‘To be honest, no …’ I felt ashamed. I was so concerned with the ultimate problems of philosophy that I’d never asked myself that simple question.
‘It’s because of the darkness we’ve taken on board. A nap during the day is no good at all – you tend to feel more lethargic than ever, am I right? Darkness is pure energy. Your reserves become depleted during the day. You burn them up, grow weary, and have to sleep some more. In the dark you accumulate fresh strength, and so on … I’m convinced that a person who only lives at night need never die.’
I was tempted to conclude that Professor Nightingale was speaking of himself. He was intensely agitated. His glowing eyes protruded from their sockets like red-hot cannon balls, his voice rose still higher.
‘On the contrary!’ he declared. ‘That person would accumulate more and more strength until he developed into something surpassing our present powers of comprehension: highly distilled intelligence coupled with immortality! Eternal life! Eternal night! Eternal intelligence!’
All at once it sounded as if a spanner had fallen into the works: the professor had changed gear again. He thumped one of his external brains with the heel of his hand.
‘Er … but I digress. Where had I got to?’
‘The bacteriological transmission of knowledge.’
‘Right! The nearer you are to me, the smarter you’ll become – it’s as simple as that. But the problem is, your grey cells can only absorb so much. Not everyone can have seven brains, can they? Your capacity for absorption is now exhausted, that’s why you can’t concentrate on your lessons any more.’
I blushed. So he’d noticed!
‘That’s all right. It simply means your time is up.’ I was already familiar with that sudden, husky tone of voice and knew that it heralded a change. I’d heard it from the Babbling Billows and from Mac, from Fredda and Qwerty. It signified that a departure was imminent.
‘There’s nothing more I can teach you,’ the professor went on. ‘You now know as much as a hundred universal scientists, world chess champions and brain surgeons rolled into one. That ought to be enough to launch you on a suitable career. I’m short of space here, so a new pupil will be taking your place. Your schooldays are over, my lad. Tomorrow I shall conduct you to the exit tunnel. It’s a long trek through the mountains, but a bluebear with your brains will find the way out. Good night.’
Our conversation, which had again become rather one-sided, was at an end. I groped around until I found the doorknob.
‘Oh yes, my boy,’ Nightingale called after me, ‘about that philosophical problem of yours …’
‘Yes?’
‘You’re neither big nor small.’
‘What am I, then?’
‘Medium-sized.’
So Professor Nightingale really was a mind-reader.
When I walked into the classroom the next morning, I might have been entering it for the first time, it seemed so unfamiliar. A new pupil was sitting at my desk: a dodo – an albino dodo, to be precise, because it had bright red eyes and snow-white plumage.
I said goodbye to Flowergrazer, Knio, Weeny and the dodo, whose name was Odod. They meant nothing to me, those classmates of mine, so I didn’t feel the least bit sad. A strange mixture of fear and eagerness overcame me as I followed Professor Nightingale to the exit.
The encyclopedia
Once there, he did something I found genuinely surprising because it was so unlike him: he gave me a hug. I had never been as close to him before, not even the previous night. His brief embrace sent another mass of knowledge surging through my brain. Millions of letters whirled around in my mind’s eye, then formed themselves into words, scientific facts, whole treatises, and, finally, into a book whose title flared up for a moment, clearly legible, and then vanished.
It was Professor Nightingale’s standard work on Zamonia, his accumulated store of knowledge about that continent and its environs. He had etched it – telepathically, as it were – on to the hard disk of my brain.
‘Another thing,’ he said in a subdued voice. ‘Two rules: if you get hungry or thirsty, simply lick the walls of the tunnel. Your thirst will be assuaged by the condensation that always adheres to them, your hunger by the spongy fungus whose slight fluorescence provides a modicum of lighting. This contains Gloomberg algae and is thus a major source of vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, and roughage.’
‘And the second rule?’
‘Never trust a Troglotroll!’
‘A Troglotroll?’ I said. ‘What’s that?’ But the professor had already thrust me into the darker of two tunnels and hurried off with his coat tails flapping.
