Part 37 (1/2)
”A tragical look,” said Polecrab. He never even glanced at Maskull, but was gazing at a fixed spot on the water with unblinking eyes.
”What lies beyond Lichstorm?” asked Maskull, after a minute or two.
”Barey, where you have two suns instead of one--but beyond that fact I know nothing about it.... Then comes the ocean.”
”And what's on the other side of the ocean?”
”That you must find out for yourself, for I doubt if anybody has ever crossed it and come back.”
Maskull was silent for a little while.
”How is it that your people are so unadventurous? I seem to be the only one travelling from curiosity.”
”What do you mean by 'your people'?”
”True--you don't know that I don't belong to your planet at all. I've come from another world, Polecrab.”
”What to find?”
”I came here with Krag and Nightspore--to follow Surtur. I must have fainted the moment I arrived. When I sat up, it was night and the others had--vanished. Since then I've been travelling at random.”
Polecrab scratched his nose. ”You haven't found Surtur yet?”
”I've heard his drum taps frequently. In the forest this morning I came quite close to him. Then two days ago, in the Lusion Plain, I saw a vision--a being in man's shape, who called himself Surtur.”
”Well, maybe it was Surtur.”
”No, that's impossible,” replied Maskull reflectively. ”It was Crystalman. And it isn't a question of my suspecting it--I know it.”
”How?”
”Because this is Crystalman's world, and Surtur's world is something quite different.”
”That's queer, then,” said Polecrab.
”Since I've come out of that forest,” proceeded Maskull, talking half to himself, ”a change has come over me, and I see things differently.
Everything here looks much more solid and real in my eyes than in other places so much so that I can't entertain the least doubt of its existence. It not only looks real, it is real--and on that I would stake my life.... But at the same time that it's real, it is false.”
”Like a dream?”
”No--not at all like a dream, and that's just what I want to explain.
This world of yours--and perhaps of mine too, for that matter--doesn't give me the slightest impression of a dream, or an illusion, or anything of that sort. I know it's really here at this moment, and it's exactly as we're seeing it, you and I. Yet it's false. It's false in this sense, Polecrab. Side by side with it another world exists, and that other world is the true one, and this one is all false and deceitful, to the very core. And so it occurs to me that reality and falseness are two words for the same thing.”
”Perhaps there is such another world,” said Polecrab huskily. ”But did that vision also seem real and false to you?”
”Very real, but not false then, for then I didn't understand all this.
But just because it was real, it couldn't have been Surtur, who has no connection with reality.”
”Didn't those drum taps sound real to you?”