By Paul Mirabile
My name is Phôs, and for the love of life I have no idea where I am, or how I came to be in this nowhere. I lie on my back, the earth a spongy bed of unusual odours; above me, a narrow, circular vault, where behind a veil of sailing cumuli shine a moon of alabaster and a steady caravels of stars. So narrow is this vision that I feel terribly compressed, as if trapped within some sort of cistern or pit … perhaps a well …
My body suffers no pain. No one has hurt me. I simply lie here surrounded by narrowness, daring not move lest someone or something be alerted to my presence and attack me; or worse still, that I touch something or someone alien to my daily wont. No, better to count the stars. Which I did … until daylight.
It was the azure that woke me, so bright, so cerulean. And the sun, filling my … my prison ? Perhaps I am in a prison and a well to boot ! A very deep well, perhaps twenty or twenty-five metres deep. Around me are scattered broken stones and bones of animals and humans; little leather pouches, too, here and there, which, when I opened a few held the remains of bread, cheese and dry fruit. Several jugs lay broken or chipped near the bleached bones. They must have been thrown or lowered down here: But by who and why ? In one pouch I discovered two apples and several slices of cheese that smelt edible. About to devour them a sudden rustling from behind interrupted my ‘breakfast’. I swung around. A girl! There lay a tiny young girl. Sleeping or dead? No. She was sleeping, her chest rhythmically heaved to some disturbing dream or nightmare. Her little mouth emitted bird-like sounds, and her face — a doll’s face — was streaked with mud, a clown-like contrast to the whiteness of her almond-shaped face.
I dropped an apple in the pouch, crawled over to the girl and shook her gently out of sleep. Her eyes opened in wild astonishment, green eyes staring up at me as if I were a monster. I recoiled a few paces and from that tiny, O-shaped mouth. “Who are you ?” flew out like the twitter of a bird from her.
I stood: “My name is Phôs and we are in some sort of well,” I stammered. “I have no idea why we are here.”
The young girl sat up, a look of incredulity cast a shadow over her face : “A well ? Why do you say a well?”
“Just look up at the blue sky. Just look around you: cold, polished stone, a pungent smell of clayish soil. A soil that seems to have marked your face.” I grinned. She immediately rubbed it off with the sleeve of her thread-bare vest. Her face did indeed resemble that of a living doll.
“My name is Ombra,” the girl said, getting to her feet with some difficulty. She screwed up her eyes, looking hard at me. “Odd really, when I see your face I have a strange feeling that I see mine. Like a tainted mirror.”
I stepped back: “But I don’t know what or who I look like. My face has no fixed image in my mind.”
She laughed feebly.
“Of course it has: almond-shaped green eyes, high cheek bones and forehead, a small, pug-nose and oval mouth. So, if you want an image, I’ve just given you one … mine, more or less! Who knows, you may be my brother!” Ombra smiled, but it soon faded as she glanced at the dark walls. “I’m so hungry, so hungry!”
I hurried to the pouch and took out an apple, a slice of bread and cheese. She devoured it all like a wild animal. I followed suit, helping myself to another pouch of bread and stale scones. Ombra moved closer to me: “The exiled. The criminals. The premature dead have been lowered or thrown into this place,” she whispered gravely, examining the skulls. “These scraps of food ; all these whitened and brittle bones belong to the Forgotten Sinbads, Josephs and Orhans … all those Devoid of Light.”
“But why us Ombra ? I am not a Sinbad or a Joseph or an Orhan ! Have I been exiled ? Am I devoid of light ? And you ?”
“Me,” she giggled dollishly. “A mysterious force has illumined our plight, Phôs. Our circumscribed confinement has drawn us together for some reason … For some unknown mission. And this well, if it very well be a well … Well, it has become our meeting place, perhaps even our final resting place.” Ombra pouted in a very coquettish way.
“No! There is no mission! No mysterious force!” I lashed out furiously, shuddering at my own violence. I regained my composure: “Look, at the top, a halo of greenish glow has formed the coping of the well. That is a good omen, believe me. All we have to do is reach the glowing green.”
“The green ? However can a colour become a sign of salvation ? And even if it were a good omen as you say, how are we ever to reach it ?”
