernabhar. These were lazy noises, which sometimes sounded reassuring, sometimes menacing.

Distant noises came into two categories. Ever-present but intermittent were various drips and plops that stirred Mathers' imagination when he lay helpless in the dark, listening; by concentrating on these distant sounds, he could imagine that he was not incarcerated in a mountain but stood in one of the rain-forests which covered the northern half of his country. These watery messages gave him illusions of freedom, as did other distant sounds, for they became voices of brooks, waterfalls, and torrents - interior brooks, waterfalls, and torrents, cascading through the entrails of Khernabhar, similar enough acoustically to remind him of waters washing slopes of mountain-jungles which he had explored with his father in his youth.

This last category of water-sound came and faded, and Mathers grew familiar with it only as day succeeded day, and week week, and the cells moved further into the mountain.

With other subterranean noises, he was less comfortable. Along with the prisoners in their cells travelled other living things, mice, spiders, insects, possibly even snakes and bats - but chiefly rats, whose activities roused him from many an uneasy sleep.

Sometimes, patches of strange light would float before his eyes. He imagined himself to be going blind until he discovered that the outer wall was sometimes smeared with phosphorescence and gave off a phantom light. He would stand with his eyes almost touching it, trying to imagine it to be the blessed glare of daylight that bathed them.

By this time, routine - the iron and remorseless routine of Khernabhar - had gripped him. The one focal point of the day came every morning with a scattered tapping, rapidly growing in volume. Although he was generally prepared for the summons, Mathers would start up and begin to hammer on the wall himself with a piece of rock. This was the signal to begin the day's haul!

He would then feel in the dark for the chain hanging from the outer wall. The chains punctuated the outer wall. Wherever the cell stopped, somewhere there was a chain to haul on.

The haul began. No movement at first, then a jerky start. Unison was soon achieved. The prisoners heaved on their chains together, unseen and unknown to each other. With squeals of protest rock began to grind over rock...

It was an enormously exhausting, an impossible task. Yet the cells moved. They moved only a few inches before rest was necessary. And then the effort had to be made again. And again. Over and over.

Being a methodical man, Mathers tried to keep track of time by counting. He came to believe that they generally worked for between two-and-a-half to three hours - nearer the latter mostly, but the strain varied according, he presumed, to the roughness of the ground underneath the cells.

The distance they moved was easier to compute, although it too varied. It was about twenty-two or twenty-three feet in one session. There was only one session a day: a morning's exhausting work.

When he had rested from the haul, Mathers habitually made an exploration of the newly exposed section of outer wall. He ran his fingers over the surface, arms outstretched. It was his way of mapping as best he could the dreadful journey inwards, and he worked his way along from end to end, from bottom to top, with methodical care.

The wall was by no means the smooth surface it had seemed at first casual glance. It had been scarred by numerous parallel lines, graphs of the moving walls incised by small stone outcrops on the latter. There were other lines, too, and arabesques and patterns, carved by prisoners. Sometimes, a fault in the rock had caused part of the wall to crumble. In one place, the wall was extensively faulted, the fault extending over three days travel. Mathers was as excited as if he had discovered a new landscape. He noted that the fault had been carefully patched with stone, with smooth blocks ingeniously inserted into the wall. At the end of the fault, his fingers discovered what he believed to be flints. He pulled them from their ledge and discovered they were regularly shaped; the knowledge, for some reason, made him uneasy.

With the flints, he made sparks, cascading like stars from his fingers. Using straw and shavings from his mattress, he was able to create fire. The straw supply was limited. He rationed himself to a few wisps at a time, and these he lit only when rations arrived, until he could create a better lamp.

Food supplies were irregular. Above the groove from which his water supply trickled was a larger hole, into which a man could insert his head. The hole formed the lower end of a tube boring upward through solid rock. Somewhere distantly up there was a gallery and a nebulous world of men an ear applied to the hole could detect, on occasion, their comings and goings, their voices distorted out of recognition. Every so often, they threw food down the tube - and no doubt down the countless other tubes under their care.

