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Fair Semblances: An Allegorical Fantasy (Chapter 14)
By pitchford | November 24, 2008
When our three wanderers first stepped out of the sunless tunnel and into the desert again, it was broad daylight, nearly mid-day, judging by the height of the sun in the sky. For awhile, the luminous brilliance of the sun quite overwhelmed their gloom-accustomed eyes, which had been several days away from any light stronger than what their flickering torch could produce. Shading their eyes with their hands, and scanning the landscape spread out before them as best they could, they were able to determine that the desert terrain was beginning to give way to broken moorlands, with a few stunted shrubs and blasted clumps of grass here and there – an altogether encouraging sign, considering they had not come across any vegetation whatsoever since the Springs of Elim. Gilead, who knew the country fairly well, was of the opinion that this must be the edge of the Heath of Demarcation, and that very soon, the broken topography would give way to the rolling hills and fruitful plains surrounding Lebben-Or. The beautiful city itself, in his estimation, could be no further than a hundred miles away, easily reachable within the space of a week.
After finishing their brief survey, they stepped back into the mouth of the tunnel, to deliberate. Gilead, after describing the topographical changes they could look forward to, and reiterating his opinion that the intervening space between them and Lebben-Or could be traversed in less than a week, proposed a new plan of travel:
“Even though we have been traveling by daylight for most of our trip,” he reminded the other two, “if you remember when we started, we had originally planned to move by night, and hide away in the daytime. Of course, that proved to be impossible when we were negotiating the treacherous desert landscape, but now that we’re coming out of the desert, I think it would be possible again, and certainly beneficial. I’m sure that by now, Vrak has discovered we are no longer with the company, and he will be scouring the country far and wide for any sign of us. He may not dare to come too close to Lebben-Or, but I don’t doubt that he would at least send his emissaries as far as the Heath; and who knows, if he becomes desperate enough, just how far into the Bountiful Plains he might be willing to venture. So then, it would be very prudent, in my opinion, to remain here in the tunnel until nightfall, and then to continue our travels in the dark, hiding away through the daylight hours until we have come quite to the boundaries of Lebben-Or itself. It would be heartbreaking to end in failure after we have come so far, and been through so much.”
“That sounds reasonable to me,” Ariel assented. Then, in an unsuppressable burst of delight, she cried out, “I can’t believe we’ll soon be in the Beautiful City once more! It’s been such a long time, and I miss it terribly. Oh, you have no idea how much you’ll love it,” she added enthusiastically, turning to Mishael; “I can’t even begin to describe what it’s like to be within its beautiful, unconquerable walls. It’s really the only place left on earth where one can feel thoroughly safe – and not just safe, but thrilled, intoxicated almost by its splendor and majesty. And then, there’s the High King – oh, but I can’t describe him to you either, you’ll have to meet him for yourself, and then you’ll see what I mean, and why I can’t stop talking about him, and wishing I were in his palace again. He’s so great and magnificent and intimidating, and yet, when you come into his house, he’s familiar and comfortable, like being with your best friend, who knows you better than anyone else ever could. Ah, Lebben-Or, I can almost see you now – soon, I’ll look again upon your beauty, and it will be just as fresh and thrilling as before….And not like the beauty of Lusk,” she continued her reverie, sharply changing her tone, and almost spitting out that word “Lusk,” as if it were a poison in her mouth. Then, coming to herself again, and realizing she had been rambling on to no one in particular, she stopped speaking, but still irradiated the very quintessence of celestial hope and rapturous joy, as she continued to think of the prospects that they had to look forward to, after all this time, of being in Lebben-Or once again.
