The Valley of Death

A lot of my inspiration comes from dreams that I have had. I do have some brilliant dreams - vivid, random, epic. I love them! This is definitely one of my favourites, that I had the night between the 19.09.2008 and 20.09.2008. When I adapt a dream I, of course, stumble across issues such as what happened before this, who are the characters, and, most frustratingly, what happens next! It is a tragedy, sometimes, that we must wake from dreams and never know the ending. Also, one needs to fill in the gaps.

Since having written this dream, I have tried to find a way to incorporate it into a larger storyline, but I can't. It's tricky. It's such a weird, stand-alone piece. I have got references to our world and culture so it can't be a created world, unless I can justify that somehow... It may come to me at some point, but for now it is a piece on its own. Enjoy.

As we came around the side of the dry mountain, we saw a vast, barren wasteland. The whole landscape was dominated by a dry, dirty ochre colour. There were heat waves shimmering what seemed to be everywhere. Snaking through the desert was a great valley with steep sides and a flat bed. It looked like it had once been a thriving river and I commented so. But I was wrong. “This is not a dried up river. It’s a tectonic plate margin. Although there used to be a smaller river in the rift. But that has dried up. It disappeared long ago.” I followed the rift valley along with my eyes, until it came to a mountain. But this mountain appeared to be somewhat different. It looked like a giant termite mound, and it had flaky sides that looked like they would crumble with exposure to the slightest breeze, of which there was none. At the foot of this mountain there was a dark cavern opening. I asked what it was. “The mouth of hell.”

“And is this the valley of death?” I joked, remembering my Tennyson.

“Precisely,” our guide said, stone-faced.

We continued our descent down the mountain and then down into the valley. We were all apprehensive of what we might find in this valley. All of our clues had been leading here. What was here that we were supposed to find, save or destroy? Was there anything? This landscape seemed to hold nothing of importance. None of us dared say it, but we all had the gut feeling that we would end up on the wrong side of the ‘mouth of hell’.

The sun was high in the sky and merciless to us weary travellers. The heat waves blurred our vision of what was ahead. But we could slowly see a city emerging. It too, like the fearful mountain, was dry and crusty, but instead of looking powerful and frightening, it seemed small and pathetic. Our guide informed us that this had once been a powerful city, a force to be afraid of. The old city had, like the sun on us, been merciless on surrounding settlements, crushing them and taking the leftovers. But now, they were nothing. Nature had sucked the civilization dry.

As we entered the city, we found it to be dead. There was no one and no thing. But so many buildings! They were all dome-shaped, and had been made by slapping mud and grasses over a wooden frame. But the mud was dry, thin and flaky after years of heat and neglect. They all looked desolate and fragile, as though the sound of a pin dropping would cause them all the collapse - we all found ourselves treading as lightly and gently as possible.

We reached the main hut. It was larger than the others and elevated, positioned upon a mound of sand and dirt, which I suspected hid a stone podium of sorts, buried under years of sandstorms.

Within the hut were three men. Their skin was the colour of milky coffee and their hair that of ash and snow. They were cast in an imposing red light, caused by scarlet drapes hung over the many gaps in the crumbling mud ceiling. The men looked pitiful, victims under a red regime. Heads hung, hands slowly and repetitively writhing, their resigned posture earned my sympathy momentarily. But they didn’t deserve my pity. I had heard all about their cruel and dark past - the fist of fiery brimstone, crushing and scorching neighbouring civilizations and mercilessly murdering passing nomadic tribes, unaware of the dangerous lands they had dared to venture across. No, these men deserved nothing from us.

They slowly raised their heads as we entered. “Travel on, strangers,” one said. “We can offer you nothing. Not even death anymore.” They spoke in a foreign language that we did not understand, but our guide translated for us.

“What happened?” my companion, Rosie, asked. There was sympathy in her voice. Bless her. Naive, innocent Rosie.

She received no reply.

“You were asked a question!” our guide said angrily.

“We choose not to answer,” another man answered. “Our suffering is too strong and deep. Worst of all, we know that we deserve all we that have been subject to.”

“We are on a journey,” I said, frank and to the point. “It has led us here, but we do not know where to go next.”

“There are two ways,” the first man said. I looked at the third man. He had not raised his head, and continued to stare at the table before him. He was angry. No doubt about that. “Backward,” the first man continued, “and onward.” There was a melancholic pause. “Both bring death.”

“So we head for the mountain down the valley?” Rosie asked.