It was a pertinent question. Ombra appeared to be very down-to-earth, perhaps a bit too straight forward for my taste, but nevertheless, a wonderfully sensible person. I myself have always been a bit too optimistic, too whimsical! Perhaps she is my sister after all! Notwithstanding…
I jumped to my feet and carefully began inspecting the texture of the circular walls: smooth, nickel-like silver smooth, like a cylinder. Not one rough stone. Odd really for a well, no rough or broken stones, no chinks or fissures. Every stone as smooth as porcelain. It were as if the whole wall had been glazed or polished. I turned to Ombra, she was crying silently.
Was there no way out then? I stared at my companion with deep sympathy.
“If only we were winged birds. Birds of lyrical tunes twittering out and far above the shadows of the under-world into the celestial rays of the universe above,” Ombra mused dreamily in a whispery voice, wiping dry her rosy-red cheeks.
A sudden deep vibrating sound, perhaps that of a gong, whose rolling undulations filled the well with reverberating tremors, caused us both to tumble to the bony soil where we cupped our ears and grimaced, so loud was the infernal vibrations: once … twice … thrice. The rolling trailed off into the distant twilight sky whose canvas-like backdrop painted a cartoon moon and isles of stars.
“What was that?” Ombra asked, trembling from the tremors of the unearthly sound.
“A gong of some sorts. A sign of night, I suppose. How strange that night should fall so quickly.” I searched out an answer on my companion’s face. There was none. “And who struck that gong?”
“The warden of our keep,” Ombra mourned.
“Warden? Keep? Then you really think we are prisoners?”
She nodded. “I’m sure without being sure. You know, I recall nothing of my being here, nor of my childhood. The past becomes hazy whenever I try to recollect it.” She lay on her back using an empty leather pouch as a pillow.
“Yes, neither do I. My childhood has become nebulous since I found myself lying on my back in this awful boneyard. Only the passing of day and night has any signification for me. Look, Ombra, has night not come upon us so unexpectedly?” The young girl groaned without answering.
So in awe we observed the swimming moon in a dark sea of resplendent, floating stars that gradually lost their splendour, descending into a void that our weary eyes could neither follow nor fathom.
Ombra turned to me: “Water? How are we to drink in this dungeon? Food there is, but water?”
I peered at her in the shifting shadows: “Well, it is a well, I think. Yes, but on the other hand it appears to be a cylinder … “
She sat up, her face now bathed in shadows, although her green eyes shone like embers of a once singing flame: “Do you remember how Joseph[1] survived when his jealous brothers threw him into the well like a sack of rocks ?” Ombra suddenly asked me out of the shadows.
“A passing caravan going to Egypt retrieved him.”
“Yes, like those passing stars above us!” Her voice gathered strength. “And how about Orhan’s Red[2], tossed into a well and thought to be dead?”
“Red was stone dead, but somehow his memory or subconscious outlived his corporeal existence and he was able to narrate his tragic tale,” I narrated.
“Exactly!” Ombra’s voice doubled in tone and volume: “Let us not forget Sinbad the mighty sailor [3]; he would have perished in that bone-filled pit if he hadn’t beaten the other widowers or widows to death, taken their jugs of water and loaves of bread and finally escaped…”
“Sinbad wasn’t imprisoned in a pit or well but in a cave … The Cave of Death,” I added.
She sized me up: “Tell me, Phôs, is there any difference between a well and a cave?” She stood, arms akimbo. “Just set the cave vertically and the well horizontally and there you have it!” Ombra pronounced this platitude with considerable aplomb, and rather pedantically, too. I smiled meekly. “Ah, that was truly a miraculous escape.” she intoned. “But tell me, what about the exiled, those poor creatures dumped into the shadowy folds of death by kings, queens and princes. How did they manage their freedom?”
“They hearkened to the chanting of the hoopoe and espied the dense green rays that streamed into their sorrow from the benevolent sky.”
She laughed and concluded gayly: “Well, we are certainly well-versed on the subject of wells ! Now I really understand our mission.”
“Our mission?” I raised an exasperated eyebrow.