Considering the poverty and discomfort of all other arrangements in Khernabhar, the food was tolerable, though always insufficient. It reflected the ample and various local resources; hard round loaves of coarse oaten bread; various fruits - coconuts, mango, satsumas, the thick-rinded mangosteen - some of which arrived well pulverised; and bundles of rice with shreds of meat in, knotted into fabric squares for their downward journey.

Mathers made it his habit to conserve his tiny fires for meal-times, so that he could eat with a little light and feel he retained at least a shred of old civilized habit.

When I'm out of here, I will rejoin the guerrillas! I will lead a band on to Khernabhar itself. We will burst from its wooded defiles, destroy this vile machine, and release all the prisoners. This evil must be ended for all time. When I'm out of here...

He mused for hours at a time on the prison itself, hoping that he might be led to think of some way of escape. Escape was always in his mind, burning like a will-o'-the-wisp against the night of incarceration. He had to escape or go mad, and every day made the idea of getting free more urgent, because - yes, that was the supreme fiendishness of Khernabhar! they were still - voluntarily, voluntarily - hauling themselves deeper into the great mountain.

Shredding the hempen squares that wrapped his deliveries of rice, soaking them in the oil of the coconut, Mathers made himself candles and lit one with the flints. A tiny flame grew, nickered, fluttered, became oval, and maintained itself. Mathers was kneeling on the floor over it. He sat up and looked about. There was his cell, his home - its walls, its roof, the shadows, banished to corners. How sane, even welcoming, it looked!

He scrambled up with his candle. His determination was to examine minutely the inner walls of his cell but curiosity first deflected him to the water trough. There, holding his candle before him, he stared down and saw his reflection staring up - or not his reflection surely, but that of a savage, a hermit, with ragged beard and ragged eyebrows, with protruding cheekbones, with sunken gleaming eyes and corrugated forehead! With a gasp of surprise, he started back and could not look again.

And how long had he been here? He went over to the record of days he had kept in the dark, a row of scratches scored on the wall with a stone. The scratches were muddled together and numbered thirty-three or thirty-five. So little more than a month had passed since he was exiled from the world of men! Time, down here in this infernal darkness, moved as protestingly as rock itself!

At last, he took his candle up and began a minute inspection of the past as recorded about him. He had, of course, made such an inspection when his torches burned; but his agony of mind then had been such that only general impressions had registered. What he wished to do was to match the information of the rock against the rumours he had heard of Khernabhar and see if they shed some new light on the situation which would give him a key towards escaping.

To his surprise, his memory of the cell walls was largely false. His mood had been such, to begin with, that he had had eyes only for messages carved by recent tenants of the cell - cries of misery, revolutionary slogans, and a proclamation of vivid obscenity. His attention was now directed to marks of past time - in many cases, long past.

By the dim flame, no larger than a human eye, he read the signs: the squinches or blind arches spanning the two inner corners and speaking, in their elaboration, of love rather than intentions of hatred: the sculpturing of the rock which showed no mark of the tools used to shape it; and the additions since, the mute voices of prisoners long dead! And how long dead? The earliest markings were in many cases obliterated by later additions, and the later additions by ones still later. It was noticeable that the most recent additions looked the roughest and least literate. Many of the earlier ones, faint though they were, were perfectly legible and perfectly formed.

Legible - but impossible to understand. For there was a script here that Mathers recognised but could not read. The Old Tongue! Men had written here using the Old Tongue as their natural language! Those prisoners must have died all of two thousand - perhaps as many as four thousand - years ago!

Many of the writings were records of individual lives. Where these were dated, Mathers saw that they went back many centuries. He read them marvelling, thinking how little life and consciousness had changed.

Frequently, the records were broken by the legend; CURSED BE THE NAME OF KHERN KAHZAA. This past tyrant, Emperor of the Eternal Wheel of Life and Death, had given his name to the mountain. His was the name most frequently invoked, until one got down to the present generation of scribbles, when the name of the hated dictator, Hener, and the beloved revolutionary leader, Reh - particularly the latter - predominated. The last occupant of the cell (so Mathers judged him to be) had scraped the revolutionary name everywhere. REH! REH! And on the rock of the trough was a large VICTORY TO REH!

