Like a bejeweled oyster, a golden mountain rose out of the sea.  I had 
been traveling for a long time toward the South, I thought.  It sparkled in 
the daylight.  At a small port, days earlier, I had been told of the golden 
mountain.  As it offered no harbor, I dropped anchor between the golden 
mountain and a neighboring island, where I hoped my boat would be able to 
avoid being crushed by the winds, and I swam to the shore.
  The water was unsurprisingly warm.  The mountain arose smoothly from the 
sea without a beach; I cut my ankle dragging my body onto its land, my 
blood a crimson red on the yellow-white of the foothills, running down into 
the sea.  The darkening red of my blood on the pale blue of the water next 
to the golden rocks seemed to define the flag of this island nation.  I 
pulled myself to my feet.
  I scrambled up the main body of scree and obtained a partial view of the 
summit, and I thought I could see the ramparts of a golden city on the 
edge, above the mountain that plunged away in an insurmountable cliff.  The 
sun was higher now and the golden mountain almost painful to look upon, 
reflecting radiance, but the tops of the towers of the city were 
incandescent, pouring brightness upon me and down the hill, and I 
questioned whether I hallucinated the city in my squinting vision.  I ran 
toward the summit, but the approach in front of me was far too steep and I 
was forced to circumnavigate most of the peak before finding a slight 
enough slope to ascend further.
  The track looked made by animals, although I wondered what might live 
upon the mountain.  The forces of nature that might have scored a long-
abandoned path in that climate seemed to consist solely of the sun that 
beat down upon me and rose up also from below and before, the glare of the 
summit growing greater as I climbed, but even the sun might have been 
easily tolerable but for the strange geology upon which I walked.
  After a final cluster of switchbacks, I rounded a sudden curve and found 
the plateau of the mountain's peak before me.  Without an obvious summit, 
the center dimpled in upon itself and housed a small golden lake, or so I 
thought I beheld in the sparkling golden mist that the intensity of the 
sun's reflections seemed to create in the air.  The edges of the plateau 
were raised a little in what might once have been the rim of a crater, but 
now worn down to slight jagged strips protruding from the top of the golden 
mountain.  The city whose battlements I had seen before, though, dimmed the 
attraction of all else on that peak, its towers flanking it as majestically 
on the inward side, lesser towers protruding from each of the walls, as 
twin suns below the sky.
  The golden city extended outward from the rim of the mountain, allowing 
enough space between its great gate and the golden lake for carriage or 
foot traffic to pass, although I saw no-one stirring from the city or any 
movement on the walls or in the towers before me, looking across the lake.  
But as I say, I was nearly blind from the immense radiation all about me, 
and as my body settled down from the exertion of my lengthy climb, I felt 
desperately thirsty and exhausted from the atmosphere and environment 
around me, as stifling to my tired mind as a desert.


  I must have passed out then, fearing as I did to drink the liquid of the 
golden lake for hydration.  For I remember no more from that point forward 
until I awoke in a more subdued light in an enclosed space.  Raising my 
head from a golden pillow and looking around, I saw that I lay on a hard 
bed of gold, and two golden figures moved about whatever room we were in, 
yet the hues of the bed and the figures were not the yellow rich gold I had 
seen before, but a pale subdued golden luster, shimmering only in motion, 
and then not as much or as fiercely as the sparkling of the golden mountain 
and its complementary city.
  'Are you awake, then, stranger?' one of the pale figures spoke to me.  
'We thought perhaps you had worn yourself out for good.'  He did not use 
his mouth nor my language, but I heard what he said and understood.
  'Yes, I'm awake.  Where am I?' I asked, stupidly, and I was disoriented 
by the strange way my speech emerged from my thoughts.
  'You're in the golden city, of course,' he said simply.  'It's now 
night.  Come, look at the stars and the city under the moon.'  
  He beckoned me to a window.  I stepped onto the hard golden floor and 
winced as my bare feet gave before the cold.  The other figure who had not 
spoken to me, female, smiled at my steps to the edge of the room.  I was in 
one of the small towers I had seen studding the walls of the city, or so I 
guessed from my position as I looked out onto the gleaming city before me, 
houses of gold pale in the moonlight, but all as stupendous and terrible as 
my host and his wife, living figures and buildings hewed from bricks of 
gold, whitish with only a hint of polished yellow under the starred black 
sky.
  The night sky was almost more interesting than its apposite the golden 
city, I realized as I stared at it, screaming thoughts of infinity and the 
few flecks floating inside.


  In the days that followed, I came to know the city and its inhabitants 
better, seeing the mountain surrounding mainly at night, for I still found 
the daytime sun blinding.  I drank a sort of water my host distilled from 
the golden lake; it tasted odd, but not unpleasant.  He told me that the 
people of the city drank directly from the lake, but he doubted that my 
chemistry could manage it.  People of flesh like me had once come to the 
golden city regularly, and then they had understood us better, but I was 
the first to visit in many years.
  The people of the city took their nourishment intravenously; my hosts 
would inject themselves with a golden solution, sparkling drops of glitter 
which shone heavier than any mass around them, and they communicated that 
it provided them with a sort of nutrition, although a strange inflection 
came over their voices when they spoke of it.  When I tried to explain what 
I ate, my host was astonished and seemed to think that my people had 
subsisted during their previous visits on only the modified lake-water.  I 
asked him if I would benefit from the injections he and his wife gave 
themselves, for I was very hungry, and he laughed loudly.
  'No, no, it would destroy you!  How do you think of these notions?'  He 
seemed amused at my naivete.
  Despite the apparent ease of communication with the golden people, many 
concepts were difficult or impossible to relate.  All the golden citizens 
seemed welcoming, if sometimes slightly patronizing, and tolerant of my 
attempts to discover all I could about their way of life, but I was unable 
to find out what the industry of the city was, or very many details of the 
physiology of the people (they were ignorant of all but the most basic 
concepts of anatomy), or how the golden mountain, city, and lake had come 
to be.  Apart from entertaining me or introducing me to the people, my host 
and his wife never seemed to do anything.
  Everyone there seemed uncomprehending at the idea of maintaining a 
living, and I grew frustrated trying to make them understand how people in 
my land were compelled to work in order to survive, and the always-cheerful 
golden people would fall to making fun of the lifestyle I tried to describe.


