I looked down. The rough ground stretched from beneath me up to the thin dusty line miles away, a sharp horizontal slice across the landscape in front of my eyes, holding the ground and the sky at bay, away from each other. The desert floor was dry and dead, coarse with rocks littering its lunar surface. It knew no mercy, no forgiving, no soothing drop of cool water from the gloomy skies above, and it had come to accept it thus, and lay rough and lifeless, its interplay of red and hot sand a reminder of anything but life.

I stood on a high perch, looking down at the expanse. It was an immeasurably tall pedestal, an impossible column of the firm desert rock sweeping suddenly out of the level ground and rising high, pointing its audacious finger at the unfriendly cloudy sky. This roughly round structure had a strangely flat, levelled top, and I stood up there, near the sky itself. I felt the high breeze and looking down at the lifeless, bare ground lying all around at my feet, containing nothing of importance but this pedestal of rock, while the colourless dusky sky swirled imperceptibly above me. It was a picture of stark contrast, that single high column of the desert ground rising above the rest, as if the purpose of the entire desert was to uphold this one structure, which was formed of the desert itself, yet which, in its towering boldness and loneliness, threw the desert into insignificance.

I was waiting for someone, or something. It was a vague feeling, but it had expectation in it somewhere. Whatever I was waiting for was being delayed, I felt as I gazed at the sky.

I turned. There was a cave-like formation right in the middle of the pedestal’s level top, slightly taller than my head. It grew out of the same desert rock that formed the rest of this world and had holes very roughly hewn into it, forming one, maybe two windows, and a door.

I went and stood at the entrance to the cave. It was dark inside, deprived of the gloomy glow the sky threw over the landscape, and at the windows, roughly cut pieces of the sky seemed to be hanging on its dark walls, a picture of what lay outside this closed hole. Then I looked down at the rock floor, and wished I hadn’t.

There was a hole dug into the floor, almost as big as the inside of the cave itself. The hole was very deep. And there were steps carved out from the rock inside the hole that descended down it. As the steps went lower, darkness engulfed them, and only a few were visible from where I stood. But I knew, for a split second as I looked down, I knew inexplicably, inexorably where the steps went, how much further the hole stretched through the spine of this proud structure. They went forever, never-ending, descending relentlessly through the darkness, through the emptiness, exploring more and more vacuum as they went, and away to an expanse that was held captive by no boundaries, and farther and farther the hole went, farther than all imagination, farther than the tiny universe; the descent was unstopped, it ended nowhere, not even where imagination fails. And it all was hidden inside my precious solitary finger of rock in my familiar, bare desert that was bereft of all but my pedestal. I had never known.

<I had this dream a long time ago, and I hope I interpreted it rightly. This is not an absolutely accurate reproduction of it. It is only a modified assortment of the images that survived the ravage of the time that has passed since then. How you interpret it, is up to you.>

1Life.