The Mortality Files- A Surface Dweller's Tale, Part 4: Back to the Canyon
The highway seemed shorter than I’d remembered, but then, everything seemed smaller on the surface now, ever since I’d been down below those years before.
Down there, I had met a giant— just one— but I got the distinct impression that there were more like him deep inside the planet, giants even bigger than Malcombish, with plenty of room to stomp around and build things like flying trains and cars.
Yes, I had seen a flying train down there. It was the sight of that train which put everything into dizzying perspective while I was inside the planet, when I realized that there were advanced civilizations down there, and when I realized that I knew nothing about the massive orb that I was born upon.
I was like a tiny spider on the roof of a building-- a roof which seemed to stretch for miles and miles-- and a roof which I could never hope to explore fully. Now, imagine discovering that building below to be six-hundred stories tall, with countless rooms and halls, strewn with elevators and escalators, laboratories and restaurants, all bustling with humans of all different sizes.
Three years had passed since I had accidentally found my way inside of the planet, and in that three years I had spent countless hours in libraries and bookstores, searching for information about my world.
It was no wonder that us surface-dwellers knew nothing about the interior of the planet-- we had been conditioned to fear the underworld, and both science and religion had trained us to ignore the evidence, or to treat that evidence as fantasy.
From UFO's to bigfoot, elves and pixies, I was taken on a ride through literature which begged me to change my story to one of fantasy, so that I could tell the world what I'd seen without sounding completely crazy.
It seemed to me that Dante's Inferno came close to describing that place below, and while disguised as fiction, those who chose to believe in the world below would find that the illustrated version of Dante's story left little to the imagination.
If the average surface-dweller were to dream of exploring the underworld, they would have to be fearless adventurers, ready to be ridiculed upon their return to the surface. Indeed, it was that fear of ridicule which kept me from sharing this tale, until now.
Now, I automatically translate every tale of space aliens and flying saucers into a hollow Earth phenomena, since I've never been to outer space, and don't know anyone who has. There is space below-- lots of it-- and the ancient structures that I'd seen down there forced me to reconsider every piece of history that I'd ever heard.
One being which haunted the UFO lore caught my attention anew; the little grey alien. These were always presumed to originate from some other faraway planet, and it was easy enough to expand on such legends, since the topic is so little understood. This would be one of the first things that I would ask Malcombish the giant, if I could find him again. I had a lot of questions for Malcombish!
The giant, having lived his entire life inside the Earth, had no way to estimate his own age, and even had suggested that my curiosity about his age was caused by an "obsession with time." It was a timeless world down there, with no obvious way to measure the days or years, and Malcombish laughed at my question as if I had asked him how many seconds he had been living, or how many mugs of ale he had drank in his lifetime.
The three years that had passed since I'd seen Malcombish were long for me, though. For at least a year after that visit, I was frazzled and scattered, and there were times when I had desperately tried to pretend that the whole thing had been a dream.
Malcombish! I had memorized his boyish face and curious clothing while I was there. His metallic shirt and colorful silken scarf, so alien to me then, had settled into my mind as the memories of a friend, but his giant features were beginning to fade from my vision now. I longed to see him again, if not just to find the joy of seeing an old friend, but to prove to myself, beyond doubt, that I had actually had the experience under the red canyon of the desert.
The rocks around me had indeed turned red, and as I approached Sedona, I remembered my terror, and the idea of going back down there seemed, again, insane. This terror had kept me away from the desert for long enough, though. It was time to find out if it was insanity or truth, whether I had imagined the whole thing, or if it had actually happened.
I put on the hat, and started up the canyon towards the ravine where I had entered the Earth three years before. Everything looked the same on the surface. Easing up the rocks, I wasn't surprised to see the two squirrels ahead, again scampering up the rocks as if leading me to the door. The pinkish wall on the left appeared, just as I remembered it, and the moment I stopped, a voice came into my head, the voice of Malcombish.
"Sun Man! I knew you would be back!"
photos above are mine, featuring illustrations by Gustave Doré from Dante's Inferno
thanks for reading along, and for previous chapters of this story, see below:
https://steemit.com/writing/@therealpaul/the-mortality-files-a-surface-dweller-s-tale
https://steemit.com/writing/@therealpaul/the-mortality-files-a-surface-dweller-s-tale-part-2-the-hat
Men does not even see 1/10th of what is here on the planet earth.
There is so much to discover, inside and outside.
But first, we must heal ourselves, and then learn to see.
That's for sure, even the oceans alone are still untouched-- a big place!
I hope you'll be able to tell us why science and religion are so anxious at convincing that the inside is something to be feared and avoided at all costs and that it's something more worthwhile than "we don't understand it and it's scary therefore it must be bad" XD
Since this is written as fictional events, then I would think that if there were an advanced, ancient civilization living inside of the planet with flying cars and trains, then if such things became commonly known, our science and religion would appear to be inept comparatively. It would explain a few things.
It would. I still don't understand that mentality :|