That must have been carved at least ten years ago. Reh grows old. There are only white hairs in his beard. True, he survives, seems invincible. Yet victory is far from him. No doubt of it, new leaders are needed. Perhaps better leaders, perhaps better slogans. Perhaps better revolutionary material and better thought behind them. Perhaps our people are less than the men our ancestors were .. .

Only in one place had later scribblers been careful not to deface earlier writings. This was centrally, on the leading wall. Here an intricate figure had been engraved. Within a large circle, a double circle, slightly smaller, had been cut. Between these two inner circles were short radial lines, dividing the rim into a number of small partitions; the partitioners were not completed all round the circle. The outer circle was broken in two places. At the centre of the figure were smaller circles, some intersecting, cut to different depths. The whole figure was intersected by a grand line.

Against this design were written various figures and notations in a corrupt version of the Old Tongue, of which Mathers could understand little. But he did understand that he was looking at a representation of the prison of Khernabhar. This was confirmation of the rumours he had heard: that the prison was a great wheel, rotating in the fastnesses of rock, the cells being mere niches on its perimeter.

He could not interpret the measurements on the incised figure, but he had heard that the diameter of the wheel was as much as five miles, and that the array of cells along its perimeter numbered as many as three thousand, although they were not always continuous. The great central axle upon which the wheel revolved notated in the heart of the mountain. To this wheel of cells there was only one entrance, only one exit, as depicted in the design - the exit being sited somewhere on the mountainside before the entrance, so that those going in should not see the pitiful state of those emerging after their long ordeal.

* * * *

That night - but in Khernabhar there was only night - Mathers lay down to sleep with his head full of the image of the great slow-grinding wheel, grinding men's lives away. The wheel moved every day, had perhaps moved every day since it was carved from the rock, for there were always wrongdoers in the eyes of the state. It could move only in one direction, and therein lay its monstrous paradox: that the captives holed like maggots in their cells were forced to propel themselves into the rock. Only by going deep into the mountain was it possible to re-emerge, only by going deep into the mountain was it possible to complete the revolution that meant freedom, only by going deep into the mountain could hope of survival be nourished.

So the prisoners hauled for almost three hours every day on the chains in the wall beyond the wheel, hauled till their sinews almost tore, to get the wheel through its long and grudging course!

Sandstone grinding past sandstone . . . Ten years to a revolution - I'm sure that's what I heard at university. Ten years - about ten years, no matter who or what the prisoners are. It might as well be eternity... .How long is ten years?

And what minor paradoxes were involved! This daily collaboration was an unspoken one between rebels and outcasts of society. They were thrust down here precisely because they did not cooperate: and only in their cooperation could they drag their way through miles of rock.

Again: They cooperated even from the beginning, pulling themselves voluntarily from the outer world, when they were fresh and strong and healthy; yet at that period, inevitably, they would pull with less than a whole heart - might, in some cases, refuse to pull at all. Only later, when they could suppose that their call was half-way or more along the circumference of the prison - that, in other words, they were now on their way out - would they pull wholeheartedly; and by then, the evil regimen would have rendered them aged, feeble, and sick, incapable of real effort.

And again: many of the prisoners, because they were the victims of a warlike state, were men of peace. Yet they, as much as the fieriest revolutionary, must have echoed the eternal unspoken wish that dominated Khernabhar: LET THERE ALWAYS BE WAR!

Only when there was war was the supply of prisoners fully equal to the supply of cells. Only then was there full manpower to haul on the chains and drag the wheel round through eternal blackness. Only then was there a chance that the tons of rock might be speeded and long years of imprisonment thereby lessed by a few days or hours.

