Xhantu

Chapter 10 of Microcosmia

Microcosmia

Chapter 10

Xhantu

Old Road was rough on Isis’s suspension, torture for her injured passenger, and murder on her driver’s nerves. Vane had driven hard for ten minutes with an expression cut in stone. Now his knuckles were white on the wheel, his head scrunched squarely between his shoulders. His feet danced on the pedals, while on the passenger-side a baritone yelp accompanied each spine-jarring crash. Half of Vane's attention clung desperately to the rough distractions of the road. The other half gradually accepted the unthinkable: he was heading home empty-handed. When he finally acknowledged it, in his heart as well as in his head, the realization was like running into a wall. Vane’s entire body went rigid. His ramrod arms slammed his back against the seat. His feet hit the brake and gas simultaneously.

The resulting sidewinder stalled the Land Rover facing south. A low cloud of hot dust rolled over them. Mudhead, tripping but still in pain, leaned into the swirling haze and heaved.

Vane hollered something unprintable, punched the dash, kicked the firewall. He threw out a shoulder trying to tear off the side-view mirror. Finally he fired Isis back up and spun her through a radical arc. When she stalled again he sat glaring at Massawa, adrenaline clouding his vision. He’d lost it. Everything. He howled out his anguish and restarted the engine. Vane grittily steered the Rover homeward. He halted and childishly revved the engine in neutral, facing Mamuset and failure.

Loser. Just like always. He jammed into first and whirled round and round in a broadening circle; cursing Franco, cursing Massawa, cursing himself. Isis died again, this time facing a wide empty desert in the eye of a fading dust tornado.

Mudhead kept right on spinning. “No…more…Bossma…”

Vane repeatedly pounded his forehead on the wheel, spewing a different four-letter word with each impact. The poundings tapered to palliative contacts. Vane massaged his temple on the wheel until his nose caught on the horn plate.

“Now what?” he muttered.

Mudhead leaned out the side again. When it was over Vane hauled him back in and grabbed a couple of beers. The African shook his head and shoved a handful of ice in his mouth.

“How’s the paw?”

Mudhead raised the mangled hand, now swollen to the girth of a football. His eyes were streaming. “Better.” He eased it into the ice chest and poured out a mouthful of Tylenol, then decided to go for the beer after all. He nodded a few times at the endless waste.

“Mecca’s behind you,” Vane noted.

Mudhead half-turned. “Whatever. Bossman remind Mudahid nod right way tomorrow.” He knocked back the caps and sucked the bottle dry.

Speaking as much to himself as to his partner, Vane mumbled, “I can’t go home without supplies. I just can’t! There wasn’t enough on those trucks to get everybody through the day.” He slowly motored along, still mumbling, letting the machine drive itself. “It’s mine…mine…that fu…that…damn that rip-off! I’ve got to get it back…got to…maybe if I called…maybe if I just…no, no, no, they’d never break through in time.”

He wasn’t the only one rambling. Mudhead’s rap was all about masks and caves, pools and dwarves. That would be the morphine talking. Vane shook his head hard as he drove, trying to toss out the grim image of a crater filled with dead. The stupid Afar trusted him way too much; they’d probably die waiting on him. The doctors and volunteers would be hip enough to beat a retreat in the buses and trucks. They might even try to organize some kind of rescue work through the government. But it would be too little too late; Mamuset would end up like Preston’s death hole. Vane briefly pondered a cash ransom for his goods, knowing Honey would bend the Banke as far as he demanded. In the same breath he acknowledged the stakes. Franco wasn’t after money. He was after Cristian Vane.

“What,” he wailed, “what do I effing do?

Mudhead did his best to answer, using babbled narrative about some nonsensical desert shaman better able to address the pangs of Vane’s conscience. After listening a while he decided Mudhead wasn’t out of his skull after all, but was in fact describing in some detail a sightless wise man, or spirit-healer, who lived in the Danakil in a big underground stone house.