Silence again, until the brooding third man spoke. “Accursed mountain,” he muttered. “The mountain ended our glory days. Accursed, damned mountain!”

All of us wondered how this mountain could have changed the course of history for this once powerful, once tyrannical culture so drastically. An enquiry into this was responded to by silence. Our guide led us out of the hut leaving the men to their vow of self-pitiful silence in the scarlet light. “A waste of space, the three of them,” he grumbled. “Despite the degree of their degradation, they still have an overwhelming sense of pride. We go on to the mountain down the rift.”

The mountain was directly ahead of us as we left the broken city. It certainly was an oddity. It rose out of the ground and peaked above the walls of the valley. It looked as though a giant had picked it up from somewhere else and dropped it there. The words of our guide echoed inside my head. ‘The mouth of hell.’ I cast this comment aside for a while. Any force that had destroyed the evil civilization, whose history now lay behind us, couldn’t be bad. Surely not. But I’m glad to say I dismissed this naive thought. There is more than one force of evil in the world.

As we slowly made our way down the scorched valley, we noticed a slope climbing the vertical side of the rift. It reached the top of the valley at the point the mountain was parallel to the ridge of the valley. Apprehensively, we stepped closer and closer to the ‘mouth of hell’. The opening was giant, dwarfing us all. And it was dark, extremely dark. Only the dirty, desert ground could be seen for little more than a few metres. We continued to approach until Rosie screamed.

Within the ‘mouth of hell’ were two giant jaws. They hadn’t been there before; they had just appeared. The upper chomped down, and the lower soared up. There was a loud rumble from the depths and the darkness. Rosie scuttled back, her voice moaning in a quavering whimper. The rest of us stepped back. The jaws snarled and ground together without a sound, only the deep deep rumbling from beyond. Eventually, after what felt like an age, the jaws retreated from each other and disappeared into shadow. “And I suppose they are the jaws of death,” I said, my ribcage sending quivers up and down my body.

“Precisely,” our guide said once again. I felt discomforted to hear his own voice faltering in that single word. I had always seen him as a fearless warrior, but the latest sights and sounds had struck fear into all of us.

John, the silent one among the four of us, stepped forward again. “Don’t!” cried Rosie. We all turned to see her on the ground, weeping. John stopped, nodded and then sat down beside her. We all sat together for a few minutes, all in silence. But we could still feel the fearful rumbling echoing through our bones, though it had ceased long ago now.

Finally, our guide spoke and announced that he was going to climb the slope we had seen earlier. Just to see if he could find anything. He requested that we stay where we were. We were only too happy to oblige him. Rosie was still quivering in John’s arms, and my heart was still racing. So he left us, walking back up the valley and then up the slope. And then he disappeared behind the mountain, or over the top of the rift. I could not tell where he went after he vanished from view. But I prayed so hard for his safety.

Many minutes passed. Possibly an hour. Maybe two. And we didn’t leave our posting out of fear. We spoke little. It is hard to converse with a mute, and Rosie had not yet recovered. I imagined that in her mind she could see the jaws snapping at ten times the original speed, noise and overall fear level. “Do you think he’s alright, John?” I asked.

He shrugged, and I said no more. Then he began to write in the ground. I watched. ‘Dead?’ was what John had written, by brushing away the little sand on the rift floor. I looked at John. Somehow his silence had given him a strong confidence in my eyes, but I saw his true self in that single word. I bit my lower lip. We were both thinking the same thing. Our guide was not going to come back. “Do you think we should follow him, or go back?”

“Please let us go back,” Rosie whimpered.

John shook his head and then wrote in the dirt. ‘Follow’ he wrote. And then another word. ‘Hope’. That word had brought us onto this forsaken quest in the first place. The hope that life could be better. The hope that we could fix everything. I looked to Rosie, whose spirit had collapsed. “I suppose we must,” she said, and she got up resignedly.

We climbed the slope, in desperate hope of our guide’s safety, our hearts throbbing again in fear of what we might find. We reached the top of the slope and came across a surreal sight. There was a wall to our left, blocking our view of the desert wasteland. We continued ahead down a walkway, blind to where we where were going.

Eventually we came to a dusty parapet, built from sandy-coloured stone. We went in. We might as well have done as we had no other plan. It was empty and small. John looked through a small, thin window. He gasped - the loudest noise I’d heard him make. He stepped back. I rushed over to see what he had seen. Rosie attempted to pursue, but John held her back. I looked through and covered my mouth with my hands. There was our guide, lying in the dust. Bloody and shattered, he lay broken on the sand. Vultures, eager for fresh meat, circled and dived towards his dead or dying body. I turned away, flinching. “Is he dead?” Rosie asked. I nodded, feeling the tears stinging my eyes.

