PART 3
Isabelle Aimery felt helpless, a feeling unknown to her. She was always there to help others and knew what to do, but now, she was the one in need of it, and she had no one to do that.
Over the years, she had learned to help herself; she believed the biggest help one could attain was that of one’s faculties which guide him in every step in life, and clear the fog one sees in the realities around him. But now, she felt utterly helpless; her head throbbed from pain she had never experienced before, her eyes hurt from the stark light given off by the images, she felt numb and weak, and her mind didn’t focus like it should. Nothing made sense to her. She had been reading Emily Dickinson and drinking coffee, and now here she was, lost in a place she had no idea of, with strange things all around her.
Maybe it’s just a dream. Maybe I’m still asleep and dreaming of these wild things and I’ll soon wake up. Everything would be back to normal then.
She closed her eyes, expecting to be in her leather armchair with the book in her hand and the aroma of coffee filling the air. But when she opened her eyes, to her distress, she was still standing there. Instead of seeing the welcoming look of her home, she saw something else.
Isabelle stared wide-eyed, as a small portal opened before her. It got wider and hollow as Isabelle stepped closer to it. The whole atmosphere around felt…numb, like nothing was there except that dark portal. She didn’t find the gloomy, void look of it welcoming at all. She wanted to run away from there. She wanted to go home, to the comfort of her solitary life, to her work, to her reality . . . but right now, none of this seemed even close to real. She ignored the negative feelings arising in her mind and stepped close enough to the opening of the portal that she could peep inside. She saw nothing. It was just dark and hollow; yet she felt a strong force surging her forward to enter it. It was stronger than her strength. She tried to step back but her legs carried her closer to the opening – and she couldn’t resist. She felt strangely connected to whatever was inside that portal, like the feeling we get when we have a strong, deep connection to something, like places or things, and they urge us nearer to them.
Isabelle breathed deeply and inching closer, stepped into the opening. She didn’t fall or bump into something, like she expected she would. The moment her aura had touched with the blackness of the portal, her whole frame got submerged in it, like little sparks of light falling slowly into a dark room. It was as if she had entered another world. After that, all went blank.
Isabelle woke up with a start. She felt as if she’d been drugged; her head was dizzy and her headache had grown worse. She sat up and looked around. She could make out nothing but blurry, dim sparks of light globules dancing before her eyes. Her head ached with each blink of the eye and she held her head in her hands, putting her chin on her knees, cradling herself in a ball. The coldness around chilled her to the bone. She felt as if her head would explode any minute; the pain was too much for her to bear. She closed her eyes and tried to calm her blaring nerves. She bit back tears as she realized how helpless she was now.
Helplessness.
It was the feeling she hated the most. She knew how it creeps up into the soul and cuts off every connection it has with the outer world and with reality, making it feel dejected and longing for help. She felt the pain of others who are victimized by this feeling, because she herself was one. Though she did believe in the fact that God’s help and nature’s forces are always there to aid man in his difficulties, yet she considered one’s own psychological powers to be more helpful, because if one learns to use his mind’s great faculties along with the natural laws empowering it, he would have the greatest help of all.
But of course in order to do that, one has to believe in the true, divine Help that’s responsible for guiding every other aid. Isabelle tried to focus on her surroundings, but her vision was blurred and she could see nothing. Gathering what strength she had left, she stood up and flung out her arms to catch hold of anything around for support, but she caught thin air. She felt her head spin in circles and again seeing nothing but dots of light dancing before her eyes, she slumped to the floor, unconscious.
Our mind has many ways to clear itself from the fog building inside it. Sometimes, it plunges into a deep sleep, resting far away from all the confusion and worry, and preparing itself to think anew. When that doesn’t happen, it simply erases every trace of reality weakening its mentality. Other times, it wanders into a lost world of its own…something we call unconsciousness.
It doesn’t rebuild its resilient bonds with reality and ignore the past confusion that broke them; it doesn’t forget the questions and doubts hindering its balance; it just plunges into the depths of veracity, going back to the spot where it lost itself, finding answers and explanations, trying to figure out logic such as why and how. Sometimes, it emerges from those depths with satisfactory results that moralize the true reason of its confusion, and sometimes, it emerges with more questions regarding its own mentality; and sometimes…it just never comes out at all.
Isabelle Aimery opened her eyes as if from a deep trance.
How long have I slept? What time is it? I must be late for work. Still have a dozen of coded files to de-encrypt and…
She thought she was back home and it had all been a dream. Opening her eyes fully and expecting to find herself in her room, she found herself lying on a cold, marble floor in what looked like a vault deep underground. Suddenly everything came back to her in a quick flash. She remembered it all now.