  My increasing seriousness in the face of their constant joviality was 
heightened by my hunger, for by the third day after my arrival my stomach 
was completely empty.  I ate no solid food, being unable to find any 
palatable matter on that hunk of golden rock, and I had problems even 
excreting the little waste I had left over from my voyage.  No-one whom I 
talked to in the city could direct me to a public toilet, even my host, and 
finally he managed to overcome his laughter enough to explain to me that 
his people had no bodily waste, no function for disposing of any.
  'Why not go down again to your vessel,' he suggested, 'in order to find a 
solution to your issue?  But come up and see us again when you are well.'
  I was unable to barter any more immediate solution, and I wondered if I 
might not have left some food on the ship that had not yet spoiled 
(truthfully, I had forgotten about it, somehow), so I tripped down the 
slope of the mountain behind the lake and followed the abandoned path down 
to near where I had moored my ship.  But I saw no trace of it, and I walked 
the perimeter of the whole island in vain, that mountain coming up from the 
placid sea in a rush of golden pebbles.  I knew that my ship ought to be 
between the golden mountain and the other island I had marked when I had 
cast the anchor, but there was no island close enough to plausibly be that 
one; specks of land of the horizon were all that I could make out.
  Perhaps I was driven mad from hunger, or my vision was ruined from the 
torturous sheen of the golden mountain.  It was daylight when I made that 
descent and searched, but my luck would have failed at night, too.  In 
short, I failed to locate any scrap of my vessel, looking through the 
golden rocks and sand on the shore, and finally picked a location in what I 
thought would be a blind spot from the top of the golden mountain for the 
defecation I had longed for for at least a day.
  Completing my business, I was reminded once again of my ravenous hunger, 
leaving my feces behind and washing myself in the light sea.  There was 
nothing more I could do but ascend again to the golden city, I realized.


  When I staggered through the gates, delirious from the midday sun and 
from hunger, none of the golden people were in sight, although I was 
squinting the whole time, trying to pick out distinctions of golden 
sparkles on top of one another by depth perception alone.  Making my way by 
touch, I found the tower that my host had seemed to live in, meaning to ask 
him what was happening or to collapse, for my motives were confused at the 
point.
  But both the golden figures I had first met in that room were not there, 
or anywhere throughout what I took for the extent of their dwelling.  
Leaning on a hard golden chair, I made to sit down in it, but I shifted my 
action and walked to the golden cupboard on the other side of the room, in 
which I easily found the needles and solution which my hosts used in lieu 
of food.
  I was badly in need of nourishment, and while I would have preferred to 
explain as much as possible my predicament to my host, he was absent.  
Perhaps if he had been present, I would have waited upon his absence to do 
what I then did; in truth, I do not fully know what I would have done.  As 
it was, I tied off my left arm with the strip of golden cord my host used, 
and imitating him, I filled the golden needle with a quantity of the shiny 
golden fluid which sat unlabeled in its golden bottle, reflecting all the 
particles of light in the room, and I put it into the vein which ran down 
my arm.
  The visions I saw, Oh!  I cannot describe my embryonic joy at the 
injection I gave myself, even as it filled me with a wondrous terror, 
without any hope of my future life, but dreams of foreign lives and ancient 
lands without the pollution of my knowledge, things without any sickly 
contamination of my being, and I felt full without refreshment as the 
golden solution ran through my blood.  In my newfound lethargy, I fell to 
the floor, the hard golden floor which did not even then seem soft, and I 
collapsed in sleep for some time.


  I awoke to find myself hoisted in the air by my arms, which were spread 
out in either direction from my torso; the left one had a vein running down 
its length of pure solid gold that sparkled a little and felt 
simultaneously more alive and deader than any other part of my body, but I 
knew no blood ran through it, and my arm already felt weaker from its lack 
of oxygen.
  The golden man who had been my host before stood in front of me, looking 
perhaps a bit paler than he normally did in the morning light, for it 
seemed to be the beginning of the next day.  But as I say, by this time my 
eyesight had been extensively damaged from its strain over the last few 
days.
  I saw a little of the shadow of what I had no doubt was a golden cross 
that they had nailed me to; the people of the golden city must have been 
unversed indeed in human anatomy, for it seemed they had first tried to 
affix me to the cross by the palms of my hands, and my hands were torn and 
ruined from my weight.  I laughed, although my body was already proving 
burdensome.  They had been more successful on their second or third try, 
and thick golden nails stuck out from my wrists.
  My host told me that I had defiled their dwelling and their land with my 
waste and stolen his serum, although he used many more legal terms and 
technicalities than I was used to hearing from him, and I was unsure of 
much of what he said.  He added in what I took to be his own summation that 
I was to be burned, to purge the island of my presence, and I thought I 
detected some disappointment in him as I imagined my body melting in the 
center of that puddle of molten gold that would soon form.



last revision May 7, 2006

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