She breathed in heavily. “So we are alone.”

Yes, we were alone. Alone and clueless as to know what to do or where to go next. We were in way over our heads. Lost in a strange country surrounded by confusion and desert dangers of which to fear and be aware. And what were we to do? Our guide was dead and we were alone in the desert. “What do we do?” Rosie asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “John?”

John nodded and told us all to hush by putting his index finger to his lips. Both Rosie and I stopped talking and hushed our breathing. John stepped to the archway entrance to the parapet without a sound. He peered up and down the pathway and then waved his hand for us to follow. With trepidation, we stood behind him. He crept out of the doorway and we stealthily sneaked down the pathway. Whoever or whatever had killed our guide, who had remained unnamed for the whole time, was likely to kill us too if we were discovered. We came to another parapet, and we ducked into it. We repeated this system a few times and found that the wall began to circle the mountain. The fourth parapet we entered, Rosie strayed from the back of the line and looked out of the window. “Guys,” she hushed. “You’d better see this.” John and I made our way to the window and we were astounded.

We were overlooking the rest of the rift; this section had been blocked from view by the mountain before, but now it was exposed to us. The sight before us was something that we never believed we would see here in this type of terrain. There was so much green and bright colours - pinks, yellows, reds and oranges. So many different plants! There were so many varieties of grasses, flowers and trees. There were vines and climbers growing over wooden frames and wrapping themselves round trees. And there were statues and monuments. Of what I couldn’t tell; I was too far away, but I could imagine that they were remarkable. But something that made it all so breath-taking was how organised and arranged everything was. The whole positioning of the various gardens and paths was beautiful, and all the water! Artificial rivers, fountains and various water features brought further beauty to the secret paradise.

My awe at this sight soon began to dissolve. Where had all this come from? We had been walking through the desert for days and we had seen so much desolation caused by the conditions, and yet there was this Eden, the glorious garden slap bang in the middle of it all! It seemed selfish that whoever could live here and enjoy this oasis in the desert was not sharing it.

Then again, these could be the people strictly oppressed by the dead city we had walked through. In that case, they deserved their paradise. But they had killed our guide. So they didn’t deserve their riches. I grew bored of debating myself over ethics and decided that maybe it was still bad not to share. I turned around, forcing myself away from the heavenly sight. And I was greeted by another sight - another person.

He stood in the doorway staring at us. He was dressed in armour, not too different from Roman armour, I remembered. A red cape, a shining breastplate and leather sandals. But this was all superficial next to the sheathed sword in his hand and the questioning, startled look on his face.

“John. Rosie,” I said simply, not taking my eyes off the soldier who stared back quizzically. They both turned round, and Rosie gasped. The soldier said something in a foreign language, but with our guide gone we could not understand. He unsheathed his sword and took a step forward. I backed away and stood beside Rosie, with John on the other side of her.

Suddenly, in a swift movement, John took a step forward and fluidly snatched a dagger from his foot, concealed from us all by his trousers. In another gliding movement, he flicked the knife from his hand straight towards the guard. It all seemed to happen so quickly, though I saw it all in slow motion and all my other senses were heightened. I could feel the sun’s warmth on my skin. Maybe I was burning. I could smell the plants and the water below us. I could hear the water trickling, my heart beating and ladies singing in the distance. I felt a strange chill climbing up my spine and pressure on my ribcage as I choked on my own breath. The dagger span through the air and struck the guard in the middle of his neck. I felt Rosie’s hand grab mine, but I was only half aware of it. I was too stunned at what our companion had done. It turned out this silent man was deadly as well. And suddenly I feared him.

The guard fell to his knees. His eyes stared at John with disbelief. And then he looked at me imploringly. My heart went out to him and I began to cry for him. And then his eyes were looking at nothing, and his body hit the ground with a dull thud.

Slowly John approached, rolled the body over and withdrew his dagger. He cleaned it on the guard’s cloak and returned it to its hiding place beneath his trouser leg. He turned back to us. Half of me wished him to be emotionless towards the act he had committed - it would be easier to hate him and fear him. But he was quivering. A tear crept down his cheek and I could understand his tragedy, to an extent. A reluctant warrior. A man expected to kill and hurt and not blink an eye, yet every life he had taken had been a like a bullet to the brain for him too. He was a tragic figure.

