THAT WAY!
You leapt from one unbroken part to the next, deciding in a split second which way to go. THAT WAY, THAT WAY! But your body felt heavy, weighed down. Everywhere you looked was shaking. Everything you saw was roiling wet. You lost your sense of balance. It was happening all around you, Anubis.This was it, but you weren’t sure what it was, you couldn’t grasp the details. Still, you ran. You were running, that alone was sure. Your vision of the scene was riddled with holes, but somehow you crossed them, you reached the bank. The bank wasn’t just a bank, it was a cliff jutting up at an angle of seventy or eighty degrees. A layer of Siberian permafrost. You climbed. Your body felt heavy. Because someone was clinging to you. An idiot human had his arms wrapped around your body. He was crying. Oh, oh, oh, he wailed. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, he wailed. SHUT UP! you thought. You managed to scramble up the bank despite the burden of him. You didn’t slip. No, not you. You weren’t the one who lost his footing and careened down a gaping crevice in the permafrost. It was him—your master. That idiot. And he took you with him. He kept his arms wrapped tightly around your body, your left leg, as he went, tumbling down into that cavernous hole that plunged like a tunnel into the permafrost.
You tumbled, your body at a diagonal.
You didn’t climb up from the bank onto solid land. You went down. Underground.
You slid. You fell very, very fast.
Your body was bashed, abrasions everywhere.
You didn’t lose consciousness, but your vision went black.
It was too deep. Too narrow. Your master, who had fallen first, was groaning. At intervals, even deeper down. You smelled death. A nasty scent that curled upward, another ominous sign marking all but certain doom for your master. It was cold. The earth was frozen all around you. The air eddying over your body was around 25 degrees Fahrenheit—not unbearably cold, but you were soaked. You began to feel the chill in your bones. In your cervical vertebrae, your lumbar vertebrae, your shoulder blades, your skulclass="underline" you felt the cold seeping in, tightening its grip. You felt: I’M GOING TO FREEZE. And you thought: NO. You thought: I WANT TO LIVE, I WANT TO LIVE, I WILL NOT DIE. You were determined. The cavern in the permafrost was tight, cramped, a natural tunnel, a world of perfect darkness. It was too dark. You were terrified. Yes, Anubis, you recognized the truth: I’M SCARED. The long night had come.
AM I GOING TO DIE?
Again and again, you asked yourself the same question.
AM I GOING TO DIE?
From time to time, you wriggled your hind legs to make sure you were still alive. You had no idea how you landed, there in the tunnel. You might be hanging from an outcropping of rock, or leaning on it. You tried not to doze. I DON’T WANT TO FREEZE, you thought, and struggled to stay awake. Only it was so dark in the tunnel that even with your eyes wide open, you felt as though you might be sleeping. You had been sleeping for a long, long, long time; so it seemed. Maybe it was real? Had you been asleep? Your vision had gone black, been black—and maybe that blackness had continued, now, for ages? You searched for sunlight. Of course. There in the depths of that long, long, long night, you yearned for some sign of a subterranean morning that would never come.
The cliff you had climbed, and from which you had fallen into the tunnel that plunged into the permafrost, was on the left of the Lena River, facing downstream. On the western bank. The cliff jutted up, almost vertical. The days were short at this time of the year, but the sun did rise. And when it did, the morning sunlight shone on that cliff. There came a moment when the light streamed in through a crack near the tunnel’s entrance.
It shot in at an angle, and for ten or twenty minutes, no longer, there in the pure darkness, the faint glow filled you.
You started and came to.
Who knows, maybe you had been asleep.
You noticed the sunlight bleeding into the space you were in.
IT’S MORNING, you thought.
And then, the next moment, you stiffened, stunned. Because you had discovered something. Immediately overhead—though of course you had no idea how you had landed, what was up and what was down—was an eye. A mammal’s eye. Enormous. Just one, one side of the head: an eyeball. It had to be a few times larger than your own, Anubis, or even bigger… maybe ten times bigger.
The eye stared down at you from directly overhead.
From within the ice.
You were face to face with a prehistoric animal encased in the permafrost. Suspended along the edge of the tunnel, inches away. It had tusks. Long, curved tusks. A long nose. Its body was covered in long fur. It was over eleven feet tall. Alive, it would have weighed six tons. It was something like an elephant that had lived ten thousand years ago, even longer ago than that, and had evolved to live in the cold. An enormous mammal, given the name “mammoth” by a French scientist in the eighteenth century.
One of these extinct creatures had been preserved, frozen, in the tunnel.
In the ground. In a layer of Siberian permafrost more than 160 feet thick.
Without decaying.
And now, Anubis, its huge eye, more than ten thousand years old, stared down at you.
WHO ARE YOU? Anubis asked.
WHO ARE YOU? The question bounced off the ice.
I’M… I’M A DOG.
The eye in the ice was not, of course, a dog. So it didn’t answer.
HAVE YOU BEEN THERE ALL ALONG? Anubis asked.
I’VE BEEN HERE ALL ALONG.
This time, the frozen earth answered. It transmitted the ice-packed mammoth’s answer to the dog’s mind: I’M FROZEN.
YOU’RE AN EYE. Anubis told the eye, very simply.
I’M AN EYE. The mammoth agreed, very simply.
YOU’RE LOOKING AT ME.
I’M LOOKING AT YOU.
AM I… ALIVE?
YOU’RE… ALIVE.
WILL I LIVE?
LIVE.
Anubis’s final question, rebounding off the ice, was transformed into a command. Anubis interpreted what he had heard as a command. He realized that this enormous eye, no one else, was his true master. It was not a dog. The eye (and the creature whose eye it was) had not said it was a dog. But neither was it a human. Anubis realized, then, at that moment, that this thing was his Absolute.
Anubis had no word to express his discovery.
Perhaps a human might have called this thing the “Dog God.”
And so Anubis, whose name itself means the “Dog God,” acknowledged this “Dog God” as his true master, and awoke.
Anubis, Anubis, at last you have awoken.
You were not asleep.
Ten minutes, twenty minutes passed. The brief period during which the tunnel filled with the morning sun’s faint glow was over. Once again pure darkness enclosed you. Your encounter with your true master had ended. What would you do? Obey the command you had been given, of course. The order. One simple word: LIVE. Already, you were trying. You had to break free. You twisted your body, twisted further. You moved. You slipped. You slid down the wall of the tunnel, you fell. But you weren’t afraid. The tunnel did not injure you. You descended.