* * * *

The things that Mathers read in the rock, shocking as they were, brought him a truer realisation of his situation. They and the presence of a little light for a few hours of the day permitted him to consider others beside himself. He thought with some horror of all the other prisoners who sweated and festered in their cells; but a gentler concern filled him when he turned his mind to the two people who had been incarcerated with him. Of the man who had been thrust into the cell behind his, he had heard nothing beyond the groans of the first day. From the girl's cell - yes, Joanna was her name he had heard some noises, scuffles as if she had been throwing herself against the walls in an hysterical effort to escape, and even perhaps a cry or two.

He set himself to make contact with her, and investigated the walls afresh. The distance between the leading edge of the cell wall and the outer wall - that is, between wheel and solid mountain - was generally no more than an inch: which said a great deal for the superhuman abilities of the architect who had designed Khernabhar! But this distance did vary to some degree, as if the wheel had a slight eccentricity and, when Mathers began his new investigation, it was enlarging to something over two inches. Since the walls between cells were about four feet thick, there was no chance of making contact while circumstances remained as they were.

Yet, even in this static place, circumstances were not unalterable. On the first day of this new investigation, Mathers found part of the outer wall had crumbled. Almost by the roof, there was a fault in the rock, into which he could thrust his hand!

Shaking with excitement, he lit a precious candle and pushed his bed over to the wall. By climbing on the bed, he could look into the hole. The hole was the width of two hands spread wide, irregular inside, going back not much more than arm's length. And two objects lay inside the hole.

He pulled the objects out. One was a length of roughly carved wood, a cudgel perhaps. The other was a skull.

He sat on the side of his bed, nursing the skull and staring at it with delight. It was the skull, he supposed, of a wild cat, paper-thin but beautifully formed, the lower jaw still intact, the buttresses of the eye-sockets exquisite. He cupped it in his hands as if it were a jewel. The hours passed as his mind travelled all the meanings of the life that, fading at last among the shadows of Khernabhar, had built and utilised this shell.

It was only later, when he had placed the skull carefully in a corner where he would not tread on it, that he turned his mind to the cudgel. It was more mysterious than the skull. He could accept that wild cats might be lured in from the mountainsides to hunt the rats living in the catacombs of the dark, scrambling in during the dry season down a water-hole. But where did the cudgel come from? Who had left it there?

In his solitude, he was making a mystery of nothing. The weapon had probably been tucked into the hole by another prisoner, tucked there and forgotten. What else?

* * * *

Next morning, the signal came, the prisoners - each in the solitude of his cell - began their daily haul on the chains, six inches forward and pause, six inches forward a pause, repeated some forty-four times. And the hole in which the skull and cudgel had been cached slid away and was finally lost to view behind the following cell-wall.

But a new and more extensive fault appeared. This one was less high than the last, and extended raggedly sideways. It had some depth and, examining it closely, Mathers deduced that it had been artificially deepened. Some of the rock glistened; moisture seeped from one of the cracks.

It occurred to Mathers that faults like this might one day appear on a much larger scale. He would then be able to hide himself in the fault. On the following day, when the wheel moved on, he would stay where he was and find himself in the cell of the prisoner following him. But the notion of being walled into a narrow hole, even for no more than a couple of hours, was enough to make him break out in a chilly sweat. Nor did he want to set himself further from Joanna. He would have to wait until a fault appeared large enough for him to squeeze forward between his cell and hers.

As chance would have it, the rock faults now stopped. Although the gap between cell and wall continued slowly to widen, it was still scarcely enough to thrust an emaciated arm through. Day followed day, each swallowed up by silent sandstone.

A plague of rats came upon him. They came swarming down the food chute and milling through his cell. They easily slipped between wall and wheel, and were gone, came back, whisked by, vanished. A day later, he saw his first cat. It was an intimidating beast, mangey, long in the leg, and boardlike in the body, with the expression of ferocity on its face heightened by a rat hanging from its jaws, which it wore like a military moustache. Mathers called a welcome to it. It disappeared with a look of unalterable hatred.

The animals came and went according to their seasons. He began to detect and was presently overpowered by an odour of corruption. A prisoner had died near at hand, to add his peculiar stench to the atmosphere. This prolonged corruption doubtless accounted for the influx of the rats and their enemies. It was dismaying to think of a sightless face a few yards away, staring into the night of Khernabhar and being dismantled as it stared.

