Any real consciousness that came to me was gradual and most certainly painful to attain. So it was not suddenly that I awoke to the frightening prospect that I was incredibly high in the air and looking down over miles and miles of mountainous landscape, but such sensation was slow in its formation, beginning with the horribly genuine feeling on my skin that I lay upon some cold and flat stone—smooth, sure, and much to my relief, but on account of its solidity almost every inch of my body was sore. I had come awake in a strange position: flat on my stomach with one arm around my back; and my left ear had the worst of it since it had endured the weight of my head with no cushion to ease the twinge. Gently, then, I turned my head and saw, about a yard from my face, the edge of the stone. When my vision adjusted to it I observed beyond a wide and overwhelming scene – that of a valley alive with considerable verdure, hemmed in by a range of white mountains. Rivers like tender fingers extended from the snowy peaks to nourish the flatlands below.
But such beauty I only pondered for a few moments, since it made me dizzy, before I returned my attention yet again to myself. I realized, in an arousing moment, that I had no memory of the past. At the outset I wondered how it was that I found myself here, but when I tried to think back, I could remember nothing. In fact, my head was so wiped that I could not recall even who I was. The very clothes I wore were unfamiliar to me: some shabby outfit with a bland brown shirt, loose pants, and no shoes or foot coverings of any kind. Surely I would have chosen more tasteful attire for myself if given the opportunity. But that simply meant that I possessed a developed sense of volition; not only was I sentient, but I knew how to think – I was not just born here today. In a strange, murky sort of way, I could picture the outlines of other people and their fashions, like hazy apparitions in brief succession. None of it was chronological as far as I could tell or in the least bit constant. It was as if I had come awake from a severe state of intoxication, and one which had lasted from my birth. Or had I even been born? But it was little use to think about it, and to a certain extent it hurt my brain to try. I consoled myself with the resolution that I must have simply hit my head, and my memory would return soon enough.
With that I sat up straight, suffering all the little sores in my body. My head was struck by a sudden pulsating ache, like one would get from dehydration, but to my relief it did not last. A single drop of blood snuck away from my nostril, and I knew at once that it was owing to the altitude. For some moments I sat gravely, with my eyes fixed upon the edge of the stone, and tried to acclimate to the thin air by opening my chest and slowing my breathing to a balanced rhythm.
Then again I looked out, marveling. The beauty was undoubtedly just that, and a most wondrous beauty, but it was equally and exasperatingly unattainable. The attractive land was distant to me, and with every passing moment became somewhat of an elusive thing. Like my own past, it was withdrawn from me. The longer I focused upon it and stared it down with struggling eyes growing red, the more I disbelieved its authenticity. The only sense strong enough to take it in was my vision, and even that was failing. I was too high for my nose to smell any enlightening scent of nature, if indeed it was a thing to be enjoyed. I smelled nothing, in fact, but the crisp, odorless air of the high altitude.
It took only a second for me to realize why I kept pondering things about my situation in the margins of seconds themselves. This revelation fell upon me as a strident toll sounded behind my head. The noise was enough to shake every muscle in my frail body, and impelled me to turn and observe what it was that accompanied me here on this high confinement. The surface I stood upon was one flat circle twenty yards in diameter, and to either side of me, the stone rose into angular pillars, arced, about thirty feet high, and conjugated at the top. The point of their joining was the apex of my whole tower, and when I stepped back and gathered a better view of this, I realized it was one massive loop. From its center protruded in horrendous proportion a metal arm. The meridian served as an axis for the arm, which swung steadily from side to side; and nearly stroking the stone platform upon which I stood, on the opposite end of the arm, was a circle of untainted bronze, like an old archeologist’s pocket watch, only magnified. How I knew what an archeologist was I could not say. I counted vigilantly the seconds it took for the giant disk to swing from one pillar to the next, and I reckoned just shy of five. With every instance the arm approached the right pillar, that atrocious blare resounded, seemingly from nowhere, but all around me, rumbling the stone underneath my feat.
Upon the fourth toll I at once covered my ears to shield them from such thunderous judgment of sound, shut my eyes from the vision of the abominable stone, and dropped to my knees because they had weakened to the point of failing. At the touch of the cold surface, a deluge of despair produced from me a sudden whimper, and wherefore painful moisture stung under my eyelids. And there I knelt for a long while, not daring to reopen my eyes. Perhaps if I waited long enough I would awaken to a world away from this, a life I must have once had, beyond the bounds of this cruel, calamitous prison of a tower.
Infuriatingly, every instance the toll resounded I was brought back, when in the silent moments my mind seemed to disappear, as if I drifted to unconsciousness, but in only short increments. I knew that was it. What else could have so tormented me but the slow, grinding turn of time, not merely as an abstraction, but a malignant spirit shouting in my ears. This oppressor of my soul exposed with great bearing my only probable destiny: the dire confines of death.