Once he had a few beers in his bloodstream, Vane was able to embrace the idea of meeting Xhantu, Mudhead’s fabulous wise man. It was that or go out of his mind. Mudhead described the wizard’s lair as situated some thirty miles southeast of Mamuset. There was plenty of gas in the tank. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock. He followed Mudhead’s basic directions automatically, his mind half on the desert and half on his friend’s respectful tale.

This is the history Mudhead related, in broken English so drug-laden Vane got a contact high just trying to follow:

Xhantu was born in Cairo in 1905, the illegitimate son of a wealthy industrialist widower. As a child, the future blind seer survived a mild flirtation with the polio virus, along with the first taste of what would become chronic bronchitis. These diseases produced a stunted, hobbling boy who broke out in fevers at the least change in weather. He was far too sickly for adventure, and far too subdued for friends.

On his tenth birthday he was kidnapped by elements of Al-Shalek and held for ransom over six long terrible days. Throughout that period the father was rigorously pressured by the Egyptian government to stall; the State Department was convinced the group harbored a member of the terrorist organization Allâh Râm Allâh. Each day the kidnappers produced evidence of greater tortures inflicted upon the son, rapidly driving the father to depression, to drink, and to madness; their final ploy being a threat to pluck out the boy’s eyes if payment was not made on that sixth night. The hysterical father, fortune in hand, was apprehended halfway to the dropoff site by a chilly contingent of military police. Flanked by Army jeeps, he was escorted home clutching a stamped and endorsed State Department certificate assuring him the kidnappers were all but captured, and his son a heartbeat from release. When a courier arrived the next day bearing a package containing the boy’s eyeballs, the father took his own life with a single pistol shot through the roof of the mouth. The following evening, triumphant Egyptian police stormed and torched the kidnappers’ hideout, resulting in the child being burned over sixty-five percent of his body. But he survived a year of intensive care in a Port Said hospital and, upon his release, was adopted by an American husband-and-wife team assigned to a dig at Menat Khufu.

He was a hideously deformed child. The mouth was a lax aperture, the nose and ears burned to shapeless nubs, the facial skin like red rubber slag. Refusing to speak a word, he was considered mute by his adoptive parents and their friends, though specialists could find no evidence of long-term damage to organs of speech. Through thrashing fits, he made plain his refusal to accept prosthetic eyes, eye patches, or half-mask. Once the shock and horror had abated, the new mother and father came to love him just as he was, gaping eye sockets and all.

Xhantu’s parents belonged to a brilliant circle. Their awarded home in Cairo University was the focus of long and regular get-togethers featuring physicists, historians, linguists, and philosophers. The boy was spoon-fed the English language. He was tended like a precious alien weed. He became the passion and darling of all: these good people attained their highest pleasure tutoring him in their various fields, by way of lectures bursting with affection, erudition, and wit. The young student would sit quietly in their midst, his cocked head ratcheting voice-to-voice. Rather than regale him with bedtime stories, his parents took turns reading aloud the Great Books of the Western World, followed by volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica in alphabetical order. A coddled prisoner throughout his teens, the young man was halfway through the letter W when he simply walked off campus and out into the real world, never to return.

He felt his way as he went. As a teen he’d compensated with a passion for the tactile; tenderly fingering and toeing clothes and household objects, attaining greater sensitivity through experience. His supreme interest was in fabrics of complex weave, and in intricate curios brought in as presents by friends of the family. There was much to explore in the streets and storefronts of Cairo.

This strange eyeless beggar eventually made his way into the desert, surviving Egypt, Sudan, Kenya, and Ethiopia by drifting tribe-to-tribe, dispensing Western wisdom in exchange for supplies and small handmade articles of great intricacy. Over the decades he attained a mythical status and the common appellation Xhantu, a polyglot description meaning, roughly, “Sees Blind.”

When he reached extreme old age he was given, by grateful Amharic pastoralists, a female albino dwarf camel and a prized two-wheeled laminated wooden cart. The old man was then ushered, with great honors, into the Danakil to die, his little red cart brimming with victuals, treasured personal artifacts, and scores of many-faced items ceremoniously donated by emissaries from tribes as distant as Tanzania and the Congo.