He devoted himself the more sedulously to plans to reach the girl. Since chance counted for so much, his plans soon degenerated into dreams of what he and she would do when they were together; in truth, imprisonment might then be tolerable. But he decided that he would be unable to forsake his cell permanently; it would be necessary to return frequently for food - two trying to live on one ration would starve; even love could not gainsay that. How could easy return be made possible? Clearly, only by breaking down a part of the wall between them.

The most vulnerable part of the wall was its outer edge. The chains dangling in the outer wall, by which the wheel was dragged round, were five feet in length. If Mathers could manage to prise a chain, boss and rivets and all, from the wall, then the chain could be used as a crude saw and, with him working at one end and the girl at another, it might be possible to wear a groove in the separating wall deep enough for them to be able to climb through uninterruptedly from one cell to another!

Now every afternoon (to himself, Mathers still used the diurnal terminology of the world outside) was spent with the cudgel, painfully attempting to prise a boss loose from the wall. Day after day, the bosses proved unmoving. The master-architect had had a skill that defied time.

* * * *

Mathers' most terrifying day in Khernabhar began as wretchedly as any other. He woke from tantalising and instantly forgotten dreams of the world outside and paced round his cell as usual until the tapped summons brought him to his working position. With a rock, he tapped on the outer wall as heartily as anyone. Come on, you lazy swine! Get to those chains! Pull us to freedom! Since about two months had elapsed since his term of punishment began, there might be as many as ninety new captives behind him ... little enough to set beside the three thousand-odd ahead, but at least a beginning.

The creaking, groaning, squealing progress was under way. How hateful the effort! How sickening, how weakening! How ill-matched was the human heart against the burden of night and sandstone! And yet ... with cries of protest, the wheel turned slightly and the cells moved along.

When it was all over, Mathers threw himself on his bed. Exhaustion set in now, and he fell into one of those uneasy states between waking and sleeping which were a feature of his present life. A pair of rats chased themselves across his shoulder and stomach. He jumped up immediately, to sit shivering on the side of the bed.

Was there some faint light or suggestion of it about the cell?

Perhaps deliverance is here! Why not? The revolution has taken place. Reh has been successful! His men are in Khernabhar, slowly blowing the place up and reaching all the prisoners. .. . Or the evil Hener is dead, his henchmen killed, and liberty proclaimed from the palace!

No, I'm just dreaming. But it could perhaps be a narrow shaft through the rock - too narrow even to climb through, let's say, but wide enough to let down a ray of light directly from the sun at a certain time-of day!

He went to the outer wall. If there was light, it was uncertain, the feeblest glow. If there was light, it came from the direction of Joanna's cell. He called her name, louder and louder. The glimmer of light died. He pressed against the rock, still calling, and felt it faulted beneath his hands, ragged and recessed.

Although he had made a stern rule with himself to use his limited candles only in afternoon and evening, he decided this new factor warranted an exception to the rule. Kneeling, he struck his flints together, sending the sparks cascading until at last the hemp wick was touched and flickered into light. He cupped it lovingly in his hands until it grew strong. Then he carried it over to inspect the wall.

The fault in the rock was deep, tall, and lengthy; it extended behind the leading wall of his cell towards Joanna's, beyond the penetrating power of his illumination. It had been neatly patched with stones, beautifully squared cabbies, but they had been prised away and the depth of the hole increased. The hole was deep enough to hold a man!

I could get to her! Now! No need to return here until tomorrow morning, when the action signals start!

To carry the candle on what would probably be a difficult scramble seemed an unnecessary impediment. Mathers set it down on the edge of the cell floor and climbed into the fault.

The rock had broken along its veinings, and the veinings were irregular. There was plenty of room one moment, very little the next. He chose to work his way along with his back to the smooth inter-cell wall and his face to the ragged rock. The fault twisted, and he was forced to push his way forward lying virtually horizontal.