What were my past indiscretions that I should end up here? And was there no liberation from this curse?
When finally I dared to lift my eyelids, I suffered the onslaught of an unaltered scene; the same loop of stone, the same swinging arm, the same inaccessible exquisiteness of the skies beyond were before me. Clenching my fist to keep from trembling, I turned my back to the pendulum and sat with a heaviness of spirit. I felt dizzy. The mountain peaks, white with mantles of snow, rippled like fearsome specters and began to distance themselves from the tower. I nearly fell backward from the weight of my head.
All this culminated in a severe case of contempt. If my mind was sane enough to observe my surroundings with acuteness, I would surely have the insight to logically assume someone had placed me here. Yes, I knew of logic; I was not deprived of it. Someone, some entity had instigated my present displeasure with seriousness of purpose. But why he had done so I could not begin to guess. If it were not for the shame in my bosom, which existed from I knew not where, nor how, for this derision, I would have readily claimed this entity of still less sanity than myself. But I could deduce by my already established genuineness of logic that I may have been standing in his own judgment, and was in no place whatsoever to question, nor certainly to despise, this unknown initiator of my current predicament. There was no doubt in my mind, however, that I was not here by chance.
So what then? If I had no determination as to the direction I was able to go—for where could I go?—nor control over my destiny, what was I to do? I could not stay tormented here, where the grossly massive chronometer had more say over my existence than I. But then again, there was one direction I had all the liberty to go.
Down.
Gradually, and arousing every little ache in my body, I lowered to my belly and pulled along the stone to the very edge of the tower. And when my eyes peered over they immediately shut by instinct. Certainly no man in another circumstance would look over a ledge so lofty and onto the face of a wall so undeviatingly steep. But I did, and when I looked again I could not remove my eyes from the extreme sight. I could not tell whether the green ground surrounding my prison was the makeup of trees, or only bushes and grass. Though the fixed tower, extending like a pin stuck into the fabric of earth, and the ground beneath were motionless, my eyes were tricked into believing they moved against each other like a ship’s rudder against the rippling flow of the sea; likewise, my head influenced the delusion that the tower ever so slowly tipped to my left. It made me momentarily nauseous. After a deep breath I stood up but stayed against the edge and held down my head as would a gargoyle or a crane watching for prey beneath. But I was rather the prey of fear, no more a raptor than the sheep on whose tail the wolf pursues. Darkness crept overhead with the arrival of a solitary cloud veiling the sun, and this added gloom to my other oppressive sensations.
Here I saw Death as heavy as night drawing me forth, and for whatever reason despite all forces toward the contrary I considered its beguiling arms. After all, Death waited for me, whether it came in the form of starvation upon this tower, or by way of fainting while I dropped the incredible distance from here to the ground. So why must I wait for it? At least deceased I would be free of this eerie milieu, of my maddening amnesia, of this tormenting mechanism of time, of the vagueness governing my whole state of affairs.
And while my deliberation nearly convinced me, something happened which prevented me from going further. A single beam of light emitted from a rupture in the cloud overhead, sliding first across the stone to my right and then resting upon me. With a slight turn of my head, I squinted from the blinding sun. As it moved from me I saw from its direction a small hummingbird. The gentle creature fluttered to the leftward pillar of the great loop and hovered there for a minute, about three feet above the surface of the tower.
The reason I knew that it was a hummingbird was as extraordinary as my lack of knowing all else; for it invoked the first real memory to have returned since my waking. Though not much in the line of a narrative, the brief visions came pouring back as wavy phantasms, or as an artist’s long-stroked watercolor on a canvas. I must have been a child, because a woman bent low to gaze at me and tell me how a hummingbird would float gently while suckling, and you could hardly notice its wings because of how fast they fluttered. I was watching a nearby bird, of the same color as my visitor today, do just as this woman told me. Who was this woman? I knew her… Yes—but could it be?—my mother! Of course it was her. Oh, what a profound delight to remember not only another human, but my own blood!
Regrettably, that was all I could recall. It was enough, however, to pique my interest in the bird still engrossed by the pillar. With a few careful steps, not wanting to scare it away, I approached. It neither flew off nor showed any sign of fear – not even at the clock’s blaring toll. But it pecked at the pillar continuously, and at last, to my utter amusement, I discovered why. It had found a concavity in the stone, one quite minute, in which a small pool of water had gathered. A gap such as this had not been caused by accident, but was formed along with the pillar, and the clock, and the whole tower, for it was smooth and perfectly fashioned for one to curl his fingers within. Why had I not noticed this before? Lines too thin and true for even a pin to be stuck in them formed a square around the concavity to the base of the column.
Only when I slowly stretched out my hand did the bird fly away, and I might have been sad about its parting if I was not otherwise enrapt by my discovery. I reached my hand into the hollow, folded my fingers around the rim of it so that the tips were dipped in the water amassed within, and gave it a pull. The section of stone within the thin lines unfastened from the whole column and lifted up, connected only by two metal hinges at the top.
