A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. Valerie Miles
in the world was not worth a single human life, and by his consequent instructions that absolutely all of the work be done from inside and from above, never allowing a single scaffolding to be lowered over the edge of the abyss. He even managed to irritate his workers with the extreme nature of his precautions. The Sea-bounds, who were much wealthier than the Iscobascos, had supposedly offered significant financial assistance for the project, which would have required of the Iscobascos essentially only a symbolic contribution, such that the project might be finished in one half or one quarter of the anticipated time. But the Iscobascos cared little for this sort of intrusion—although it would alleviate a sizable expenditure for such a poor and austere people—and Susubruz threatened once again to resign from overseeing the project. That’s what he did whenever someone opposed him. And, of course, his departure had to be avoided at all costs; still, he was not always able to sway everyone with this threat, some quickly figured out what sort of thing would actually make him resign and when he was just posturing in order to get his way. The participation of the Sea-bounds would have actually caused Susubruz to abandon the project; so they had no choice but to reject the offer. The project, which lasted fifty-two years, ended without a single fatality and without any injuries more serious than a few men with hands or feet crushed by blocks of stone. Still, it was said, that in the last years of his life, already over eighty, his legs no longer permitting him to walk uphill and downhill, Susubruz commissioned a chair of wood and wicker in which, hanging from a rope and using a pulley, they raised and lowered him outside the parapet, suspended over the abyss, until on one occasion, seeing a strong wind lash him terrifyingly, scraping him and even causing his chair to slam into the rock wall, they’d had enough, and so they approached him claiming that he was not submitting himself to the same cautionary measures that he so harshly submitted the rest of them to, and he answered that the project could be finished perfectly without him and that he was old enough to be allowed certain whims and to satisfy them as he desired. To which the others were silent at first, but then someone even older than him said: “So you’re just an old egoist, because you know that it will be a death you won’t even feel, but it doesn’t even occur to you to think about how unpleasant it would be for us to have to go recover your body, shattered in a thousand pieces on the rocks down below. We can have a couple strong youths here everyday to take you up and down on a stretcher as many times as you like, even though it won’t be as much fun for you as the chair.” And with these words he was convinced to stop using the chair and pulley. [. . .] Because of the nature of the project, master Susubruz was given the nickname “woodworm of the Meseged.” When the guide stopped speaking, Nébride was thoughtful for a moment; then, removing a beautiful enamel pendant that he always wore around his neck, he said to the courtier: “Might I honor the memory of such a great man and great master, by leaving here, on his tomb, this pendant given to me by my grandfather Arriasco?” “Yes you may, and you can be sure that the Iscobascos will be grateful to you for the appreciation you have shown for such a deserving and so honorably remembered man.” [. . .]
XXX. It took us more than four hours, allowing for several stops, to descend the four-hundred-thousand horses of the Meseged ramp that comprised the fifty vertical unit drop of the cliff-face. Before us now opened a desolate territory of scattered whitish deposits formed by the accumulation of detritus that came, mostly, from the Meseged itself, with erosion ditches running through it, converging in sandy ravines that dropped to the banks of the Barcial. Here the path was not at all firm or stable, almost annually it was worn down or washed away, if not erased, by waters that, without a solid bed to retain them, continued to flow torrentially for some time after a downpour ended. Our Iscobasco escorts did not want to return without first seeing us through that desert—which extended a length of some three thousand horses—and putting us on the road to Gromba Feceria. Of course, that stretch was not without frequent traffic, it led to the Iscobasco ramp, which was the obligatory route to the north, because to the right was the path of Atabates, a people that traders generally avoided. That desert itself was vaguely considered an Atabate territory, although that consideration meant nothing. The Atabates populated an area to our right, on both banks of the Barcial, with only messenger rafts to communicate between the two sides, occupying an area of five thousand horses, downriver