I was standing in the middle of a large empty place. I saw a portal open before me, and I entered it, hesitatingly, and was snatched in it by some strong force. I felt dizzy and my head ached so much… I couldn’t see properly; my vision was blurred. I tried to examine the place around but was too light-headed and couldn’t balance myself. And then I tried to grab hold of something, but there was just vast emptiness…and then I lost consciousness.
Suddenly she started to panic again. Despite the fact that it was intolerably cold, little beads of sweat trickled down her forehead. She felt anxiety take over her whole frame.
I have to find what this is all about.
She rubbed her eyes hard. She could see crystal clear now, no dots before her eyes. She realized her headache was gone for once. She didn’t know why, but she felt better now…related somehow, to whatever place she was in. She didn’t know how long she had been lying there, helpless, unaware of what was around her…She walked up to some distance.
The basic rule everyone is taught in cryptology is the process of observation. Not just common, ordinary observations, but precise and deep observations; over-analyzing every line, every angle and every pattern of the code in order to understand its encryption. Even in other scientific calculations, one has to observe the problem at hand, its causes, effects and the very logic behind its existence. Only then can it be easily solved. Now, standing there with no possible clue of where she was headed, Isabelle stood still for a moment and tried to observe anything peculiar around her. Any strange sound, movement, anything that she might have missed before…and like so many other times, it was her observation alone that helped her this time also.
She had been walking lost in confusion and hadn’t noticed what she was walking into. Now as she looked round about her, she could make out tiny black and white specks of light morphing into different shapes and sizes all about her. And she couldn’t believe how ignorant she had been of walking right into them without every noticing it.
As the speckles of light were very small and just taking shape, Isabelle couldn’t quite see what they illustrated. She concentrated hard on them, remembering she could control things around here – though she still couldn’t fathom how. If she could just make them more apparent and perceivable by somehow thinking of it…It took all her mental strength to visualize something non-existence and bringing
it into existence. She just imagined the specks getting larger and forming into whatever images they were to be formed into. Eventually, the entire place around was filled with sharp streaks of light taking forms, and it looked like a clash of lightning from opposite sides, both crashing into one another, canceling each other’s effect. Isabelle put her hands over eyes, shielding them from the sudden explosion of brightness. It was strong enough to make her blind. Slowly, bit-by-bit, it all blackened. When she opened her eyes, what she saw before her was a beautiful yet strange sight: the light itself had taken shapes and sizes, forming a black and white film of a sort. It rather looked much like a soap opera – but just a very large one. It wasn’t hanging from something up above or floating in mid air. It was like a very large image sending off sparks of light, emitting a certain kind of glow.
Isabelle stared wide-eyed. By now she had a perfect idea of what it all was. It was nothing unfamiliar to her. She knew all this, had seen all this - just not in reality. But it all seemed too…bizarre to her to be true. Each speck of light that had formed into a whole illustration represented a hope, a belief, and a fear…a dream. Isabelle never knew she dreamt so much. We never know what we dream, how we dream, or why we dream; yet we all like to cherish the very idea of it.
These are my dreams. I’m actually looking at my dreams… but how can that be?
Sometimes our mind becomes ignorant of its own thoughts…it forgets. It is then that Chance and Reason come along, morphing the reality we see around us in such delicate yet easily perceivable consequences that bring what’s forgotten to our memory, vividly.
It all came back to her now, baffling her mind all at once, as she stood there, gazing at what she once thought was only an un-realistic, meaningless, morbid flesh of her imagination take shape. She understood now how she came to be here, in her dream world - because she had thought of it.
Though it still seemed utterly bizarre to her, she had forgotten she could control things, make things happen around her just by giving it a little thought - and it was exactly what she had done while standing before that dark portal which she had stepped into and was thrust here - in her dreamland!
Maybe it’s just a dream. Maybe I’m still asleep and dreaming of these wild things…
It was the only logical explanation she could think of at that moment, just when things had started getting stranger. And now, it was that very thought that had plunged her here. She had come across many obstacles in her life, especially after she was left all alone when her parents died. The first rule she was taught in her cryptology course was not to look at the complications in the encoded texts, but to look for the simplest of patterns in the figures, patterns so simple that they gave rise to many possible solutions and techniques, thus puzzling the mind. But this was something she couldn’t deduce some meaning from.
It was cold. She felt the shivers run through her whole frame, chilling her senses, but she kept herself intact.
