of trees; the trees go off from each side into the woods. And there’s an open doorway, maybe six feet tall; and it’s too dark inside to see anything, at least from the outside.”
“Yes, yes, precisely as she described it, Beatríz. Now, please follow my lantern and me into my home that some call Adytum, but I call Mud Mansion.” Aneht reached straight out her arm carrying the lantern and led the girls (still in two of her other three hands) through the arch and into what struck Elli as an unwelcoming darkness, as if stepping into the blackness of deep space.
As soon as the girls entered the room, stepping on a smooth circular floor also made of hardened mud, Aneht’s lantern revealed in its dim orange light a room with no windows and another dark doorway, somewhat smaller than the one they had just entered and located in the floor itself, leading to a flight of stairs going down. Almost missed by Elli, in the crown of the ceiling above was a hole just big enough for someone the size of Aneht to crawl—or jump—through. A faint shimmer of light inside the hole was scarcely noticeable.
The smell of something baking was wafting into the room from below, and although the aroma was not unpleasant, it carried the definite odor of hot dirt. The three of them descended a spiral staircase (constructed of tree root cuttings and bush branches woven together) until they stepped into another circular room almost identical to the one above, except that it had four doorways not quite opposite each other, as well as, again, a dimly lit hole in its ceiling located to the side of the ceiling’s center, and another spiral staircase penetrating the floor.
“Down we go, yes, yes! Down we go! Follow the light! Yes, yes! Something to eat and drink!”
In this fashion Elli and Beatríz trailed behind Aneht through several levels of virtually identical mud domes until Aneht arrived in a domed space that was identical to, but much larger than, the others through which they had descended. There she invited the girls to sit on a couple of large spongy balls made of the thinnest of reeds and vines. The room also had a shut door with a small window, suggesting by the light drifting through it that the doorway led to the outside.
“Yes, yes, here we are! Please sit and comfort yourselves in my home while I prepare you some dinner and drink! Yes, yes!” Elli watched Aneht open the door to the outside and walk out onto a wooden platform where there were various articles of furniture, including a large table on which were baking in the sun what appeared to be the very sorts of mud pies that Elli and Beatríz as little girls used to make quite frequently in the summer months—but, of course, never to eat! (Once a little boy next door asked for one with dirt-made worm squiggles on top, and then, when the girls had given it to him, he promptly tried to eat it, only to vomit moments later.)
As Elli explained to Beatríz what she was seeing, both girls had the incident of the little boy fresh in mind when they thought at all about eating.
Aneht poked her head in through the door and invited them out. “Time to eat! Yes, yes! Come out!”
Elli took Beatríz by the hand and led her through the doorway. The light from outside was so bright—by comparison with the darkness inside to which Elli’s eyes had grown accustomed—that she squinted her eyelids nearly shut, and so was unable to see anything at first except the smooth wooden patio beneath her bent head.
“Yes, yes, take my hand, Elli! Soon you’ll see!” Whereupon Aneht took the hand of each of the girls and led them a short way to a chair for each, similar to the ones on which they had been sitting inside the dome.
“Yes! Yes! Sit and see! Take whatever time you like—since there is, of course, no time to take! But what sort of time there is will give us time to talk and answer questions! Hee-hee!”
“Elli!” Beatríz said eagerly while settling into the chair that seemed softly to both gently cradle her and hold her secure. “What do you see?”
“Just a moment, Beatríz—I’m still not used to the light!” Beatríz, once again feeling the warmth of sunlight on her face, spread her arms and waited patiently while Elli rubbed her eyes and started to open them farther and farther. Aneht was shifting around the mud pies and taking plates and cups from a small cabinet beneath the table.
“Oh my, Beatríz!” Elli exclaimed in a half whisper. “It’s just so beautiful—and it’s so amazing!”
“What Elli?” Beatríz asked, squeezing her friend’s hand as if she could thereby squeeze out the answer more quickly. “What?”
“Yes! Yes! Please tell her, Elli! Pies almost ready!”
“Beatríz, let me see if I can describe it!” Elli turned this way and that in her chair, stood to look around, and then sat down once again. “Beatríz, we are on a patio made of wood that goes straight outside the door of the dome about thirty feet or so. The dome is connected to a ring of domes that bends out of sight in both directions behind us. If you look up at the dome we just came out of you will see about three levels (or rings) of domes above us, with each ring going up being smaller than the one just below it—so the domes are all identical in size and shape, but each layer going up has fewer domes—until the top layer is—I think—just the single dome we entered in the forest, although I can’t actually see it.”
“You mean, Elli, sort of like we are on the outer edge of a round pan of dinner rolls all pushed together—without the pan, of course—with another smaller layer of dinner rolls stacked right on top of our layer, and then a still smaller layer on top of that one, and so on, until there is only one round dinner roll on top?”
“Yes, yes, that’s correct, Elli and Beatríz!” said Aneht, who continued to prepare their dinner.
“And then below us—as if in space—there are several other layers of domes, each one in a ring that gets larger as a layer of domes is added below. If you look out, away from the domes (that look sort of like a child’s ‘stack of rings’ toy), you see below—hundreds of feet below—vast meadows and flowers and trees and streams covering gentle, rolling hills. Far away the meadows stop, and there is what looks like a sea of clouds further down—below the meadows—similar to the clouds that covered High Swamp River. Remember, Beatríz?” Beatríz nodded excitedly and smiled.
“Then, beyond the cloud cover—that seems dozens of miles long in all directions—there are, um, not very pretty mountaintops on the horizon just poking themselves through the clouds, and they are covered in a brown haze, and behind these mountains there are columns of smoke—and, I think ash—shooting into the sky.”
“Elli—what are the rings of domes standing on?” Beatríz asked, and shuddered, as if she had imagined layers of domes standing in midair.
“Yes, yes . . . Well, Elli, if you’ll walk around the domes just a little ways in one direction or the other, you’ll see what is happening, I think—yes, yes!” Aneht said as she brought plates of steaming mud pies over to the three chairs. Elli released Beatríz’s hand and walked part way around several of the domes, clinging to the wood railing.
“Oh my, Beatríz! Oh my!”
“What, Elli? What?”
Elli, returning to her seat, and to the aroma of the earthy confections, said, “Well, halfway around the layered rings of domes you will see that they are attached to—or, or maybe go into—a sheer cliff, and you can see that below the stack of domes that we are on there is, like an identical mirror image, another stack of dome rings—going down, all upside down and going from large rings to ever smaller ones—until you have only one single dome at the very bottom—or so I think, because, again, I can’t see the last couple of