from the waterfalls. The Atabates were the only people at the bottom of the Meseged not descended from the Sea-bounds, and their bodies were no different than ours, nor those of the Atánidas, nor the Iscobascos. At one time it was speculated that the Atabates were the forefathers of all peoples and that, having previously occupied the lower Barcial much farther downriver, they had been pushed back by the invasion of the Sea-bounds, sending off successive emigrations that had gone into the Contrarrío mountains on opposite ends of the Meseged, and later returned, on opposite sides of the Barcial, as the Grágidos and the Atánidas. That the Grágidos and the Atánidas had descended, on opposite sides, from the high valleys and their tributaries to arrive at the Barcial was a recognized fact; but that their previous origin had been a divergent emigration from the banks of the lower Barcial was the new—and, for me, the ludicrous—part of this theory. On the other hand, a different theory proposed the opposite, that is: that the Atabates came down from upper Barcial and were the only people to have gone around the Meseged to settle at the foot of the great waterfalls. But the truly inquisitive did not trust either of these ideas, since it has always been the jurists of Esteverna who have advocated this sort of hypothesis, using them to establish juridical theses, all of which provoke distrust among the rest of the people. The Barcial emerged from the waterfalls perpendicular to the Meseged and followed the path of the Atabates, but then it began meandering and curving to the west at an obtuse angle, and at the height of Gromba Feceria it more or less came parallel to the ramp of the Iscobascos, such that our road to the city was perpendicular to the spot in the Meseged where we had emerged.
However, we would face a strange and profound sadness before leaving that desert and bidding farewell to our escorts. It was Vandren who, riding on the back of my horse, suddenly pointed out, on the profile of one of the whitish dunes, dappled with small dark shrubs, about five hundred paces away, the dark silhouettes of a pack of animals that I was unable to identify just then, running diagonally in the direction of the path, as if aiming to cross it up ahead of us. I didn’t know how they’d spotted us or what imperative of their nature had made us their apparent object of interest. An erosion ditch hid them from our view for a few seconds, but soon they reappeared, closer and at the exact point where our eyes expected them; now everyone else was waiting for them too; I was able to identify them as a tribe of monkeys. There were no monkeys in our lands, and we did not suspect that they lived anywhere outside the remote jungles of the Barcial delta. Our guide noted our surprise and without waiting for our questions: “They are the begging baboons,” he said, “you’ll see when we get up to them.” We had just arrived at the point of convergence. Now their group stood motionless, about ten or fifteen paces from the path, all of them facing us; there must have been about forty of them, males, females, and infants, horribly ragged, hairy and covered with scabs and filth; the largest male had come six or seven paces out in front of the others and, as soon as we stopped our horses, he broke into a feverish speech, garrulous, whining, gesticulating, more distorted than inarticulate and more discontinuous than articulate, but recalling without a doubt the intonations and sounds and inflection of human speech, above all in his mode of emphasis and the profiles of his elocution; who knows what infinite resolve had put the need in those eyelids covered with the whitish dust of the desert and in that red snout twisting imploringly, denying all the proud power and ferocity of those long baboon fangs; who knows what incomplete destiny had transformed those long and dark hands, born for pure and immediate prehension, identical to the primal appropriation, into instruments not made for gesturing, but for the gesture of a gesture, for the supplicating search for or simulation of a gesture. We were quiet, entranced, listening to him, just like his quiet, expectant tribe behind him, when the solitary motion of our second escort dismounting from his horse put an immediate end to his speech. His stillness and that of the others was absolute. The Iscobasco untied a sack from the back of his horse and carried it over, leaving it two paces from the largest baboon who waited for the man to return to his horse and then quickly approached the sack, expertly untied it, now emitting only the soft grunts appropriate to his species, and then grabbed it by the bottom corners, and with a single motion, dumped all its contents on the ground. In that same instant, the whole tribe threw themselves on the crusts, chestnuts, carrots, beans, apples, and, with total desperation and speed,