The Hollow Earth

 

 

In fine, the Great Old Ones are huge woomo, watery bags similar to the creatures that sailors call bêche-de-mer, trepang, or sea cucumber. A zoologist would place them in the class Holothurioidea of the phylum Echinodermata, which means that the barrel-shaped holothurians are cousin to such echinoderms as the starfish and the sea urchin.

So humble to see are the Lords of Creation.

I remembered hearing Bulkington and Captain Guy talk of bêche-de-mer, telling of how the earliest cruises to the Feejees had gathered hundreds of the creatures, which had then been dried in the sun or smoked over open fires on the beach. Sold in Canton, the best quality bêche-de-mer fetches ninety dollars a hundredweight. Their purchasers are voluptuaries who use the bêche-de-mer as a tonic and as an exotic delicacy, akin to birds‟-nest soup. Bulkington had asserted that when set into hot water, a dried bêche-de-mer will permeate the fluid with so marvelous and slippery an edibility that a woman treated to a private dinner of such wonder will surely—but I lose my train of thought, I shy away from our universe‟s humble mystery: the Titans at world‟s end are graven not in Man‟s image, nay, nay, the Great Old Ones are ludicrous slippery sacks. Even so, let me now stress, their minds are clear, wise, and beautiful. Indeed, it was their minds whose emanations I had thought to be from God Almighty!

Examining three Great Old Ones in detail with Eddie, I found them to be enormous thick-walled meatbags proportioned, severally, like a rolling pin, like a Turkish hassock, and like a gourd. All three had flexible bodies that were deeply striated as a sea urchin‟s shell. The five longitudinal stripes that run along their bodies consist of warty bumps in double rows, the warts the size of small mountains. These warts resemble a starfish‟s tube-feet and are flexible and roughly cylindrical, with somewhat concave tops. The extremities of the great sea cucumbers‟ bodies are as two poles: cloacal and ingestive. The cloaca is a thick turned-in pucker, but from their ingestive ends the trepangs evert ten branching treelike limbs of enormous intricacy. The flexible branchings give them an appearance like sprouting yams. The oral fans are used for seining food from the air; each bêche-de-mer periodically drawing its branchings back into its mouth, there to consume what has accreted. The ten fans are taken in turn—as a child would suck its fingers.

The rows of warts are used for sensing and for communication. The Great Old Ones‟ major sensory mode, other than tekelili union, is electric. Each of the tubes of light that flows out in any direction from the Central Anomaly emanates from one of the swaying mesas on their hides. When I watched attentively, I could see how the skeins of light darting through the inner sky were like giant ghostly versions of the Tekelili beings‟ fans. Apparently, the dual, mirrored spinning of Earth and MirrorEarth makes the Central Anomaly an endless source of electric fluid, and the giant holothurians use their tube feet to manipulate the continual discharge. Before he changed his mind about the Great Old Ones, Eddie took this to mean that our planet is a giant body, with the trepangs comprising a galvanically active central brain benevolently working for the greater union of the whole.

Of the Great Old Ones‟ inner nature I can give little more than my initial impression: They were calm, busy, and filled, I would say, with love for the world and for all the living things in it. The tekelili mindreading ability is an effect that seems to take its physical cause from the spatial constriction at the Central Anomaly. An equally odd physical effect obtaining at the throat of the bridge between the worlds is timelessness. Relative to a mind on the Central Anomaly, Earth and Htrae are moving with immense speed, yet so strong is the central tekelili that nothing goes unnoticed. I recall the words of a hymn—“A thousand ages in Thy sight, are like an evening gone.” How to fit something so majestically great into my small mind... and how to tell it?

At the very peak of our first union with the Tekelili, Eddie and I were able to see out through them. I could see out through the Tekelili‟s all-probing eyes of light and into all of Earth, Htrae, MirrorEarth, and MirrorHtrae.

                                                                    

 Rudy Rucker, The Hollow Earth

                                                                      

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