There was the very minor comfort of knowing that he was (technically) not alone. The brief night-time glimpse he’d been granted of the camp revealed at least two score similar cells. It was to be presumed that, for reasons of time-economy if no other, the Vehme initiated their recruits on a batch basis.
There were some minor furnishings in the cell but Slovo suspected there would be more than ample time to investigate them at his leisure. By forcing his mind to dwell on the writings of Euclid he caused himself to sleep.
In the morning, a hatch in the door opened and Slovo exchanged the cell’s chamber pot for bread and wine. It had rained during the night but he did not complain or in any way converse with the invisible owner of the proffering hand.
Sitting on the muddy ground, he meticulously nibbled his way through the half-loaf and then sipped slowly at the wine. He memorized each mouthful’s exact taste as solace in case there came a time of want – and so that he should know if and when his food was given that little narcotic or poisonous extra.
He had committed whole chapters of the Meditations and Epictetus’ Dissertations to memory, and so had the faculty to wile away some hours in ‘reading’. When this palled, as even the most sublime literature eventually must, he refreshed the body as he had the mind, with a period of vigorous exercise. The fierce glare of noon alerted him to the fact that the cell would never be more illuminated than now and it was thus an auspicious time to inspect fully the fixtures of his little world.
On the side opposite his chosen station there was a curious little table – perhaps an altar in intention – made of a stack of new-cut corn, levelled off below the head and made flat for a vase to rest on. This vase was also a direct gift of Nature, being made of cunningly woven green grass. In it stood a single stem and ear of bearded wheat.
Behind this on the wall were two images, paintings on wood, somewhat redolent of the icons Slovo had seen brought or pillaged from the schismatic Greeks and Rus. One was plainly of Zeus the Unconquered Sun – the second picture Slovo failed to recognize.
These items turned out to be the sum total of the diversions provided him and it took the calling to mind of his wife’s sexual repertoire for Slovo to lull his mind to sleep.
After twenty-three days, the food stopped arriving. By then the wheatsheaf altar had dried and drooped towards the ground to which it would eventually return. Admiral Slovo had had more than enough opportunity to observe its slow demise. Made cussed by boredom and the attentions of sun and rain, he deliberately refused to enter a decline. Others undergoing the same test failed to bear up so well. Several times he heard voices raised in protest from nearby cells. The Vehme clearly had some means of rapidly silencing these weaker brethren for each remonstration was abruptly aborted within seconds. Slovo took the hint and kept his own counsel.
After a further week of a water-only diet, the Admiral grew light-headed and reconciled. All rancour and rebellion flowed out of him, hitching a lift atop his departing reserves of strength. At the very end of the week, after a day without even water, just before dawn, the disembodied hand offered a change of clothes in the form of shining white raiment. Slovo was glad to accept for reasons of personal delicacy, if no other.
Almost directly, the door was sprung and the transformed Admiral Slovo stepped out to rejoin the world. After initial difficulties with distance focusing, he discovered himself in the company of a dozen similarly hesitant figures. There were men of European race, some negroes, even one woman with yellowish skin and curiously arranged eyes. Still attuned to the discipline of the previous lunar month, no one spoke, and each kept even their visual curiosity under control.
Slovo was impressed by the organization brought to the occasion: the troops of cavalry which appeared served both to herd the initiates on their way and to explain how the camp remained unmolested. The horsemen were silent and answered to no orders but those already in their heads. Even so, they drilled and rode in perfect order as though they had been together for long and eventful years; brothers all, who knew each other’s thoughts. Slovo wondered how this could be when they clearly came from each and every nation, race and army, retaining the dress and weapons appropriate to each. He could not conceive what force might cause Gendarme, Stradiot, Reiter and Spahi to act in such harmony.
Like bright-fleeced sheep the newly liberated prisoners of the Vehme were shepherded away by these grim and speechless horsemen.
They were left at the mouth of an underground temple. There was no prospect of flight – the Vehmic cavalry would straightaway have ridden them down. This being so, Admiral Slovo boldly led the way forward, endeavouring, in so far as his weakened state would permit, still to appear the master of his own fate. A wizened Turk of similar fortitude joined him at the front.
They descended the sloping, torch-lit passage for quite some time, expecting at any moment to emerge into the high drama of a vaulted cavern or subterranean hall. However, this did not occur. To pay the Vehme their due, what they had to teach, true or false, had nothing of the petty or fraudulent about it. It did not require the assistance of showmanship.
At a point where the passage levelled slightly, Admiral Slovo almost bumped into a woman standing in the half darkness beside one wall. He surprised himself by his failure to adopt a fighting stance or to reach for an eye or throat with reflex malicious intent. Obviously his period of enforced preparation and contemplation had had some effect after all. Instead, he bade her good-day.
She was very young and quite exceptionally beautiful; her voice was sweetness itself, without being cloying. All but the last was, of course, largely lost on the Admiral, although he could academically acknowledge perfection when he saw it; particularly when it was revealed in all its naked glory.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, apologizing for the near collision once his survey was complete.
She giggled, one tiny hand courteously shielding her mouth from sight. ‘That’s all right,’ she said, looking up at him provocatively. ‘Welcome to the New Eleusis. Pray drink at the well.’
Then she straightaway turned to the old Turk and addressed him in his own tongue, presumably stating the same message. It was obvious Slovo was meant to move along.
He obligingly did so, allowing the Vehmic girl to greet each of the initiates. A mere score of paces on, he discovered the well referred to and dived his face into the torrent that splashed into a cup carved from the rock of the passage wall. The draught he swallowed was bitter, but mineral-rich and highly refreshing. He waited for all the others to drink and eventually the callipygian girl came to the fore to lead on. ‘On’ proved to be into a maze and in its dreary convolutions the party soon became separated. Then Admiral Slovo died.
At first he thought he was back at the tunnel’s start, a flicking back of memory from future to past by no means uncommon to him. But then he noticed that this passage was radiantly lit and of infinite size, that his feet were no longer required to propel him forward and that the glorious light suffused his insubstantial body. The experience bore no relation to his previous trot down the tunnel to ‘New Eleusis’ and so Slovo was forced to more radical conclusions.
Looking down he saw the husk that had been Admiral Slovo, left behind, dead on the dusty floor. Meanwhile, the … force that from sheer habit he still called ‘himself’ was called on by something that caused the great light and which drew all created things home to itself. Keen to make the light’s acquaintance – or, wild notion, to re-meet his oldest friend – Slovo did not hold back. Surrendering like a whore offered a fortune, he barely noted the receding glimpse vouchsafed him of the maze in all its subtle and significant complexity. The supernatural, cut-away vision of the Vehmic mountain, with its wasp’s-nest of rooms and barracks, chapels and thousands of swarming devotees, no longer had the power to amaze. Not even the confirmation of the globate nature of the world as it dwindled away, or the premature discovery of the existence of America, Australasia or Antarctica, particularly exercised him.