Rosie stepped over to him and outstretched her arms. John collapsed into them and silently wept. And Rosie wept. And I wept. All of our stories were tragedies. We seemed to have very little to live for, and now our guide was dead our lives had become so much less. What were we to do? What was to become of us? Our frightful situation had caused two innocent people to die. If we continued, how many more would be a victim? And if we didn’t continue? The whole thing seemed hopeless. The obstacles in our way were just too much.

We sat down, holding hands. We knew not what to do. Maybe we would just stay like this forever, and in a thousand years there would be three skeletons sitting in a circle. And maybe archaeologists would try to come up with a reason why we were like this. An ancient burial ritual, they might guess. Or that we were a family huddling together in the final moments of life. Or maybe we would never be discovered and we would remain undisturbed for the rest of eternity. Unlikely, I scoffed to myself. We sat there for not very long, but long enough for us to feel comforted and at home. “We need to do something,” I said.

“What are we going to do?” Rosie snapped bitterly.

“I don’t know, but we can’t stay here. We have to make some kind of effort.”

“But what is the point?”

A pause. I couldn’t answer her question. And then he spoke. He hadn’t spoken at all since we’d met him. We’d assumed he was a mute, but now he opened his mouth and sound came out. “The point is that life mustn’t be wasted, else it wouldn’t be given to us. And if we don’t continue, more life may be wasted.” And then he said no more. Rosie’s question was answered, but that didn’t matter anymore.

“You can speak?” It was a question we both had at the front of our minds now. But John wouldn’t reply with words. He nodded in response. “Then why don’t you?” John didn’t say anything. “Is it some kind of vow of silence?” John’s facial expression told us ‘sort of’. “Is it a military thing?” He shook his head. “Do you prefer saying nothing?” He nodded. “Why did you speak then?” He said nothing.

I proposed that we continue our way down the walkway and that John lead the way. He nodded and we all continued our way down the walkway met by no one. And soon, we came to a fork. “Great,” Rosie commented with heavy sarcasm. The left opened out into the desert. Would that route take us to our guide? Maybe he had left us some kind of message or clue? The route to the right would take us into the mountain, something that none of us wanted to do. And the route ahead would take us further along the walkway. I proposed we take the left route, and both of my companions agreed. The walkway to the left had high walls and was therefore cast into shadow.

The sun was setting now, and in the shadows it was cooler. We reached the desert as the sky was darkening and a cool breeze echoed across the sands. Our shadows were long before us, and the whole atmosphere was haunting, accentuated by the search for a mauled corpse. It was silent. The desert made no sound and the mountain and its inhabitants said nothing. Even our footsteps made barely a noise, muffled by the sand. And then, not too far from us, we saw him. He looked larger, with his shadow extended but as we began to differentiate between body and shadow we realised how small he really was. He looked tiny and pathetic here in the dark. And he had been treated severely. Beaten, bloody and savaged. He was a sad example of the power of violence that outsiders were treated with in this civilization. It seemed crueller, even, than the empty city but for the three old men we had visited earlier in the day.

John knelt beside the body. He put his middle and index finger on his right hand together, kissed them, and then gently placed them on our guide’s forehead as a sign of respect.

I looked for our guide’s bag, but it wasn’t there. His murderers had taken it from him and kept it. There was no sign or clue for us. We were as lost as we were before. But then Rosie called us over. She was kneeling by our guide’s right arm, which was outstretched. John and I went to her. She pointed out something written in the sand. We all looked and saw two vertically parallel zigzag lines and three letters: an S, either an E or an F, and an X. We all looked to each other, all of us hoping another would understand. “Is that an E or an F?” I asked.

“I can hardly see what intercourse has got to do with all this,” Rosie replied dryly.

“And I can hardly see how the letters S, F and X are connected and could be a clue,” I said bitterly. Rosie and I glared at each other. “What could the lines mean?”

“I’m no cryptographer, thank you very much!” And we glared at each other again, not breaking eye contact.

“From where I come from, the letters SFX stand for Special Effects in the media industry,” John said, breaking Rosie and myself from our stares. “These lines could be the jaws from the entrance. And so our guide has told us that those jaws are nothing but Special Effects to scare away unwanted visitors. The jaws will do us no harm.”

And so we found ourselves standing in front of the giant mouth of the mountain, each of us quivering with terrified anticipation. John started to walk forward first. I took Rosie’s hand and we followed, dreading what we might find in that darkness...