The thirsting camel, named Pegasus by Xhantu, pulled cart and master up a rocky table and down a spiral chimney into a labyrinth formed by underground rivers last active during the late Tertiary. Pegasus drew Xhantu through a great cavern to a small artesian pool, and thereafter the two lived peacefully in an abutting cave, the camel growing old while Xhantu ordered his learning into extended meditations. When supplies were low, the quirky little spectacle of camel, cart, and blind man would be seen meandering tribally, dispensing and collecting. Xhantu’s home became a kind of shrine, where carefully-screened tribesmen and the occasional city-dweller were directed for counsel and tutoring. Mudhead himself came upon the sage this way, referred by a frustrated mullah during his stormy Ramadan withdrawal. Having learnt of the old man’s penchant for the tactilely complex, Mudhead arrived with an elaborately engraved bamboo-and-ivory abacus. The gift was an instant hit with the sage.

Xhantu advised Mudhead to flow: if he was moved by something, he was to move with it. If an ideology ran against his grain, he would be a fool to spend his life attempting to conform.

The sage wanted Mudhead--indeed he wanted all healthy individuals--to focus on Virtue, believing there would be much less Vice in the world if Vice was much less trumpeted. “Vice” meant all qualities attractive to the sensual, or reactive mind, as opposed to those ideals appealing to the analytical, or objective mind. Aware of the flaws inherent in even well-meaning pursuits, Xhantu directed seekers to not embrace religions and philosophies whole, but to embrace their Ascendant Virtues. He worshipped the abstraction “Virtue” as the masses worship the abstraction “God.” He simply felt no need to anthropomorphize it.

Mudhead, winding down his story in the bouncing Land Rover, rolled sluggishly with the terrain, his broken right hand still submerged in ice. He appeared free of pain, but the bumpy ride and overmedication made him certain one minute and lost the next. Eventually he began to recognize landmarks; outcroppings and depressions that, to Vane, appeared identical to their background. Then, in the absolute middle of Nowhere, Mudhead rose half out of his seat to indicate a strange little snowflake balanced on a rounded, flat-capped rocky rise. Through his binoculars Vane made out a scrawny white camel, perhaps three feet high at the shoulder, perched leaning on a stepped shelf. In the lenses it was no larger than a hamster. Mudhead waved his good hand at a pass in the rocks, and Vane hammered on through to a barely navigable foot trail. The trail continued up the rise, rolling and twisting to the summit. It was one of those natural courses that seem ingeniously designed to test a young man’s courage and equipment, and Vane was no exception to this call. He revved the engine hard, his palm itching on the gearshift’s crown. In response, the camel’s tiny white head popped out above the shelf. Vane clearly discerned the pink of its eyes. It began making little barking sounds, like an asthmatic Pekingese.

He hit the path full-bore, stomping accelerator and clutch like double bass drums, ever on the lip of disaster. After a complete circuit, the path ended twenty feet above where they’d started. Mudhead opened his eyes and caught his breath. In a minute he swung back his good arm and grabbed a bag of sweetened dates. He opened the bag with his teeth. “Bossman,” he gasped, “carry goodie box.” Vane hefted the remaining beer under one arm, the box full of cigarettes, snacks, and sweetmeats in the other. The African approached the little camel crooning, honey-dipped dates overflowing his outstretched left palm. “Hello again, Peggy. Peggy remember Mudahid?” The camel dropped her head. Her nostrils quivered while one eye metronomically followed the gently rocking hand. “Peggy good girl.” The muzzle stretched forward, the lips writhed, the dates vanished. Mudhead patted her nappy white head. “Party time now, sweetheart. Bossman bring Oreo.”