When she was 5, Isabelle had visited Tundra Biome with her parents on one of their archeological researches. It was said that fossils of some rare kind of species, those that dwelled in cold regions, were buried there somewhere in the ice. Her parents had been assigned to find out of that was really true.
She always did some research of her own of the place they were to go to. She had read some things about Tundra Biome, some of which she still remembered. She had read that Tundra is the coldest of all the biomes, noted for its frost-molded landscapes, extremely low temperatures, little precipitation, poor nutrients, and short growing seasons. Dead organic material functions as a nutrient pool. The two major nutrients are nitrogen and phosphorus. Nitrogen is created by biological fixation, and phosphorus is created by precipitation. She liked chemistry and was glad to find it playing its magic in such a region when only ice covered everything on a barren piece of land, like cotton placed on a piece of dry wood.
It had been the most adventurous journey from all the places she had been to with her parents. She found the high peaks of mountains with crystal-clear ice sprinkled over them, along with little pieces of land scattered around the towering mountains and blue chunks of streams flowing about even more beautiful than the pyramids in Egypt and the ancient monuments and temples in Rome. She found the 10-hours ride in the chopper more fun than flying in a plane – she could see everything from above through the huge glass window. She had stuck her nose on the mirror, gazing down on the greens and blues and whites scattered here and there, thinking of how God created it from total nothingness and how man spills smoke and dust over it, hiding away its beauty.
They had landed safe and sound. Her father had been working on the navigation computers and setting up all the electronic devices while her mother had been busy setting up the camp and preparing hot steaming tea to warm them up. Isabelle was left on her own. It was a good opportunity to stroll away silently, she had thought.
Taking her father’s large woolen coat over her shoulders, she had silently stalked away, without her parents knowing. They hadn’t even glanced at her, asked her where was going. Sometimes it annoyed her; how they were so absorbed in their work they never paid much attention to her, ignoring her as if she wasn’t even there. But she convinced herself that what they were doing – un-veiling secrets and truths about nature and its aspects that would otherwise have been hidden from the world, rotting away in the dark of ignorance, was more important. The world needed to know the countless secrets and treasures hidden in the folds it daily walks on.
She had been looking for peculiar things in the ice, some rare kind of stone or a fossil, to add to her large collection of artifacts from all the places she had been to. It was when she had heard a heavy, distant sound, like a bear grumbling far away. Looking around she had found no sing of any danger. The noise had grown louder each minute. She had thought it might be a storm – if storms could come in places like that, when a puff of white had risen far away, descending from a hill covered with ice. She didn’t know why, but her brain had acted too slow, flaring warnings of the danger ahead when it was too late: the puff descending from the hill was part of an ice cap of the highest mountains in north of the Tundra Biome. It was why she had heard the sound as clearly – she had been in the northeast of the valley.
Fear and panic gripping her senses all at once, she had looked around helplessly for some kind of cave or rock to hide under, but there had been no sign of any mass till far away… except ice. She had been at a loss of what to do or where to go. She had been far from her parents. She had screamed for her them but her cries had been muffled in the crushing sound of the glacier. Realizing she could do nothing to save herself, she had sat right there in the center, knees cradled up to her chin, looking like a miserable, helpless child. Looking straight in the mist of the glacier rising closer each minute, she had known her death was certain; alone and a quite one it would be. She had been ready to face the monsters waiting for her in the hands of fate.
They say imagination is nothing but a world we create in our head with all that we have seen or heard or felt, blending some of our creativeness in it, giving it beauty and meaning…but they say a lot of things just for the sake of satisfying their own troubled minds.
Isabelle had a good imagination, and a very vivid one. She always memorized things by imagining them; moving and shifting them to the state we see them in. It always helped her a lot in understanding biological phenomena. She had closed her eyes tightly but had felt the cold ice wash over, burying her tiny frame like a gust of wind blown over a feather. The weight of ice had increased tenfold whenever she stirred; her movements gave way to more ice to fall down under its upper layer. She had grown stiff due to the cold, which luckily had helped her remain still.
Isabelle always wondered why our thoughts don’t have some effect on the world around
us, apart from our practically applying them in life. If a tiny grain of sand could have attraction to the earth’s gravity, why couldn’t our thoughts have some likely effect too, even if they are a tiny seed in the depths of our mind? She had asked her father once about it. He hadn’t said anything, but had taken her to their back garden and had dug a small hole in the ground and placed a stone inside. He had then covered it with soil.