“Because we are so well-versed in wells, so well-informed about those fabulous figures of well adventures and misadventures, it seems that it is now our turn to fill the pages of fabled lore. Don’t you see?” I didn’t. All those stories and figures were literary or fictitious. Ombra and I were certainly not a storied couple. Then again, her vibrant voice did indeed seek to enlist my sympathy.
“Perhaps. But I’m no fabulous figure, believe me.” Ombra giggled so loud that her echo raced up the wall of the well, fading into the reddening dawn.
I sighed, exhausted by all these enigmatic impasses. I wished to lie back and day-dream of green pastures or rye-filled fields. My energetic companion interrupted my drowsiness, but in more subdued tones: “And the dolls, Phôs. We forgot the dolls.”
“The dolls? I know nothing about dolls.”
“Well then let me refresh your memory. Five or six circus-like people found themselves trapped in a cylinder. They had no idea how they had come to be there. One of them, a tiny ballerina, because she was strong and nimble, managed to climb to the top, but once there she toppled into a snowy street like a tiny ballerina doll; a doll with tears running down its plastic-red cheeks.” I frowned at this foolish doll narrative, remarkable though it be. I lay back and ruminated our predicament.
I strained to conjure up one clear image of my past life, hoping to glimpse a scene or two. Nothing. Only bits of knowledge that I must have learnt at school, promptly awakened by Ombra’s unusual questioning. And now, here I am, an unfortunate soul without a history at all. I turned my head to my companion: Was she meditating upon her own amnesia?
Dawn … midday … night sheathed in moonlight were bright. No gong to usher in the twilight! Soon, however, blackness cloaked us as sleep overcame our troubled spirits and souls.
Daylight burst into our confinement like a shower of phosphorescence. I jumped up, mouth parched, eyes puffy from a restless, dream-filled night. I pricked up my ears: to my left, high up on the wall, a dripping, slipping, slithering sound filled my imagination with confused hope. I placed my hands on the smooth stone and through my fingers small runnels of water slipped. Yes, two or three runnels trickled down ever so slowly from between the stones midway up the well wall. I licked the smooth stone, lapping it up as best I could. Then I ran to Ombra, shook her awake and led her to the trickling runnels. She too licked the wall, sating her thirst savagely, heaving and panting with each lap licked. We were saved … For the moment …
I scoured about the bones and pouches and found some more bread, cheese and dried fruit. Had they been lowered during the night ? Our circumstances had become terribly enigmatic …
As we munched on our meagre breakfast, the violet of dawn grew bluer and bluer, the rays of the sun, hotter and hotter. They warmed our chilly bones. Glancing up at the coping, I again espied that green glow encircling it. A halo of throbbing green. Odd that light, I mused to myself as Ombra washed her face with the clear dripping water. That must be a sign … I’m sure of it ! All of a sudden that hellish roll of the gong buffeted us from left to right: once … twice … thrice … Then it stopped as suddenly as it began. Why had it rolled at dawn? There must be some logic to that vibrating roll! Was the gong-beater confusing us purposely by confounding the signs?
“Are we not in hell?” queried Ombra, refreshed after her ‘morning wash’. “That gong may be the Devil’s instrument to enlighten us on our former faults or delinquencies.”
“Nonsense! What faults or delinquencies? And why Hell, what have we been punished for? Are we a pair of abject criminals? Do we deserve such inhuman treatment?” I responded with more questions.
Ombra shrugged her shoulders, searching about the well for more titbits.
“How can you be sure since your past remains in some sort of veiled unknowingness?” she said. I clenched my fists in contained anger. Ombra responded in an eerie, hollow voice: “The exiled. The forgotten. The unfortunates.” She keened in a soothing liturgical rhythm. I suppressed a desire to jolt her out of that sullen, dull, monotonous dirge. But I ignored that and sat down to brood over our unfair dilemma.
That day was spent poking about pouches and bones, wordless, soundless, helpless, both of us wrapped up in his and her inner world of phantasy and fugitive illusions.
The inky obscurity of night succeeded the bluish light of day. Rosy stars waned. The silver moon waxed. So night after night, day after day we endured our imprisoned existence, two desperate souls forgotten by the outside world. Neither of us had family or friends to rescue us. Neither of us could recollect our past lives, good or bad, no matter how hard we plumbed our memories. It were as if the present alone existed; the past submerged in Lethe’s watery vapours; the future, a glimmer of green light swallowed up daily by the darkling evening tide.
