And it did seem wise to the Master Monstruwacan, and unto me, that if
any should find the Lesser Redoubt, they must surely do so somewhere
within the mighty Valley; but whether The Road that led into the West,
where was the Place of the Ab-humans, should bring me to it, I had no
knowing; nor whether it might lie on the Northward way. And I, maybe, to
wander a thousand miles wrong; if, in truth, I were not into some
dreadful trouble before.
And, indeed, no reason of value was there to give me hope that the
Lesser Pyramid lay either to the West, or where the Road went
North-ward, beyond the House of Silence. Yet I did so feel it to be
somewhere to the North, that I had made a determination to search that
way for a great distance, the first; and if I could not come upon aught,
then I should have sober thought that it did lie Westward. But in the
Valley someways, I had feeling of assurance that it must be; for it was
plain that the telling of the book was sound in its bottom sense; as
might be seen; for how should any live in the utter bleak and deadly
chill of the silent upper world that lay an hundred miles up in the
night, hid and lost for ever.
And strange is it to think of those wondrous and mighty cliffs that
girt us about, and yet were fast held from us in the dark; so that I
had not known of them, save for the telling of that book; though, in
truth, it had been always supposed that we lived in a great deep of the
world; but, indeed, it was rather held in belief that we abode in the
bed of some ancient sea, that did surely slope gradual away from us, and
not go up abrupt and savage.
And here let me make so clear as I may that the general peoples had no
clear thought upon any such matters; though there was something of it
taught in the schools; yet rather this and that, of diverse conclusions,
as it might be thinkings of the Teachers, after much study, and some
ponderings. For one man, having a lack of imagining, would scoff, and
another, maybe, to take it very staidly, but some would build Fancy upon
the tellings of the Records, and make foolish and fantastic that which
had groundings in Truth; and thus is it ever. But to the most Peoples of
the Pyramid, there was no deep conviction nor thought of any great hid
World afar in the darkness. For they gave attention and belief only to
that which lay to their view; nor could a great lot come to imagine that
there had been ever any other Condition.