Robert followed the path
towards the top of The Mountains. He
had been on his quest for more than ten years and yet he still found nothing to
tell Mother Earth.
There was an
area of The Mountains he had yet to search.
A passerby had once noticed that this area had a jagged look to it and
had dubbed it Jagged Reach. There were
rumors that reached as far as the Southland town of This Place that told of a
mysterious cave that was very mysterious indeed. Strangely, that was all the rumors ever said about it, but
nevertheless, Robert was curious.
He climbed up
the rocky incline, using his staff as support, until he stood on a relatively
flat surface. He looked around,
observing the landscape around him and realized that he was standing on what
looked like a rocky path. The path led
around a corner and while on one side was a smooth cliff wall, the other side
dropped with a shear straight fall towards many sharp looking rocks. The path was thin, but Robert managed to
navigate it safely.
Once around the
corner, Robert found himself face-to-face with a small cave opening. He walked to the opening and listened
carefully. Beyond the darkness within,
he could hear the sounds of bangs and clangs; the sounds of two metal objects
hitting each other. Along with these
sounds, he could hear the faint sound of giggling.
Curious, Robert
worked his way into the cave, following the sounds though the blinding
darkness. The cave wasn't very long and
soon he found himself in a large cavern lit by several lanterns, which had been
placed around the rocky enclosure. In
the light from the lanterns, Robert could distinctly make out the forms of two
men at two different sides of the cavern, each carving something into the
rock.
Robert stood
staring at the creations wondering what the final images were to be. After a moment of deliberation, he decided
to ask the man to his left. The man was
standing back from his sculpture in thought, with one hand's finger tucked
under his lip and the other hand cradling his elbow. "Excuse me, sir," started Robert.
"Why yes, you
may," exclaimed the man in a wild roar of words as he spun around to look at
Robert before spinning back to his previous position.
Robert furrowed
his eyebrows, trying to figure out what had just happened. It had been quite sudden and he hadn't
expected it to happen that way. He
thought for a moment longer before giving up and simply pretending that the
outburst had never happened. "Would you
mind if I asked you a few questions about your sculpture?" asked Robert softly.
"Don't mind if I
do," cried the man, who spun full circle on one heal and returned to his
previous position once more.
Again, Robert
had to stop and think about this response. "What are you carving?" asked Robert
before he had the chance to question the man's behavior any longer.
The man stood
silent for a moment as if thinking.
Robert expected the man to bounce around the cave this time while
chanting some incoherent dribble about something utterly bizarre, but nothing
quite like that occurred. The man
simply pointed towards the statue and softly said, "This."
Robert looked at the
statue in puzzlement. "But what is it?"
he asked again, trying not to smack some sense into the man.
The man paused
for another moment before screaming loudly and attacking the sculpture with his
tools. A few seconds latter, he calmed
down and stood several feet back from his creation. Robert looked at the man, then at the creation, and back to the
man.
That was about
when Robert gave up. He wandered across
the floor of the cave to where the second man stood carving a sculpture across
from the cave opening. "Good day," he
said to the man.
The man turned
to Robert and he could see that the man had a rather long and bushy beard on
his chin. There wasn't an expression
that could be seen in the man's eyes, though they were slightly crossed. Robert thought suddenly that the man must
have been having trouble carving his statue, but on quick inspection of his
work he decided against that possibility.
"Hello," said the man in a rather unusual sounding voice, almost as if
the man was too happy for his own good.
"What, may I
ask, are you carving on this fine day, sir?" asked Robert politely.
"It's not so
fine if you ask me. It's been night
time for a very long time and a might bit cloudy too, if you ask me," said the
man as he gazed up at the ceiling of the cave.
Robert looked at
the ceiling for a moment and realized that the man didn't think he was in a
cave. "You know you're in a cave, right? You can't see the sky from in here."
"If you ask me,
that's garbage, if you asked me that is."
Robert stared at
the man in surprise. He wasn't sure
what to say in response to that, so he decided that his best course of action
was to change the subject. "What are
you carving?" he asked the man.
"Well, if you
ask me, and I'm sure you will sometime, I'd say that I was carving something
along the lines of that," he said, pointing at the statue.
"What?" asked
Robert again.
"That," said the
man again, emphasizing his pointing finger towards the creation on the wall
that seemed to be developing a beak.
Robert looked
that the man, then at the statue, and back to the man. There was something about the two men in the
cave that was starting to give Robert the feeling that he would go insane if he
were forced to stay with them any longer.
That was about
when Robert gave up again. He decided
that they were obviously quite mad and that he was never going to get a decent
answer from either of them. He made his
way slowly out of the cave, disturbed by the loss of time. He had a quest to fulfill and he had wasted
nearly ten minutes on the mad men in the cave.
He ventured back
down the path and marched south towards his "home town" – This Place.