Vane had to mind his fingers while shoveling Pegasus Ho-Hos and Ruffles; the animal was in a state of gustatory ecstasy. When at last he turned away he was just in time to see his friend being screwed into the ground. He walked over curiously and peered down. Mudhead was gingerly descending a rough spiral staircase in the rock. The interior appeared inky black, but as Vane followed him down the darkness gradually dissolved, becoming a restful twilight at the swept stone floor. The caverns they were nearing were immense; the cave he and Mudhead now occupied was more of an antechamber, leading into the black depths of a much broader hall to their right. Numerous small ceiling fissures illuminated the cave, emitting slender beams that struck the walls and floor at various angles. The men waited patiently, letting their eyes adjust. Someone, Mudhead’s sage apparently, had draped the rock walls with colorfully dyed tapestries, and arranged native artifacts and objets d’art upon a series of homemade tables and shelves scattered amid furniture created out of old crates, straw, and blankets. Vane found himself closely admiring a Karamojong ceremonial headdress of human hair and ostrich feathers, a few oddly-stitched cloths from Madagascar, and an ornate divination staff from Mozambique. There were funerary figures, necklaces, an Angolan thumb piano, a Maori talisman, even an intact Maasai shield. All works had been showcased for their intricate nature, and were very carefully kept. A far corner contained a small thatched hut modeled on Amharic homes, but with an outsize door cut in its facing wall. Vane, reminded of a doghouse, remembered the little albino camel and smiled. There was an oddness about the texture of the thatch. On closer inspection he perceived that fibers had been closely braided, and the braids interwoven. The amount of painstaking work involved struck him as mind-numbing.

“A nasty fracture,” piped a voice behind him. “Or perhaps merely a bad sprain?” It was the voice of a wizened child.

“Whole hand broke,” Mudhead grunted. “But scooterman bring magic bag. No more pain.”

Vane half-turned to see a figure so tiny it might have been a bit of washing tossed on a chair, almost smothered in an undersized version of the Afar sanafil. The little man’s deformed fingers were exploring Mudhead’s swollen hand, seeming to hover rather than contact. Despite his friend’s straightforward description, Vane was absolutely unprepared for the monstrosity he was facing. Xhantu’s gaunt hairless skull and mooning eye sockets were exactly reminiscent of the skeletal remains popularly portrayed on pirate flags and poison labels. As the old man rose delicately the intrepid American, much to his dishonor, instinctively retreated a step. A hand like an anorexic spider found his forearm. Vane forced himself to look down, directly into that taut, ruined face. In the dimness the dark orbits seemed as prominent as a fly’s eyes. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a pair of wispy antennae waving inquisitively.

“Bad news and good,” came the tiny voice. “You bring a friend.” Turning back to Mudhead, the sage swiveled his whole frame rather than just his head. He couldn’t have weighed more than sixty pounds.

Vane self-consciously rummaged through his pockets and came up with his beloved Swiss Army knife. He nudged it forward until it brushed the back of Xhantu’s hovering hand. “Um, this is a gift. From me.”

The warped hand revolved until Vane’s knife was cradled in the creased old palm. Xhantu’s head ratcheted in a heavenward arc, his chin thrust toward the tool, while his other hand inspected the knife’s every curve. His fingertips studied the emblem dreamily. Long yellow nails found, extracted, examined, and repositioned the implements one by one. “A most intricate and considerate token.”

The man from the States relaxed. “Vane. Cristian Vane. I’m from the States.”

“Ah.”

“Bossman big problem Eritrea.”

“Ah?”

“No.” Vane shook his head. “Uh-uh. Not with the country directly. My problem’s one of her renegades. I really don’t think the Eritrean government knows what he’s up to.”

Grimacing deeply, Mudhead carefully wagged his broken hand. “This matter war!”

“Ah! And, Mr. Vane, what is the nature of this rapscallion’s offense?”

“Stole all my goods. Everything. Warehouses stocked with food and supplies, soil regenerators, parts in plastic, steel, aluminum. You name it, he glommed it.”

The sage silently clapped his hands. “So it is you! Mr. Vane, I have received much news of your endeavors. Intriguing news, inspiring news. It has become one of my favorite treats to humbly envision your great work in its completion.”

Vane sighed histrionically and muttered, “Then get comfortable.” He checked himself. “Sorry, Mr. Zantoo. I don’t mean to be rude.”

Xhantu inclined his head toward a central arrangement of overstuffed homemade furniture. “Please.”