Progress became easier, the gap between wall and rock widened, he regained his feet, shuffled forward, and soon the edge of her cell wall met his knuckles.

He stepped out into her cell. Living darkness, strange smells.

'Joanna! Joanna!'

She flung herself on him out of the dark, kicking and screaming. Or for an awful moment he thought it was her. Then his hand, fighting to push her face away, met a bristling crop of beard! Almost at once, his hand was bitten. He pulled it back and struck out wildly. Two hands closed around his throat and squeezed!

Electric colours punctured the blackness. Reaching forward, he linked his hands behind his opponent's skull, at the same time bringing his own skull violently forward. The bearded man fell back cursing unintelligibly and then charged in again. Mathers ducked, falling over with the enemy on top of him. He kicked out wildly and was lucky enough to connect his knee with something vital. As a howl of pain sounded, he staggered and almost fell back into the rock fault.

Before he could pull himself to safety, his assailant was at him again, this time poking a stick at him. It caught Mathers painfully in the ribs before he managed to grasp one end of it.

'What's the matter with you? I'm no enemy if you're an honest man. Where's the girl, where's Joanna?'

Savage growls and curses in a strange language were his answer.

The stick was wrenched from his grasp. He scrambled back to his own cell under a fusilade of blows. Never was refuge more welcome, or light more blessed, than his. He lay for a long while on his bed, trembling and gasping, clutching his wounds, and peering in dread at the rock fault.

All that night, he could not sleep for fear of his unknown attacker, for the pain of his wounds, and for wondering what had become of Joanna.

Next morning, he worried about trying to make contact with the prisoner on the other side of him. Perhaps they might form an alliance Mathers suddenly felt the need of company. But, when the cells next moved on, the rock fault would lie, not between his cell and the next prisoner's, but between the next prisoner's and the cell following that. There was no way of getting in touch. At least he had the consolation of knowing that the unknown attacker would no longer be able to break in upon him after this morning's work.

His candle was almost at an end - he had been unwilling to extinguish it - when the working signal came. Never more gladly had Mathers gone over to take his position by the dangling chain.

* * * *

In the brief fight, he had sustained nothing worse than bruises. Even in his weakened condition, it took Mathers only a few days to recover from them. His mental state required longer to stabilise, he was now victim of fears and suppositions that almost took on their own life. Night after night, he woke screaming from dreams in which terrible things with faces all hair and snout and teeth flung themselves at his throat in paroxysms of fury. Sometimes these dream attackers were gigantic, filling the cell; at other times, they were no larger than a finger-nail.

All were equally terrifying.

His hours of candle-light were necessarily rationed but, light or dark, he would crouch with every muscle tense, staring towards those cracks round his walls from which attack might come.

Gradually, however, his fears subsided. The plague of rats also died and, with it, the abominable stench that he imagined helped to distort his senses. The stench of Khernabhar was always permanent and corrosive; it ceased to be intolerable.

What has happened to me all these days? How is it I have been so preoccupied with myself? What about her? What has happened to Joanna? Is she still alive? She can't be dead, no...

One morning, he was his normal lucid self. The terror of the attack had vanished. He saw clearly, or imagined he saw, what had happened. That vile bearded creature was merely another prisoner, originally three cells ahead of Mathers, who had taken advantage of the rock fault to get back to Joanna's cell. He could be ousted if Mathers went prepared to fight. As for Joanna, Mathers had no proof that she was not still in her cell. He tried to avoid dwelling on the evils that might have befallen her.

What he needed was a weapon. Then he would be prepared for the next occasion on which it was possible to attack.

There were no metal objects available. But the cudgel was a fine solid affair, and one end could be sharpened into a point by the flints. By the time he had finished with it, it gave him added confidence.

But the grudging stone wheel of Khernabhar obeyed its own laws, turned at its own pace, unfolded its own possibilities when it would. Its rotation on its axis was like the slow turn of the centuries themselves, and its blind unchanging walls offered no chance of escape.