“But I suppose we haven’t told you much about Lusk,” Gilead added after a few moments. “Lusk lies a little over a hundred miles away from Lebben-Or, almost due east. It’s just south of the border between the Desert of Salt and the land of the Nethinim, and north of the impassable Aurorean Mountains; and hence, it is at a point through which all the rich trade goods of the exotic eastern kingdoms must pass. It has therefore become unimaginably wealthy, and possesses every conceivable sort of luxury that the world has ever devised. It is so rich and beautiful that very few who have entered its gates ever desire to leave; so they stay, and grow fat and prosperous, and eventually become slaves of opulence and glamour. Oh, and there are plenty of real slaves there too, who have been kidnapped and sold from every nation under the sun, from the tall, strong, dark-skinned races in the south to the fair and slender snow-walkers of the north. These slaves do every bit of the disagreeable labor, so that their fat, opulent masters might spend their lives in indolence and excess. Only the ironic thing is, the real slaves are the least enslaved of them all. Lusk is hopelessly enticing to the fools and myopic,” Gilead concluded, “but to those who have eyes to see, its true ugliness is in proportion to its ostensible beauty, so that it really has such a loathesomeness as is unrivalled in all the world, except perhaps in the very lair of Vrak. So if you’re ever invited to visit, and you feel compelled to look upon its fabled beauty, by all means decline the invitation, and escape in any way possible, or you’ll no doubt end up as one of those deluded souls upon which the glamorous lords of Lusk batten and grow ever fatter and more disgustingly ostentatious.”
Strange to say, when Mishael was listening to these descriptions of the two vastly different beauties of the cities of Lebben-Or and Lusk, he felt curiously and darkly drawn to the sinister beauty of Lusk, far more than to the heavenly beauty of Lebben-Or. He just couldn’t quite feel or understand in his own heart the rapture with which Ariel spoke of the Beautiful City, although he could clearly see how unfeigned and stirring her joy was, reading it unmistakably in her eyes. Yet, to him, it seemed ethereal, intangible, like it would dissolve away if he even touched it. But the dark beauty of Lusk, even while it terrified him, still secretly captivated him, and made him long to feel its palpable, guilty pleasures. He desperately feared the outcome if he should do so; but oddly, that very fear was part of the enticement, and drew his affections there more than almost any other element that Gilead had just been describing. Of course, these hidden thoughts perplexed and half-distressed him, and so he purposed not even to speak of them, but just to continue with the others, and to hope that, when he actually saw Lebben-Or, he would understand what Ariel was feeling.
Such was his plan; but alas, in actual point of fact, before he would ever thrill to the nourishing beauty of the city of the High King, he would know to its nauseating fullness the debasing beauty of the opulent city of Lusk.
Later that evening, just before nightfall, when our hero and his traveling companions were still sleeping in preparation for the coming night’s journey, Mishael was awakened by one of the dissembling chimeras of Lusk, whose name was Allura. But before I proceed to tell the tale, you must kindly excuse my taking a moment to describe just what these dissembling chimeras were, for the advantage of any reader that might not yet know.
As Gilead had made clear the previous afternoon, Lusk was an opulent city inhabited by many lords who were characterized by the grossest excess and most unrestrained sensual passions. Day after day these lords and gentlemen of leisure would give themselves over to indulge in unimaginable lusts, until they began to exude an aura of lewdness and lechery that was almost palpable. These seductively alluring ambiences followed and surrounded our libidinous men of passion, fed upon each other until they had grown greater than the hearts which originated them, took on personalities of their own, and spread like a malignant tumor across the plains surrounding Lusk, until the whole area was suffused with the very breath of guilty and captivating pleasures. After this sumptuous environment had existed for many years, people began complaining of disturbingly sweet and pleasant dreams, in which they saw things a sailor would blush to speak of, and were drawn to them, and could not keep them out of their minds even when they were wide awake. Eventually, men were seeing phantasms and mirages in the broad daylight, which seemed half-corporeal, almost palpable, and always exuding such a tempting and passionate air that they could not help but follow them, no matter where they were leading. Many followed them to their death off the tops of steep cliffs, or plunged after them into raging rivers. Some were lost in the Desert of Salt, where they perished of thirst, after following these seducing spirits far into the wilderness. Finally, it became common to speak of these phenomena as dissembling chimeras, and some of the better-known of them were even graced with names, such as the one who awakened Mishael, a very enticing chimera responsible for the destruction of many Luskian souls, whom the lavish city’s inhabitants called Allura.