Vane buried his butt in blankets and straw. Mudhead passed round the beer and snacks. Their tiny host gushed politely over the goodies and gratefully sipped his Lowenbrau. Pegasus came clattering down the spiral chute at the sound of Mudhead ripping open a two-pound bag of Chips Ahoy. She stopped just short of bowling him over, nipped the bag from his good hand, and vanished inside her little thatched house. The visitors laughed. Xhantu smiled uncertainly. The ice was broken; Vane explained his situation between swallows.

Xhantu had no need to ruminate. “It is imperative you retrieve your supplies at once. Were this a matter of pride, or of property for property’s sake, I would doubtless counsel otherwise. But this is not about you or your goods, nor is it about your vile colonel. It is about your many dependents, and about placing responsibility above ego.” Xhantu’s head rolled back and his gummy mouth fell open. Suddenly he was smiling like a child digging into ice cream. “What a marvelous operation! How audacious! To in fact construct a Utopia from scratch--and with mathematics for a foundation! You are a rare man, my friend, a rare man indeed.”

Vane shrugged uncomfortably. “Well, sir, not everybody gets my opportunity. If I’m a rare man it’s because I’m a lucky one.”

The sage shook his head, still marveling. “And even rarer for possessing the gift of humility. Such a gift is not shared by small men. A truly small man, in your most enviable position, would be interested in others only for their capacity to be dazzled.”

Vane shrugged again. He shifted about in his seat while carefully sweeping straw back under the chair’s fleece blanket. A schoolboy called on to speak, he froze dead in place and studied his clasped hands. The sage appeared to be deciphering each awkward realignment of human tissue. When he spoke again it was with the exaggerated clarity of a guarded therapist. “That small man would strut and preen. The universe would pale by his ego. He would shower his mother with jewels, impress his friends with gifts of expensive automobiles, and make certain he was never seen without a curvaceous young starlet on his arm.” He cocked his head in the manner of a man listening intently. “You like automobiles, Mr. Vane, and lovely young women? Have you no mother to impress?”

Vane looked back up. “Some. Yes. And definitely no. This is all incidental to my problem, Mr. Zantoo.”

“I would venture a guess--and please do not take offense--that you also have no deity to impress.”

“All…” Mudhead mumbled, slumped in a loveseat-sized heap to Vane’s right, “everything…dust in wind.”

Vane ignored him. “I’m not stupid, sir.”

Xhantu nodded respectfully. “May I then assume your philanthropic project serves as a surrogate for some or all of the above? And that, in your magnanimity, you are relieving yourself of the guilt often accompanying tremendous wealth?”

“Not a bit of it,” Vane said flatly. “It’s the right thing to do under the circumstances. Stick me in the unemployment line, and I seriously doubt I’ll be dreaming so big.”

“And these people in Mamuset? Do you not feel great compassion for their plight? Do you not take their hurts to heart? Could it be that they represent family to you, and that their happiness redounds to your self-esteem?”

Vane got to his feet. The prying little monster was beginning to bug him. He said brusquely, “I just really don’t know,” and grabbed a bottle from the case cradled in his unconscious friend’s lap. He aggressively popped the cap with an opener on his key chain. “I guess.” After two minutes of furious contemplation he said equably, “If so, then no more so than any other population in any other part of the planet. These people are no more important to me, intimately, than I to them.” He nodded and took a long drink, nodded again. “The principle’s the thing.”

“Then sir,” the sage said gravely, “it would appear you are afflicted with the dread disease microcosmia.”

“How’s that?”

“It is a sickness,” Xhantu said, “or perhaps a mood. A life-mood. It means abhorrence of the microcosmic mentality, or, more accurately, abhorrence of taking worldliness seriously. Do not bother looking it up, as it is not a plaint of the herd. It is what eats away at sensitive, intelligent men repulsed by the meaninglessness of the real world. Such unfortunates are born with wounded souls. Rather than lock horns over possessions real and imagined like normal, healthy men, they pass their lives brooding and dreaming, allergic to the crowd. Microcosmiacs are, by definition, compelled to extrapolate.” Xhantu paused for emphasis. “It is one of the great tragedies of life, Mr. Vane, perhaps the supreme tragedy, that a man cannot know all that men have learned. The human mind is a near-infinite reservoir, capable of almost continuous analysis and retention. There simply is not enough time. One might learn a simple fact concerning a minor culture during an undistinguished epoch, and his mind, always active and venturous, will dissect that item, and erupt with unlimited related questions and possible answers--enough new self-generated input to send his poor brain forever reeling into shifting realms of light and shadow. But with what delight! No greater gift could nature provide her poor student than the ability to ruminate, to dwell, to envision.