The road to freedom
Uninviting though it was, the maze of tunnels in the Gloomberg Mountains, I entered it with a feeling of relief. My schooldays were over. Real life awaited me with open arms!
My eyes soon became accustomed to the dim light, and I strode along in a highly optimistic mood. No more stupid, piggish Knios or sneaky little Gnomelets, no more suicidal unicorns, no more canned sardines and boredom. The dank, dark tunnel seemed a place of beauty because it was taking me to freedom.
I had my first misgivings after walking for about an hour. What was I doing in this cheerless labyrinth? Where was the exit? Besides, I was hungry.
A can of sardines wouldn’t have gone amiss. Why hadn’t I simply stayed at the Nocturnal Academy? Why couldn’t you remain at school after completing your education? Was there a law against it?
I could become an assistant teacher at the Nocturnal Academy – or a janitor, for that matter. I would take on the humblest cleaning jobs unpaid. Anything would be better than roaming around in this clammy labyrinth, at the mercy of an uncertain fate. What did I know of the world that awaited me outside? It was a vast and incalculable place alive with hardships, dangers, and ill-disposed creatures – that much Mac had taught me only too well. On the back of a Reptilian Rescuer I’d been safe, but now I had to fend for myself.
I decided to go back to Professor Nightingale and ask him to keep me on. Why hadn’t I thought of that during our conversation last night?
A futile decision
I turned on my heel and walked back to the Nocturnal Academy. Yes, I could already picture myself pursuing a comfortable, deskbound career. At the professor’s side I would hand the torch of wisdom to a never-ending stream of grateful students, and in our spare time we would devote ourselves to darknessology. Perhaps Nightingale really was on the track of the secret of eternal life. I could assist him with his experiments and might even give him the hint that helped to achieve the vital breakthrough. We would share the official honours and awards. I wasn’t greedy, after all.
An intersection? I couldn’t recall coming to one earlier. Forks, yes; intersections, no. Thoroughly perplexed, I stopped short and peered in all directions. A drop of condensation fell from the roof and landed plumb on my nose. I had obviously gone astray.
Every bend seemed to offer the prospect of salvation, of light at the end of the tunnel, but all I encountered each time was yet another fork or some even more complex ramifications. I thought it wise to favour tunnels that led downhill because the exit must be at the foot of the mountains, but there were times when they led uphill for hours on end. The downhill tunnels had to be somewhere else entirely. I climbed higher and higher.
I felt an occasional puff of wind on my cheek. At first I thought it was fresh mountain air blowing into the cave mouth I longed to reach. But then I realized that it was always the same puff of wind. A prisoner like myself, it had been desperately roaming this labyrinth in search of a way out, perhaps for many thousands of years.
I tried to assume that my schooldays weren’t over at all – that this was Professor Nightingale’s idea of a final examination, and that those who managed to extricate themselves from the labyrinth had passed it. All I had to do was think laterally – turn my thoughts in every possible direction.
I debated which field of knowledge would be most helpful to me
. Mathematics? Philosophy? Biology? Geology? Astronomy? Zamonian poetry? I came to the conclusion that, to begin with, my legs would be the greatest help of all. Unfortunately, they couldn’t have been in worse condition, thanks to my persistent lack of exercise and unbalanced diet.
I walked on. Sometimes I broke into a slow trot, sometimes I shuffled along, but I kept going, on and on, without a break, until exhaustion overcame me. Then I sank to the ground and slept for a minute or two before struggling up and plodding onwards for hours and days on end.
From time to time I licked a tunnel wall and sampled the rusty mildew and salty condensation that had been clinging to it for millions of years – at least, it tasted like that. I took one mechanical step after another. You couldn’t call it walking any more. I tottered along between the tunnel walls like a drunk, head sagging, shoulders drooping and arms dangling, a picture of misery, a lost, despairing bluebear with cramp in the calves. At some stage my strength finally gave out. I lay down, firmly resolved never to get up again.
