A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. Valerie Miles
and the people sang to him “Hosanna, filio David” because “son of David” means “you are of the Jewish tribe” and a descendent of David and you are entering Jerusalem to retake the throne of David. This is the most modern interpretation that there is. It does not take heed of the mount. This is something I say to myself, it seems to me that it is a mount of the nobles and moreover what they sing is “son of David” meaning “king of the Jews.” He was not coming to die. He was coming to triumph, not to triumph through death, which is a Christian solution, but to triumph as the king of Jerusalem. So, Nébride and Yarfoz both ride horses, but there are no great social divisions among the Grágidos. There was no triumph. It has not ended. Soon they lose importance because they die and the history of the Grágidos continues.
A THOUSAND FORESTS
FROM EL TESTIMONIO DE YARFOZ
[A NOVEL]
THE THIRD DAY OF NÉBRIDE’S JOURNEY INTO EXILE
Apart from the escorts provided by the king, our expedition was made up of ten horses: Nébride rode one, his wife Táiz another, on another rode Sorfos, and on a horse he had just been given by Mirigalla, rode Sebsidio; Fosco, the carpenter, and Anarino, his wife, rode their own horses, each carrying one of their children; on another rode Chano, Táiz’s lady-in-waiting, on another Quiarces, the Atánida of Ebna, who had come along as the head of the household; on another was Nerigreo, the agronomist, and, finally, on the last horse, rode Vandren and myself; then came eight cargo mules and a mule driver, lent us by Mirigalla, who would return with the mule train. Only Fosco’s children and Vandren were without their own mount, and the horse the king had gifted Sebsidio was far and away the best.
XXIX. The “Path of the Iscobascos” is described in the Grágidos as a passageway carved out of living rock, but we would never have been able to imagine the monumental construction we would encounter that morning. We had only traveled a distance of eight hundred horses—not along the path leading to the cliffs, but on a path running perpendicular to that one, heading west, through the lush coolness of cedars and yews—when turning to the south we saw the path start gradually to drop underground, as if burrowing into the rock. We descended to a point where the walls of rock flanking the path closed in a vault over our heads, forming an underground tunnel. My sense of direction led me to believe that the mouth of the tunnel was perpendicular to the line of cliffs such that, if it continued in a straight line, inevitably there would be a light at the other end. But this was not the case; instead it continued to drop, maintaining the same angle, through the heart of the living rock, banking slowly to the right. It got so dark that our guide lit a torch, by which light I saw the great craftsmanship of the stone carvers, no hollows or protuberances, and I could see a channel, about a foot wide and a foot deep along the right hand wall, coursing with clear, fast-moving water. Soon, however, a light appeared and the tunnel opened into a room with a circumference of at least two-hundred-and-fifty horses, positioned parallel to the vertical face of the precipice that we had encountered days before. The tunnel was the entryway to a ramp cut into the stone wall of the Meseged, forming a sort of lateral groove, so that not only the floor was stone, but the right-hand wall and the ceiling were stone as well; on the left, it was open to the air, but a thick stone parapet came up to a safe height. It was a kind of overlook cut into the wall but always descending, almost rectilinear, with only a few protrusions and recessions in the hard stone wall. The channel of water still coursed rapidly to our right. Soon we saw that at a distance of approximately one-hundred-and-fifty horses the ramp seemed to dead-end against a wall, on a landing that was either wider than the path, or cut deeper into the rock; but when we came up to the wall, we saw that at the landing another tunnel opened into the rock; this second tunnel also curved, but not as sharply as the first one, delving into the rock, and always descending, inscribing first three quarters of a helicoid to a point where, turning back on itself, it rotated a final quarter of a circle, arriving parallel to the cliff face once again, giving way to another ramp, identical to the first, but the inverse of it because now the stone was on our left and the emptiness on our right. Seeing this, we understood, in essential terms, what the so-called “Path of Iscobascos” was: if we had been able to look down at it from the plain, we would have seen a succession of zigzagging ramps cut into the stone, mysteriously connected at the ends by tunnels that penetrated the heart of the rock, always descending, inverting and dropping to the next ramp, emerging parallel to the cliff face thanks to the doubling back or inverse curvature of the last quarter of a circle. In the end, the totality was not structurally different from a great spiral staircase, but one that had been pressed flat, except at its extremes, against a single plane. The guide told us that the landings at the ends of the ramps, along with the square recesses that appeared here and there, greater in number all the time approaching the center, were pullouts for carts that crossed paths while descending and ascending, for resting mules, fixing malfunctions, or any other eventuality. Before long we saw water tanks, troughs, and even small gardens, jutting out over the luminous abyss. In places where the rock seemed unstable, the parapet extended in columns to the bridge that formed the ceiling, all of it carved out of living rock, not a single fabricated feature. Our admiration for that prodigious construction increased at each new ramp: I even thought I saw the melancholy dissipate in Nébride’s eyes, replaced by a glow of joy for the past and excitement for great public works. At a particularly lush overhanging garden, on a landing significantly larger than all the others, uniquely adorned with a small columned vista, Nébride stood out like a white stone in the middle of the dense foliage. “Is there, perhaps, a tomb here?” he asked our guide. “Yes, there is a tomb. The tomb of master Susubruz, who built this ramp and oversaw its fifty-two year construction.” The guide parted the foliage and showed us the tomb: the date read 317 of the Isobascos Era, which, accordingly, would mark the date of his death, the guide told us, less than one year after the completion of the ramp, corresponding to the year 232 of the Grágido-Atánida Era: the ramp of the Meseged was completed, then, some eighty years before the Barcial bridge. “So much glory,” said Nébride, “has come to Grágidos and the Atánidas because of the bridge connecting the eastern and western sides of the Barcial, even though the two sides already communicated via raft; and here we have the Iscobascos and this astonishing ramp, which eighty years prior connected the north with the south, upper Barcial with lower Barcial—no other connection between them existed apart from the long circuitous route through the region of the Sovereign Villages or through the Llábrides Mountains—and yet they never received any great recognition for it. Then the guide detailed for us the characteristics of the ramp: the precipice was five hundred vertical units, and as the slope of the ramp was about eight percent, every hundred horses the drop was twelve vertical units,2 such that, to cover the five hundred units of the drop, the total length of the ramp was four-thousand-one-hundred-and-sixty horses. It necessarily had to be supplied with water; this came primarily from the stream that we had been seeing, but also from other springs that the carving of the rock had uncovered. It took a horse four to five hours to make the climb, it could take a cart fifteen to twenty hours, and men and animals had to be able to refresh themselves and to drink; so there were water tanks every six ramps, thirty-one in all; the water was also necessary to wash away excrement that was carried out through sewers to the cliff face. The excess water was used to vitalize the ramp with the cool, overhanging gardens that provided shade and moisture to the stone, burning in the midday sun. Water was such a necessity that when there was none, because of a problem at the source, cart drivers did not even attempt the climb, certain that at the very least their mules would perish, if not they themselves. Then we asked him about master Susubruz. The guide told us that he’d been the brother of the king’s mother, and was only slightly older than his nephew. That he’d begun planning the ramp’s construction even before his nephew took the throne. Some said he’d acted with excessive grace and flattery, hoping that when his nephew was king, he’d be allowed to carry out his project and that later on he’d take advantage of his nephew’s youth to exert his influence. But this was untrue; he was never disloyal nor did he mistreat the king in any way. His whole life had been driven by the desire to build that ramp and his behavior had to be understood in light of that singular passion. But in truth the notion that his passion was such that it robbed him of all human tenderness