I had found a door.
Only blackness could be seen beyond it. How crushed I would have been to have such hope vanish on account of a solid wall within! How mortified I would have felt, had I not spotted the beginning of a stairwell nearly hidden beneath my feet. The smallest steps led down into the darkness, and I dared to take them at once. Before I ventured out of sight of the open door, I took one last backward glance at the vertex of the tower, but not for any length of time. Who would ever look long at his jail cell after he had just been granted his parole?
For a minute I could see nothing still, and I had to feel for each step with my toes before I took it. But soon enough my eyes adjusted, and I shivered at the prospect of an infinite winding stair. If my experience above on the platform of the tower had been in any way fantastic or surreal, my journey of descent was double in the scale of illusory. And by that I mean my dizziness magnified in such enclosed space and in keeping constant pace on the stairwell; all sounds were muffled, so that even the clanging chronometer, which had blasted in my ears outside, was fainter with every toll—and I may have lost all sense of time—; eventually I could no longer feel my feet for their numbness; and I could not see more than a few feet in front of me, so I had absolutely no idea how long my downward trudge would take me. Yet greatest of all these excitations was the sheer wonder and ambiguity of my destination. Were there even a door at the bottom that would let me out, nature was itself a perplexity to me; for there was a vast wilderness to be explored, a created environment of the beautiful that I felt too inconsequential even to be amidst, to see, to hear, to touch, and smell. This was a sensation exactly opposite to that which I felt only a few minutes ago—if not hours—up against the edge of the tower. It was more than a hope; I felt excitement, awe, fear—though not horror—, and the weight of mercy and a new beginning. The notion carried me onward, down each step with resolve, though I stumbled often, and the length of time it took me was agonizingly great.
When all I could hear were my footsteps, and just when I thought I could bear it no more, for I was sore from head to ankles, suddenly the steps came to an end. One can imagine, I’m sure, how having taken every step, perhaps a couple hundred thousand, and coming to a point where there was no next step but level ground, my legs and feet proceeded mechanically, and I immediately tumbled against the wall and onto the hard floor. I gave out a good groan, and afterward lay still for two minutes. Would anyone have blamed me for conjuring a hysterical laugh? I did, for no other reason but to let out of my system every strong feeling that had been building inside of me over time.
Though it seemed there was no part of me that did not ache, I summoned the will to pull myself back on my feet. When my head stopped its spinning, I noticed the space I was in to be very bland, an undecorated, dismal bottom to the staircase; and hardly a fitting reward for that brutal descent. Yet there was a door, on the far side from me, small and simple. I hobbled over to it. Its handle was round and wooden, its rim a solid metal slab, and the faintest light stole through its cracks. I thought even if the door were locked, I would break it down by force.
But it was not. When I turned the knob, the door opened without resistance. I knew that at some time in my obscure past I must have experienced my heart jump, but nothing could have compared to the exhilaration of spirit upon my exiting the tower. Beyond the threshold was groomed grass, which felt like a cloud beneath my feet as I stepped onto it. Since the bright light briefly burned my wearied eyes, I shut them momentarily, and smelled the sweet air of nature. And, Oh! What sounds! What wonderful noises surrounded me! – The blissful chirping of birds, the rustling of tree branches, bushes, and grass in the breeze, the wind from afar off. I could have been happy for the rest of my days had I lost the use of my eyes completely, for my other senses took in ample beauty as it was. But I could not resist raising my eyelids and taking in the greater sense of my setting. After blinking a couple times, my eyes no longer hurt, but by some miracle were now strong and clear, keener like everything else. Perhaps the lushness of green foliage all about enhanced my vision; or perhaps the hundreds of trees of all varying kinds standing placidly and almost uniformly in a grove, some bearing flowers of dazzling colors, brought about a wondrous transformation in my head. Every bit of nature beckoned me forth melodiously. Even the birds must have enjoyed my presence, for they sang all the more freely.
All the anguish that I had felt atop the tower had entirely vanished, replaced by wonder and gratitude. I started off, strolling leisurely among the trees, and all sense of the oppressive strain of time was left behind. I could not tell what was beyond the grove, except the far-off hills. The distant mountains rose one after another, first the foothills, then the shadowy intermediate rises, and finally the greater bluffs which licked the sky with their frosted peaks. There was no end to it all; the tower seemed to have been built arbitrarily in the very center of an inexhaustible garden. In another existence I might have been plagued by nagging questions: What was I to do, now that I was here? Where was I to go? Should I have headed off in search of my past? To my eternal delight these issues never even entered my mind, for I was so enraptured by the splendor of my surroundings, revealing itself, as I journeyed forth, from one degree of pleasure to the next.