To divert himself, Mathers took to pacing the cell and to reciting such poetry and prose as he could recall at the top of his voice. By some insensible shift of his emotions, one poem in particular became his favourite:

Anna, thy beauty seems to bring

Bewitchment of the world I know,

Spelling a change, till everything

Is pale, impermanent, as though

World were but rares-show.

O'er ravaged lands and prosperous,

Countrysides of sun and shade,

Seascape or moonscape, without fuss

Your dreaming eyes, your lips, have made

Reality to fade.

So now before the bricks of town

Palm trees advance or towers pace,

Wild mountains rise, breakers crash down!

Unchanged alone where phantoms race -

Thy love, thy face!

The Anna in the old poem became Joanna. The bricks of town became the walls of his cell. Then the poem was true, yes, yes, all else faded before the beauty of her face and all the intangible qualities her face stood for. No imprisonment could crush the budding of humanity's finer qualities. He forgot that the beauty of her face was something far more frail and transient than the beds of rock about him. Mathers was suddenly in love!

Over and over, he tried to trace all his memories of her.

Had I ever set eyes on her before we were assembled for the march up the mountain? Wait, yes, I saw her in the yard of the court on the day we were sentenced! Of course! She was standing in the cart as Hener's toughs thrust me down the steps! She in sunshine! Had she something round her head? A handkerchief ... Her hands up to her hair?

Why didn't I pay better attention? The sun was in my eyes.

So many times did he return to the" few fragments of memory he had of her, that they became obliterated. He was left with nothing but a glimpse of her shoulder, the nape of her neck, a curl of hair on it, the sight of an ear-lobe. And that was all of Joanna that remained!

Through the days of progress and stillness through the rock, in which he sought her essence and waited to see her reality, Mathers paced his cell and kept himself exercised. He was at his exercises one day when a fresh aspect of the wheel design on his wall caught his eye. Holding the candle up close, he inspected it minutely.

It became apparent to him - and he wondered how he had failed to observe the fact before - that the design was etched over a much more ancient version of the same plan. What he had previously regarded as construction lines or markings in the rock were parts of a far older drawing, executed in a more fanciful and decorative way. Allegory had been used, and he realised that the old man with the beard, whose lineaments he had admired, was part of this archaic design, and supported the semi-obliterated wheel upon his shoulder.

Accompanying the design were hieroglyphs, faint, indecipherable, and certainly of great antiquity. Mathers, gazing at them, was taken back to a fine winter morning when he was a young man, riding on horseback early through the woods with his father. They cantered through a thicket of holly trees which cut at their legs, up to an eminence on which stood a dozen or so tall spruces, so old that they sprawled at angles, often leaning their trunks against each other for support. The hieroglyphs conjured up the intricate foliage of those spruces, glimpsed in freedom long ago. Mathers and his father rode up to the trees to enjoy the view and let the horses breathe. They jumped down onto the soft ground, peering through the mist across the valley.

'There's Khernabhar, the home of the ancient tyrant Khern Kahzaa!'

Mathers Senior said. He pointed to a mountain that, from this distance, hardly looked bigger than others nearer at hand, up whose shaggy slopes the mists were drifting.

Leaning against one of the spruces, Mathers Senior spoke of the Saga of Cunais, which contained word of Khernabhar and its secrets. The Saga was of a great oral tradition, born long before the days even of Khern Kahzaa, before the days of written language; it contained legends that seemingly related to the coming of man on the planet. One legend spoke of a dynasty of terrible kings, father, son, and grandson, who imprisoned a whole nation in a mountainside because they were hairy and possessed six fingers on each hand.

... ther peltts

Like fiber were up ta eye-pits

On befor-heds thankly as arm-pits

Sprooated while each furd' hand mounted extra fur d' fingre

Upon imprisonment, this strange nation was forced to build a great wheel of incarceration inside Khernabhar, to symbolise the eternity for which they would be sealed off from the world. The last king of the dynasty sealed up the entrances to the mountain; but the nation still survived inside and would one day emerge to overthrow the world. So claimed the saga.

'The Saga of Cunais has been banned from our libraries since Hener came to power,' said Mathers Senior to his son, looking across the valley.