He had then asked her whether it would take longer for a worm from under to reach it or someone standing on the top. She giving it a little thought, she had replied that of course, a worm could reach it before, because as it lived under the soil, it would be closer to the stone than someone standing on top of it, far away from it. He had smiled passionately to her and told her to imagine the stone as a thought, the worm as the mind and the soil on top of it as the physical forces around us.
After she had got the picture clear in her mind, her father had explained to her that as the worm is closer to the stone lying almost in the depth, it would take a short time for the worm to reach it. Contrary to this, it would take longer for the person standing on top of the ground to reach the stone, as he will be on the surface, far from the depth it lies in.
Same is the case with our thoughts, which are closer to our mind’s core than they are to the outer physical world. He had told her that the distance between the depth the stone is lying in and the top surface basically signifies the barrier between our thoughts and the outer world, the barrier being the aura whirling around us like a magical sheath, keeping the powers inside us from unleashing themselves and fencing the majority of them from reaching us.
It’s this very aura that keeps the physical forces around us from reaching into our mind – those that try to enslave our free thoughts and dreams and make them strangers to us. They can reach that depth though, but just like the worm is closer and has a stronger attraction for the stone; our mind has a stronger hold of our thoughts, guarded by our aura, than the physical effects outside it. They can reach our thoughts, but it would require all their will and power, leaving them broken. As for our thoughts, they are an un-breakable glass; they are strong, but eventually, they break. And so, it was only her imagination and positive thinking that had kept her from falling in the hands of death.
The mass of ice had been un-bearable for what little strength she had in her body, but she had kept her mind working like a machine…just without fuel. All she had to do was imagine. She thought of fire, loads and loads of it, surrounding her from everywhere, its heat flaring her senses. She had imagined herself in a pit full of fire, lightened up by its flames and its fast burning embers emanating from everywhere. The ice around and above hadn’t turned to fire or warmed all of a sudden, as if by magic. But she had had a funny feeling – other than the numbing coldness around her: she had felt warm inside. Images of flames had kept rising before her closed eyes, and she had somewhat found it soothing in the cold.
Isabelle had used her best not to shut off her mind completely, in the hope that her parents might find her, so that she may do something, scream or hit the ice or make some other kind of sign to let them know where she was. No matter how hard she had tried to keep her lungs breathing and her mind working non-stop, she just couldn’t outrun nature’s forces; when the mass of ice settled on top was more than she could bear, her insides became deadly numb. The last thing she saw was light, a lot of bright, white light blinding around her irises, and after that, she thought she might have gone to a place no one returned from . . .
Isabelle hadn’t known how long it had been since she lay in what she had thought might be her deathbed. Her parents had gone looking for her the moment they had heard the loud noise of the icecap falling down. They had caught a glimpse of her overcoat stuck in between patches if ice on the ground, the place where she lay with tons of ice on top of her. As soon as the icecap had stopped its flow downwards, they had started clearing ice from the ground and had found Isabelle unconscious, with her legs curled up to her chest, her face blue as death.
They had thought they had lost her, judging by her deathly paler and rigid body as if death prevailed over it, but she still had a pulse, though very meek one; and some warmth still remained in her.
Death is an un-expected guest. For some it gives a sign of its arrival, for some it comes without a warning while for some, it comes but turns its back on them, sparing them a chance of wandering more in the valley of life . . . and it’s when it seems as if chances of survival are very bleak.
Isabelle had lapsed into unconsciousness for a very long time. Her mother had wrapped her up in blankets and kept water bags under her arms to make her warm. After long last, the redness in her cheeks had returned and when she had re-gained her senses, her mother’s happiness knew no boundaries; seeing her daughter re-cover from a near death accident, blooming once again to life. Hugs and kisses were exchanged, and soon everything was back to normal.
Soon, arrangements had been made for their safe return. The research into the Tundra Biome for the so-called hidden fossils had never been carried out. Isabelle hadn’t blamed herself for anything that had happened – like most of us do in bad times, making ourselves responsible for everything that happens when it’s actually fate and luck that set the chain of such events in motion. She believed in cause and effect, and that everything happens for a reason.
She had kept her feelings to herself; she hadn’t told her mother or father the impending doom that had gripped her heart when she had been buried under the cold icecap. She had simply crushed that feeling and started looking at the better side of things; she only felt lucky to escape from such a near death experience.
Now, standing face-to-face with the treasures of her mind: her dreams, she recalled the power of imagination and the roles it had played in her life. And it had once again knocked on her doorstep. She just didn’t know whether to let it in or not . . .