At first, he was just dreaming the most vivid and darkly enchanting dream that he had ever had, in which he saw the most beautiful of women laughing, beckoning him on, and playfully retreating. Her hair was black as a raven’s, her eyes were the darkest ebony, shining with a suggestive and inviting hint of a deep and shameful pleasure, and her alabaster skin gleamed an unearthly white. Her body was veiled with the sheerest of silks, or at times, so it seemed, with the very mists of the summer air, which trembled and danced upon her flawless form, as the clouds which the wind blows across the shining sphere of the midnight moon. In his dream, he felt an inexplicable and deep-rooted terror, which strove with, and was mingled together with, the most unrestrainable impulse of passion he had ever known, and he fought to lie still, strove to turn his head or close his eyes, but could not. For many long moments, without blinking or diverting his stare, he feasted upon the alluring image which gracefully swayed and undulated before him; and then, before he knew what he was doing, he was on his feet, following her. In his dream, she began to change and morph into image after image of seductive pleasure and enticing opulence, becoming captivating and elegant women of every conceivable race and color, and then the image and suggestion of every sort of rich and desirable food, luxury, fame, and power that the human soul could ever crave. If one could imagine the physical representation of the innate desire of men to be great and famous and respected, a prince to whom all men come fawning and cringing, that is precisely the shape Allura took, and so with every conceivable temptation, until Mishael was in a daze, almost as if he were downright drunk with desire.
At what precise point the dream faded away to reality, he was never exactly sure. All he knew was that, sometime later, gasping for breath and hopelessly lost, he caught the last sight of her in the distance, still laughing and beckoning him on, but now hopelessly beyond his reach. The faster he had run after her, the farther she had flown away, and now, when his faltering body could no longer sustain the frenzied sprint into which he had broken, he sank down in a swoon, lost in the desolate stretches of the Desert of Salt, and Allura finally disappeared from his view.
When Mishael finally woke up, some hours later, his head was throbbing and his tongue was swollen and parched in his mouth, and was continually sticking to the back of his throat, almost gagging him. He could scarcely breathe, and every time he did, the scorching desert air seared his cracked and bleeding nostrils, so that he almost cried out in pain. His limbs were stiff and sore, and when he tried to stretch them out, he realized that he could not move his arms in front of him, or spread his legs apart, for his hands were bound behind his back with iron chains, and his ankles were likewise held together with fetters. The skin beneath the iron restraints was raw and bleeding, and the sores were full of the acidic desert dust, which burned with an intense and crippling pain. He had not yet dared to open his eyes, but when he finally did, he saw that he was jolting along on top of a rough, wooden cart, drawn by a couple of pitiful little donkeys. He could see that his garments were torn, exposing his arms and part of his chest, and everywhere the skin was exposed to the sun he was burnt to a deep, excoriated red, and covered with blisters oozing a purulent puss. Up ahead of him were a couple of men on horses, one of which was leading along the donkeys and the cart; and when he let out an audible groan, they both looked back at him, with laughing, malicious eyes. One of them said to the other, “Well, well, well, our little friend is awake. I suppose he’s had better days, what do you think?” The other chuckled, but did not respond. Neither of them said anything for a long time after that, and Mishael, unhappy to the extreme, continued to bounce along in his little wagon, cursing the day he had ever left Fair Semblances.
For three full days, Mishael and his two captors continued traveling eastward; and during all this time, he never had so much as a bite to eat. Only, when they stopped for a mid-day meal, and then again when they stopped for the night, they would begrudgingly toss him a little canteen, from which he would drink ravenously, until one of them got impatient and snatched it away again. Neither of the men ever said a word to Mishael and he only formed the merest suggestion of an idea of their plans for him from their rather sparse conversations between themselves, which had largely to do with expected prices and fair divisions of profit. Throughout these three days, Mishael came to an increasing and very distressing conviction that they intended to sell him at the slave market in Lusk; and when he thought of it, he remembered the cruel suggestions of the camel-riders to that same end, and how he had escaped and found the Springs of Elim, and how glad he had been to find rest and refreshment, and to enjoy the true friendship of Gilead and Ariel. And then, he would weep bitterly, until one of the riders would finally glance back at him scornfully, and roll his eyes, and turn away with a dismissive snort.
Finally, just after nightfall on the third day of their journey, Mishael could make out the dim outlines of a vast, sprawling city a few miles before them. And a little later that night, when it had been fully dark for a couple of hours, they stood before the high-rising gate in the towering wall, and called out for passageway. Soon, they were passing beneath the soaring arches of the gate and into the fabled city of Lusk.
Topics: Books, Fair Semblances |