“There is a kind of projector, Mr. Vane, far more wonderful than any in your famous Hollywood, that exists within the crania of all creative and ruminative men. A man successfully freed from the bondage of worldly concerns is a man sitting before a glorious and ever-changing screen, with speculation nestled in his lap like the most domesticated of Siamese. Greater, far greater, than knowing is the ongoing tremor of wondering. Once one has learned to wonder, one can do no else.”

Vane suppressed a yawn. “The wealthy, Mr. Zantoo, ponder no less attentively than the poor.”

“Touche,” Xhantu said. “Relax, Mr. Vane. Your wealth notwithstanding, no one is accusing you of being rich. Rich men are never afflicted with microcosmia. They are far too preoccupied with profits and losses. No matter how high they may ascend on the ladder, they are always looking up to see whose rear end they must bite in order to claim the next rung, then looking back down to see whose teeth are testing their own precious behinds. No, my friend. You are poorer than they.” His head drooped sadly. “That top rung could be yours.”

Vane had to pinch himself to remain standing. It was so dark and cool in the cave--for a moment he had the disturbing feeling Xhantu was trying to mesmerize him with all this underground psychobabble. He struggled to remain on-topic. “I’ve seen what people will do for money, sir. I may be a fool, but I’m not a masochist.”

“Microcosmia,” Xhantu hummed, swinging an erect forefinger to the left, “is an illness as real as masochism.” He swung that same forefinger to the right, then brought it to his lips, his voice dropping accordingly. “Perhaps the sufferer,” he whispered, “has witnessed an act of cold-heartedness too intense to appreciate maturely. Or perhaps this individual, of a sudden insight, has realized the full measure of his insignificance in the universe. He has been…jolted!” Vane’s eyes popped back open. “The damage,” Xhantu declared, “has been done!” Again his voice fell, and again Vane’s eyelids drooped. “Now the microcosmiac becomes progressively moody, and his basic urges go by the wayside. His ego withers. He grows very…soulful.” For a while there was nothing to be heard but Mudhead’s snores. Xhantu resumed speaking in a conversational tone, as though no pause in his monologue had occurred. “Those broken by microcosmia, Mr. Vane, are our genuine artists, our genuine philosophers, and our genuine philanthropists.” He shrugged. “If they are in my corner of the world, they eventually come to me.”

Vane shook himself. “Sir, the only thing genuine about me is my stupidity. I’m a big-time loser, even with every card going my way.” He sighed deeply. “But I didn’t come looking for anybody. This trip was totally spontaneous.”

Once more the sage cocked his head, this time until it was nearly parallel with his shoulder. “Spontaneous…” he muttered. Then, speaking as much to himself as to Vane: “You really believe this.” For a moment he was lost for words. “Sir…you are no loser! Your actions speak for themselves. You possess a priceless quality, a quality the crowd can ape but never carry. Mr. Vane, you are a man of vision.”

Vane barked with laughter. “Vision? Catch me on a bad day, Mr. Zantoo. Better yet, watch what happens when I get my hands on a certain bombastic Eritrean pirate.”

“You sell yourself short.” Xhantu folded his hands behind his back. As though encouraging the shyest of prodigies, he explained, “You are no ordinary man. An ordinary man would not reach.

“The ordinary man, sir, exists as the voluntary prisoner of a bubble defined by his senses, in a universe stretching precisely as far as his eyes can see. It is a flat universe, covered by a dome alternately painted black and painted blue. If he moves a mile, if he moves a thousand miles, the dome rolls right along with him. Time is an event that began upon his birth, and will continue, notwithstanding a minor speed bump called Death, into a groundlessly assumed, yet blindly and wholly accepted, hereafter. And humankind? An odd assortment of ingrates. A very few, the Good Ones, are familiar. They are to be prized, trusted, and protected. Very many more are misguided strangers, ignorant of our ordinary man’s intrinsic superiority. They must all be reminded, ad infinitum, that they are either guests or trespassers in his bubble.”