I rust away
For several hours I remained lying on my back, spreadeagled with my gaze fixed on the roof of the tunnel. I had made up my mind to dematerialize, vanish without trace, rust away like a piece of old iron, and thus become an integral part of the Gloomberg Mountains. It seems that rusty tunnel walls have an unwholesome effect on overtaxed brains. I would never have entertained such an idea under normal circumstances, but anyone who has brooded on it for hours will feel, in a truly physical sense, what it’s like to rust away. It’s a strange but far from unpleasant sensation. You surrender to the forces of nature, utterly serene, then slowly turn metallic. Your body becomes coated by degrees with fine, rust-red fur and starts to crumble. The rust eats into you, ever deeper. Layer after layer flakes off, and before long you’re just a little mound of red dust to be blown away by a captive puff of wind and scattered along the endless tunnels of the Gloomberg Mountains. That was as far as my dire imaginings had progressed when my shoulder was nudged by something soft and slimy but not unfamiliar. It was Qwerty Uiop.
An old friend
‘What are you doing here?’ he inquired anxiously.
‘Rusting away,’ I replied.
The dimensional hiatus
It was a while before I could more or less sit up, and it genuinely surprised me that I didn’t crumble away like an old ship’s biscuit. Grunting and groaning, I got up off the floor of the tunnel while Qwerty waited impatiently. On my hind paws at last, I felt life seeping back into my bones. Qwerty’s presence gave grounds for optimism. Having jointly solved astronomical problems of the greatest magnitude, we would surely locate the exit together.
‘I’ve found a dimensional hiatus,’ Qwerty announced.
‘A dimensional hiatus?’ I replied. ‘Why, that’s wonderful!’ I sounded rather unconvincing, no doubt, because it meant that we would soon be going our separate ways again.
‘It was quite simple. I stumbled on it, so to speak – in fact I nearly fell into it the way I did on the way to my coronation. Come, I’ll show you.’
The dimensional hiatus was in a parallel tunnel just around the corner.
However, I’d always had a rather more glamorous mental picture of the entrance to another dimension. To be honest, I couldn’t see a thing.
‘You can’t see it,’ Qwerty explained. ‘You can only smell it.’
I sniffed. A faint, entirely unfamiliar smell hung in the air.
‘It’s definitely a dimensional hiatus, it smells of genff,’ said Qwerty. I had no idea what genff was, nor did I wish to be enlightened. Having found the dimensional hiatus some days earlier, Qwerty had been wondering whether to jump into it ever since. The odds against his landing in his home dimension were several billion to one.
‘I may end up in a dimension teeming with monsters whose staple diet consists of gelatine princes from the 2364th Dimension. It’s a terrible risk.’
‘Perhaps you’ll be lucky.’
‘I never am. I’m the kind of prince that falls down a dimensional hiatus just before his coronation.’
I had never seen Qwerty so irresolute. Even though it ran counter to my own wishes, I simply had to encourage him to take the plunge – it was my duty as a friend. If he didn’t risk it now he would never bring himself to do so, and that would leave him roaming our dimension for ever in a state of profound unhappiness. I tried to find the right words – words that were simultaneously motivating, sympathetic, heartening, comforting, and irresistibly persuasive.
‘Go on, jump!’ I said.
‘I can’t!’ he wailed. ‘What if I land in a sea of boiling tar or the jaws of a dinosaur? The cosmos contains innumerable places that are harmful to the health of gelatine princes. Some dimensions are reputed to consist of nothing at all. There are billions of situations less favourable than my present predicament.’
‘You think too much, that’s your problem. You may land in the arms of a pretty gelatine princess from the 2364th Dimension.’
‘Gelatine princesses don’t have any arms.’
‘Are you absolutely positive it’s a genuine dimensional hiatus?’
Qwerty sniffed. ‘It is a dimensional hiatus, I can smell it!’
‘Try again. Maybe you’re wrong.’
He took another sniff.
‘Genff,’ he said. ‘Genff without a doubt.’
And that was when I pushed him in. ‘Aaargh!’ was all he got out before he disappeared into the void.
