Tom woke up the next day somewhere near the south polar region.
39
(Frigate's letter continued)
"There's a tower in the middle of a sea surrounded by the polar mountains," Tom said.
"A tower?" I said. "What do you mean?"
"Haven't you heard about that? I thought everybody knew about the tower."
"Nobody ever mentioned it to me."
"Well," he said, looking somewhat peculiar, "It is a hell of a long River. I suppose there are plenty of areas where nobody's heard the tale."
And he proceeded to tell me that that was just what it was, a tale. No proof. The man who told Tom about it may have been a liar, and God knows there are just as many here as there were on Earth. But this wasn't an account heard from a man who'd heard it from another who'd heard it from still another and so on and so on. Tom himself had actually talked to a man who claimed to have seen the tower.
Tom had known this man for a long time, but he'd never said a word about it until he got stumbling drunk with Tom one night. After he sobered up, he refused to talk about it. He was too scared.
He was an ancient Egyptian, one of a party led by the Pharaoh Akhenaten or Ikhnaton, as some pronounced it. You know, the one who tried to found a monotheist religion about the thirteenth century B.C. Apparently, Akhenaten was resurrected in an area of people from his own time. The teller of the tale, Paheri, a nobleman, was recruited by Akhenaten along with forty others. They built a boat and started off, not knowing how far they had to go. Or, indeed, what their goal was, except the source of The River. Akhenaten believed that Aton, God, the sun, would live there and that he would receive any pilgrim with great honor. Would, in fact, pass him on to paradise, a place better than The Riverworld.
Paheri, unlike the Pharaoh, was a conservative polytheist. He believed in the "true" gods; Ra, Horus, Isis, all the Old Bunch. He went along with his Pharaoh, thinking that he would lead them to the seat of the gods and would then get his just deserts for having abandoned the old religion on Earth. Poetic justice. But he, Paheri, would be suitably rewarded for his faith.
Fortunately for their quest, the area in which they'd been first resurrected was in the northern hemisphere, far up The River. Also fortunately, they passed through areas mainly inhabited by late-twentieth-century Scandinavians. These were comparatively peaceful, so the boat's crew wasn't enslaved, and there was no problem using the grailstones.
As they got closer to the polar mountains, they came into an area populated by giant subhumans. These seem to have been a species the fossils of which were never found on Earth. Eight to ten feet high (2.45 to 3.048 meters), believe it or not. With noses like proboscis monkeys. Language users, though their speech was simple.
Any one of these behemoths could have wiped out the whole crew singlehanded, but the boat frightened them. They thought it was a living monster, a dragon. Apparently, their area, which extended for several thousand kilometers, was cut off from the area below them by a very narrow valley. The River boiled through it at great pressure, making a current against which a boat could not be rowed.
The Egyptians weren't stopped by this. It took them six months, but they made it. Using flint tools and some iron tools-there was some iron in this area for which they traded booze and tobacco from their grails-they chopped out a narrow ledge about 3 meters above the water. They disassembled the boat and, carrying the parts on their backs, they crawled the kilometer or so to the end of the narrow part.
In the land of the giants, the Egyptians recruited an individual whose name they couldn't pronounce. They called him Djehuti (the Greek form of this name was Thoth) because his long nose reminded them of that god. Thoth had the head of an ibis, a long-beaked bird.
The boat proceeded up The River, to where the grailstones ceased. This area was in perpetual fog. Though The River had given up much of its heat while going through the sea behind the polar mountains, it still had enough left to form clouds when it encountered the colder air.
They came to a cataract that was wide enough to float the moon on, or so said Paheri. The boat had to be left behind then, and for all anybody knows it is still on a platform in a sheltered cove. Rotten by now, what with all that moisture.
Now, here comes one of the strangest parts of the tale. The expedition came to a cliff which seemed insurmountable. But they found a tunnel which someone had cut through the cliff. And then, later, at the bottom of another insurmountable cliff, they found the end of a rope made from cloths. Up it they went, and though their path was anything but smooth from then on, they did get to the polar sea beyond the mountains.
Who made the tunnel and who left the rope? And why? It seems obvious to me that someone prepared the way for us Earthlings. I doubt that it was Riverdwellers who cut the tunnel and who planted the rope. The mountain which contained the tunnel was made of hard quartz. The tunnel would have worn out a large number of steel tools, which would not in any event have been available in large numbers. Moreover, Paheri said that there was no debris, no cuttings and shavings which would have to be piled outside the tunnel. Even with iron tools, a party would not have time enough to cut the tunnel. They couldn't possibly have brought along enough food for the time it would take to do the job.
In addition, how could anyone have gotten up the aforementioned cliff without a rope? Maybe some mysterious party preceding the Egyptians fired a rocket trailing a rope? But there was only one projection, a tall, thin spire of rock, for the hypothetical rope with hypothetical grapnels to catch on. The chances of the rocket hitting it (especially when it's invisible from below) and the grapnels catching on it are highly remote. Also, there was no empty rocket case around. Whoever had lowered the rope had tied the end of the rope around the projection. And Paheri said that it looked as if the projection had been cut out of a larger spire.
Anyway, after crawling on a ledge through a dark cave through which a cold wind howled, they came out onto the sea. Clouds covered the sea from rim to rim of the unbroken range circling the sea. Only it wasn't really unbroken. On the other side there must have been a great gap between two mountains. Djehuti saw it first; he went around a corner just as the sun broke through for a moment. Those behind him heard a cry, then a bellow, and then a long, dwindling wail. They inched around the corner and got to the edge of the ledge just in time to see Djehuti's body disappear in the clouds below.
Afterward, they reconstructed what had happened. He had rounded the corner and seen a grail a few paces before him. Yes, a grail. Someone had preceded them. Apparently, Djehuti saw it, too, and then the sun shone through the gap in the mountain. Blinded, or startled, he had stepped backward and tripped over the grail.
There was just enough light from the passing sun to give a glimpse of something in the middle of the sea. It looked like the upper end of a colossal grail sticking from the clouds. Then the sun passed the gap and the clouds rolled back up and covered the big grail.
You're probably asking, how could the Egyptians see the sun? Even if the break in the mountains extended to the horizon, wouldn't the clouds still cover it? The answer is, yes, the clouds would cover it under normal circumstances. But there was a combination of wind which cleared the clouds away momentarily just as the sun passed the gap. An unhappy combination of circumstances, for Djehuti, anyway.