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I crouched within the thick leather bag like—I couldn’t help thinking—an embryo within its sac. I was sweating so much that I felt as if I were floating in amniotic fluid. The outside noises came through dimly; every once in a while I’d hear a big shout.
When the workers quit the barge, I stuck my head out long enough to grab some air and look at the sun. It seemed to be about eleven o’clock, although the sun, like the moon, was so distorted that I couldn’t be sure. Our scientists had said the peculiar warmth of the valley and the elongation of the sun and moon were due to some “wave-focusing force field” hanging just below the stratosphere. This had no more meaning than calling it a sorcerer’s spell, but it had satisfied the general public and the military.
About noon, the ceremonies began. I ate the last two plums in the basket, but I didn’t dare open the bottle at its bottom. Though it felt like a wine-container, I didn’t want to chance the possibility that the Brew might be mixed in it.
From time to time, I heard, intermingled with band music, snatches of chants. Then, suddenly, the band quit playing and there was a mighty shout of, “Mahrud is Bull—Bull is all—and Sheed is the prophet!”
The band began playing the Semiramis overture. When it was almost through, the barge trembled with an unmistakable motion. I had not heard any tug, nor did I think there was one. After all I’d seen, the idea of a boat moving by itself was just another miracle.
The overture ended in a crash of chords. Somebody yelled, “Three cheers for Albert Allegory!” and the crowd responded.
The noises died I could hear, faintly, the slapping of the waves against the side of the barge. For a few minutes, that was all. Then heavy footsteps sounded close by. I ducked back within the bag and lay still. The steps came very near and stopped.
The rumbling unhuman voice of The Allegory said, “Looks as if somebody forgot to tie up this bag.”
Another voice said, “Oh, Al, leave it. What’s the difference?”
I would have blessed the unknown voice except for one thing—it sounded so much like Alices.
I’d thought that was a shock, but a big green four-fingered hand appeared in the opening of the bag’s mouth and seized the cords, intending to draw them close and tie them up. At the same time, the tag, which was strung on the cord, became fixed in my vision long enough for me to read the name.
Mrs. Daniel Temper.
I had thrown my mothers bones into the river!
For some reason, this affected me more than the fact that I was now tied into a close and suffocating sack, with no knife to cut my way out. The voice of The Allegory, strange in its saurian mouth-structure, boomed out. “Well, Peggy, was your sister quite happy when you left her?”
Temper,“ said the voice, which I now realized was Peggy Rourke’s.
“After we’d kissed, as sisters should who haven’t seen each other for three years, I explained everything that had happened to me. She
, started to tell me of her adventures, but I told her I knew most of
,! them. She just couldn’t believe that we’d been keeping tabs on her
‘ ’and her lover ever since they crossed the border.“
“Too bad we lost track of him after Polivinosel chased them down Adams Street,” said Allegory. “And if we’d been one minute earlier, we’d have caught him, too. Oh, well, we know he’ll try to destroy the Bottle—or steal it. He’ll be caught there.”
“If he does get to the Bottle,” said Peggy, “he’ll be the first man to do so. That F.B.I, agent only got as far as the foot of the hill, remember.”
“If anybody can do it,” chuckled Allegory, “Dan H. Temper can. Or so says Mahrud, who should know him well enough.” i “Won’t Temper be surprised when he finds out that his every move since he entered Mahrudland has been not only a reality, but a symbol of reality? And that we’ve been leading him by the nose through the allegorical maze?”
Allegory laughed with all the force of a bull-alligator’s roar.
“I wonder if Mahrud isn’t asking too much of him by demanding that he read into his adventures a meaning outside of themselves? For instance, could he see that he entered this valley as a baby enters the world, bald and toothless? Or that he met and conquered the ass that is in all of us? But that, in order to do so, he had to lose his outer strength and visible burden—the water-tank? And then operate upon his own strength with no source of external strength to fall back on? Or that, in the Scrambled Men, he met the living punishment of human self-importance in religion?”
Peggy said, “He’ll die when he finds out that the real Pol-ivinosel was down South and that you were masquerading as him.”
“Well,” rumbled Allegory, “I hope Temper can see that Mah-rud kept Polivinosel in his asinine form as an object lesson to everybody that, if Polivinosel could become a god, then anybody could. If he can’t, he’s not very smart.”
I was thinking that I had, strangely enough, thought that very thing about the Ass. And then the cork in the bottle in the basket decided to pop, and the contents—Brew—gushed out over my side.
I froze, afraid that the two would hear it. But they went on talking as if they hadn’t noticed. It was no wonder—the Allegory’s voice thundered on.
“He met Love, Youth, and Beauty—which are nowhere to be found in abundance except in this valley—in the form of Alice Lewis. And she, like all three of those qualities, was not won easily, nor without a change in the wooer. She rejected him, lured him, teased him, almost drove him crazy. She wanted him, yet she didn’t. And he had to conquer some of his faults—such as shame of his baldness and toothlessness—before he could win her, only to find out his imagined faults were, in her eyes, virtues.”
“I don’t know. I wish I’d first taken the form of the Sphinx and asked him her questions, so he’d have had a clue to what was expected of him. He’d have known, of course, that the answer to the Sphinx is that man himself is the answer to all the old questions. Then he might have seen what I was driving at when I asked him where Man—Modern Man—was going.”
“And when he finds the answer to that, then he too will be a god.”
“If!” said Allegory. “If! Mahrud says that Dan Temper is quite a few cuts above the average man of this valley. He is the reformer, the idealist who won’t be happy unless he’s tilting his lance against some windmill. In his case, he’ll not only have to defeat the windmills within himself—his neuroses and traumas—he’ll have to reach deep within himself and pull up the drowned god in the abyss of himself by the hair. If he doesn’t, he’ll die.”
“Oh, no, not that!” gasped Peggy. “I didn’t know Mahrud meant that!*‘
“Yes,” thundered the Allegory, “he does! He says that Temper will have to find himself or die. Temper himself would want it that way. He’d not be satisfied with being one of the happy-go-lucky, let-the-gods-do-it Brew-bums who loaf beneath this uninhibited sun. He’ll either be first in this new Rome, or else he’ll die.”
The conversation was interesting, to say the least, but I lost track of the next few sentences because the bottle had not quit gushing. It was spurting a gentle but steady stream against my side. And, I suddenly realized that the bag would fill and the bottles contents would run out the mouth of the bag and reveal my presence.
Frantically, I stuck my finger in the bottle’s neck and succeeded in checking the flow.
“So,” said Allegory, “he fled to the cemetery, where he met Weepenwilly. Weepenwilly who mourns eternally yet would resent the dead being brought back. Who refuses to take his cold and numbed posterior from the gravestone of his so-called beloved. That man was the living symbol of himself, Daniel Temper, who grieved himself into baldness at an early age, though he blamed his mysterious sickness and fever for it. Yet who, deep down, didn’t want his mother back, because she’d been nothing but trouble to him.”