Pushing people into dimensional hiatuses is the sort of thing you do in a fit of youthful impulsiveness, without giving much thought to the consequences. But it’s not like pushing someone off the edge of a swimming pool; the effects of falling into a cosmic aperture are rather different. An adult would have thought the idea over carefully and decided against it. It wasn’t until some minutes after Qwerty had melted into the tunnel’s rusty floor that I had my first misgivings. What if his fears had been justified? He might even now be expiring in the fangs of a primeval dinosaur or stewing in a sea of boiling tar. I had probably murdered my best friend.
There was only one way to find out: jump in after him. If Qwerty had landed in a dinosaur’s jaws, I myself deserved no other fate. I got ready to jump.
On the other hand, if Qwerty really had landed back in his 2364th Dimension there would be no point in my jumping at all. Besides, I would very probably emerge at some utterly outlandish spot in the universe. Even if I did land in the 2364th Dimension, it was absolutely inconceivable that I would be able to live on a diet of music produced by instruments made of milk. I drew back.
But was this the act of a true friend? What had I got to lose? After all, Qwerty’s dimensional hiatus seemed to be the only way out of this diabolical labyrinth. I held my nose like a diver and prepared to leap into the unknown.
‘Jumping off the edge of the pool is strictly prohibited!’ growled a stern voice.
I spun round. A peculiar figure emerged from beyond a bend in the tunnel. Short and thickset, it was precisely half my height and entirely covered with warts and scattered tufts of hair. It looked like an old beetroot afflicted with some frightful skin disease.
‘Who … who are you?’ I asked uncertainly.
The Troglotroll
‘I’m a Troglotroll,’ the figure blurted out. ‘No, wait, that’s wrong! I’m a swimming pool superintendent disguised, just for fun, as a Troglotroll. I may bear a superficial resemblance to a Troglotroll, but I’m really a swimming pool superintendent, ak-ak-ak!’
Even the gnome’s laughter was peculiar.
From the
‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’
by Professor Abdullah Nightingale
Troglotroll, The. Distantly related to the Common Gnomelet, the Troglotroll can claim to be the most despised creature in Zamonia, more so even than the →Bollogg. Whereas other malignant life forms are at least distinguished by their audacity or demand respect on account of the
ir physical superiority, the Troglotroll possesses no laudable attributes at all; worse still, it doesn’t even pretend to any and rejoices in its obnoxiousness. In certain administrative districts in Zamonia, ‘Troglotroll!’ is considered a personal insult carrying a heavy fine. It has been known to spark off barroom brawls, duels, family feuds – even minor civil wars.
The Troglotroll is a semihumanoid shadow-parasite of the lowest order. In other words, it favours dim, dank surroundings, shuns daylight, and lives in other creatures’ homes [→Mountain Maggot, The] – without, of course, asking their permission or paying them rent.
‘To be quite honest, I’m not really a swimming pool superintendent,’ the figure said very quickly. ‘I’m a mines inspector. I inspect mines.’
He gave the tunnel wall an experimental tap.
‘Yes … very nice … excellent tunnelling technique,’ it muttered approvingly, and continued to tap the wall with its knuckles.
‘What the hell,’ it cried suddenly, flinging its arms wide in a theatrical gesture. ‘Why tell a lie? I’m not a mines inspector at all, I’m the Emperor of Zamonia on a secret mission! Travelling incognito, hence my disguise! I may bear a superficial resemblance to a common Troglotroll, but underneath I’m an all-powerful monarch! That explains the absence of a sumptuous coronation and my rather shabby get-up. It’s camouflage, that’s all.’
Very slowly, I edged along the wall of the tunnel, ready to take to my heels at any moment. I was obviously dealing with a madman.
‘All right, I admit it,’ said the creature, withdrawing its former assertion unasked. ‘I’m not the Emperor of Zamonia, I’m a Pelp. Although we Pelps bear a superficial resemblance to Troglotrolls, we’re far more noble-minded. That’s what I am: a Pelp in Troglotroll’s clothing. Does that sound convincing?’