Vane folded his arms across his chest. “Mr. Zantoo, each man is a prisoner, one way or another. Maybe of his circumstances, maybe only of his imagination. And a man’s bubble can be anywhere. It can be a crater in the desert.” He briefly released one arm for a casual cave-wide gesture. The sage’s face followed the movement like a cat’s. “It can even be made of stone. We’re all ordinary men. The entire planet’s a bubble; the same old program year to year and culture to culture. There truly is ‘nothing new under the sun’.”

“Ah! But there are flowers rare and sublime! There are individuals, Mr. Vane, who do not run in place; men dissatisfied with the status quo. Men who realize that an existence devoted to appetites and egos is an insult to the gift of life. And, on excruciatingly rare occasions, fate produces an individual positioned to exalt that gift.”

Vane unfolded his arms to make a damping motion with his hands. “You’re embarrassing me, sir. I’m very sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not that aspiring man. Nor am I a particularly inspired one.”

“I am not disappointed. Your openness and modesty fully embrace my expectation.” He turned and, proceeding with extreme confidence, drifted across the cave’s floor toward the arch leading into the main cavern. “Come with me.”

The cavern was vast as an indoor stadium, but with a ceiling averaging only a dozen feet above floor level. It was wonderfully ventilated, the rock actually cool to the touch. Scores of narrow ceiling flues created a crazy cathedral laced with thin columns of sunlight standing at various angles. The floor dropped off at the east wall, producing a deep stone hollow containing ten feet of clear water. The pool’s surface was lit by a pair of these flues, the beams poised like crossed swords.

Vane found himself nodding with an envy strange for a billionaire. “Mister Zantoo, I tip my hat to you. A water hole in the middle of the desert in a dark cool cave. You’ve got it made.” His nod went on with increasing vigor. “Yes sir! Yep. That’s how I want to go out, man.”

“Pardon?”

“When I die. Just submerge me in the dark surrounded by endless stone, a zillion miles away from everybody.”

Xhantu inclined his head. “Consider your place saved. But do not be in such a hurry, my friend. There is something I would like you to experience first.” Turning his back abruptly, he led Vane through the cavern into a gulf that grew deeper with each step, proceeding fearlessly while his guest inched along behind. They crossed the great chamber to an arch like the gateway to Hell. The blackness beyond was so profound Vane instinctively hit the floor.

Slowly swiveling his body, Xhantu addressed the dead space above his eager young disciple. “There are times, Mr. Vane, when the wind comes howling and moaning through these chambers from somewhere deep in the caverns. Clearly it originates without, on the lip of the Highlands where hot and cool air collide.

“At such times the chambers respire, and the air funneling up the fissures behind us produces tones like those of a gargantuan organ. They are for the most part capricious and fleeting, but occasionally idiosyncrasies of current and bore will produce a startling vox humana. It is a lonesome voice, Mr. Vane, patient and grieving, as old as its Cambrian womb.” Vane, feeling the rock floor beginning to tilt, nauseously rose to his feet. The little sage’s body language seemed to be questioning the motion. He was now a ghostly outline, visible only due to the fuzzy haze created by the nearest flues.

Vane shivered in the bottomless darkness, fighting for balance and listening to the silence. Finally he mumbled, “It’s…it’s beautiful.”

“Yes.” The ghost folded its hands neatly at the waist. “Think about all this colonel expressed. He is obviously a megalomaniac, and megalomania is the exact opposite of microcosmia. Therein lies his weakness. He is a molecule, a little self-adorned balloon ready to be pierced by the plainest of pins. He sleeps fitfully, for the world is crawling with traitors and sham flatterers, all scheming to usurp his unique wonderfulness. They are jackals. Their eyes gleam in the withering savanna of his dreams.”

“That’s my guy,” Vane whispered.

“Do what you have to do. Go about your business knowing that, as a man of vision, the decision you make will be correct.”

“But how will I know--”

“You will know.”