'And perhaps before his day, too. Even very ancient and dead things can return to disrupt the present.'

The mist of that distant day faded into grainy sandstone; the sound of his father's voice changed back into the drip and boom of water; and the knot of trees became merely the hieroglyphs of Mathers' cell wall.

It's all older than anyone can guess at ... Reh, do you know of this iniquity? The revolution must come! Or perhaps it has come, and we prisoners are abandoned here. Perhaps the revolution has been betrayed! Then there must be another revolution .. . I must get free!

Mathers stood for a long while, one shoulder against a wall, staring absently ahead, listening to the endless working of water all round. At university, he had joined one of the secret revolutionary societies, where he learned of another version of the story in the Saga of Cnnais. This version also claimed a dynasty of three kings, father, son, and grandson; but it presented the father as an upright and religious man, founder of a Holy Order for which the great subterranean wheel was designed. This saintly ruler intended the cells for monastic cells; and the holy penitents intended to occupy the cells would propel themselves, generation after generation, revolution after revolution, reverently through the deep earth until, at the time of the final Resurrection, they propelled themselves direct into the presence of the Lord Almighty. The son of the pious dynast had been a weak and dissolute man, who allowed construction to go forward without his personal interest. He was murdered by his son, who indeed took personal interest in the vast wheel but subverted its sacred intentions and turned it into combined prison and torture chamber, which usage had been maintained into historical times and ever since. The legend had it that the enslaved wheel-builders turned against this wicked king, and that he was the first to be set to work in his own instrument of terror.

Whatever version of the legend was nearest the facts - and the truth would now almost certainly never be established - this such was evident: however far one might cast one's mind back into the history of civilisation, the wheel would always be there, turning, groaning, every day on its axis.

As for the possibility that an ancient nation, hairy and six-fingered, had been incarcerated here, that was probably an embroidery. Unless - and an idea so paralysing came to Mathers that he dropped the candle. It rolled on the floor and went out. As he scrabbled for it on the floor, he tried to recall details of the hairy man who had assailed him in Joanna's cell, trembling to remember how many fingers the creature had on each hand ...

Shakily, he felt for his flints and re-lit his candle, looking round fearfully at the swooping shadows.

* * * *

Careful measurements of the outer wall revealed that the slight eccentricity of orbit was still gradually increasing the gap between wall and cell-end. Mathers was sure that the maximum gap would be small and, once maximum was reached, would dwindle again: so that when the gap was barely wide enough for him to struggle through, he resolved that go he must. He had his cudgel - if he met his old assailant, he would be ready.

As to that old assailant, Mathers had a new theory. It was mere superstition to imagine that any of a prehistoric race mentioned in a long-forgotten saga could survive below ground - wasn't it? There was a more practical explanation.

The wheel of Khernabhar could not continue without maintenance. He had seen how faults in the rock had been repaired, and rock debris would have to be cleared away. Very well: then, just as there were passages to allow for water and food to enter the cells from above, so there must be ways for humans - guards - to do the same thing. His assailant had probably been such a guard; which might well mean that a passage-way to the world above was near at hand. If he could find Joanna, they could escape by that route and find their way to Reh's headquarters, there to help fight for the revolution.

In his pockets were flints, a new candle, and some food. He went over to the water trough and took a last drink. He looked round the cell and counted the scratches he had made in the sandstone. His lifetime of imprisonment in the rock had in fact lasted only one hundred and two days so far. Something like one hundred and fifty three prisoners would have been thrown into the cells behind him - and the same number released far ahead of him - several miles and many years ahead of him!

He set his old candle down on the cell floor, since he would be sure to drop it in his struggle to reach the next cell. Taking up the cudgel, he pushed his way into the gap between cell wall and rock face. Thin though he was, there was scarcely room to edge forward but, inch by inch, he did it, cudgel in his leading hand, face forward into the darkness.

In the vacant cell, the candle continued to burn for some while. The marks of ancient occupancy stood on the walls, water continued to drip. Shadows fluttered occasionally against the roof of rock.