Then it happened! My hands under my head, observing the rotating vault of night, I immediately sat up, for something had caught my eye. Yes, the rays of the moon, now white, now yellowish, now green fell upon several uneven and jutting stones on one side of the well wall; stones fissured, too, whose cleaved spaces allowed fingers to grasp, feet to prod and cling. Exalted, I mentally marked each and every stone of deliverance as the green slipped away into darkness.
At dawn, all agog, I shook Ombra awake and excitedly related my fabulous discovery. And although the uneven, chinked stones could no longer be seen with the naked eye, I had memorised their placements on the wall.
“But how are we to reach them so high up?” Ombra lamented.
“Not we, but you! You alone, Ombra, will make the climb. You, Ombra, will deliver us from this infamy. Your tiny, nimble fingers and feet will slip into those cleaved stones and fissured spaces. Mine are much too big. You will shimmy up that wall and once at the top find rope and get me out. Or you can run for help. Where there is a well there is a village, no?” I was in a state of great excitement, contagious indeed, because Ombra’s face showed signs of warming up to my plan; a face that now beamed with renewed hope, the white of her cheeks crimsoning.
“The plot of our mission is thickening,” Ombra chuckled in a playful tone. “But how are we to reach those first stones?” She looked up and sighed. Suddenly that devilish gong sounded, sending us to the walls where we cupped our ears until once … twice … thrice… the undulating vibrations gradually trailed off, leaving behind a strange humming that quivered within the circumferential stones of the well.
In a flash I had the solution : ‘Ombra, get up on my shoulders, be quick. I’ll lift you up to the first stones and there you can manage on your own, I’m sure of it!”
No sooner was it said than done …
Upon my shoulders, then holding her feet with the palms of my hands Ombra reached the first jutting stones. From there, the agile Ombra climbed, stretching her unusually long arms towards the height of the other fissured stones. She grasped them like a professional alpinist, and with a nimbleness that amazed me, my companion slowly but surely zig-zagged her way from left to right, right to left, clambering ever higher. I cried out encouragement after encouragement as she crept up that wall like a bat, crawling and slithering and creeping. Hours and hours, too, crept by, or so I thought. As Ombra struggled ever upwards, stretching herself towards those liberating stones, seeking them with a strained, panting excitement, I had a weird vision of her body joints stretching like a series of elastic-bands, elongating in some doll-like dislocation. Was I hallucinating ? Her forearms and biceps appeared to draw out then draw in at the elbow with each thrust upwards. Her calves and thighs, too, protracted and contracted at the knee-caps with each salvaging step. I rubbed my eyes to rid myself of these burlesque images.
“Ombra! Ombra! Have you reached the top? What do you see?” I yelled out far, far below, my voice, hollow like a death rattle.
At this point, the omnisceint narrator intervenes for the faraway Phôs had no idea what his companion had seen or felt as she clung to the green glowing coping of the well. There the exhausted young girl, mouth agape, set her tear-welling eyes on a gigantic void! Yes, their well lay in the middle of nothing! It was a tower some hundreds of metres above … above what she could neither discern nor imagine. No mountain of mirth. No plain of pleasure. No forest of festivity barred the tears from rolling down her crimson-coloured cheeks. Speechless she clung, peering into nothing, only an infinite, horizonless void. The poor girl, overcome by such a tragic spectacle, involuntarily swung a leg over the now greenless coping, and like a broken doll let herself drop, falling … falling into the clamorous silence of the black, bottomless void.
As to Phôs, his arms finally drooped in exhaustion. The green of the coping had long since vanished into night and his companion with it. There was no sign of Ombra …
He stood crestfallen, utterly alone, the expectancy of escape waxing as a dense darkness stole upon him like a shroud of death …
[1] Genesis 37-50 (The Torah or First Testament).
[2] From Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red, 1998.
[3] In Arabian Nights, The Viking Press, 1952. pp. 428-429.
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Paul Mirabile is a retired professor of philology now living in France. He has published mostly academic works centred on philology, history, pedagogy and religion. He has also published stories of his travels throughout Asia, where he spent thirty years.
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