A TOP-DOWN PERSPECTIVE

I heard tale, once, of a tribe who lived at the summit of a bottomless mountain. They had been a nomadic people, eons before; they knew this from the thousand and one names of their ancestors they chanted in shared memory, the songs and titles from the centuries of climbing that preceded them. They held relics of an age before the mountain they could not themselves make at such an altitude, like their sacred cooking pots, or their chipped knives once smoothed from meteoric iron. At some point on that trail, the climbers passed their old gods, frozen against gneiss older than themselves. They performed for them the rites of mourning unknown travelers, before continuing the ascent to their people’s new home.

Now at the apex, they raised and trained black owls with oily feathers to bring them ptarmigan and squab, which they boiled down into a perpetual stew with many gathered leeks and nettles. The dark broth they shared formed the foundation of their bodies, generation to generation, in their encampment that looked down on all of reality. The air was so thin, and so cold, that their skin was violet, nearly transparent, the patterns in their veins as much a part of their individual identities as their faces. In a place forgotten by oxygen, to so much as hold their breath was a risk, to make love a mortal danger. They remained human, but their vitality became delicate, their songs quiet.

There was no map of the world as they knew it, for it could have no axes, lacking horizontal and vertical measures alike. There could be no horizon when there was no surface of the world to split earth and sky, and from there, no division between night and day, no sunrise. There was, forever, a faint glow in the Undereast, somewhere impossibly far beneath their territory, and if they gazed down toward it long enough, they could catch a faint, distant spark of pink and orange. It was a fire smaller than any ember, further away than the stars above them, yet it reminded them that the old songs were true, and they continued to sing.

Their only companions in the animal kingdom, beyond their owls, were goats. They were the bridge between two impossibly far worlds: wise, horned beasts unencumbered by alpine terrain, transcending the tribe’s beginning and end. An infinite expanse of stone was as mundane to caprines as any other landscape, and when they visited in passing, they were treated as sacred, never killed, though occasionally spoken to. Goats were seen as the bringers of dreams, and carriers of messages from an underworld the tribe had long abandoned to their dead.

Eventually, a traveller arrived speaking in a language they did not understand, the first intruder since their own arrival. He looked to be dying, starved, his skin blackened and purpled by the frost of endless night, grave injuries clotted shut by the sunless air. The few words he managed to gasp out, they chanted back at him, and they ran his tender flesh through with their knives, bleeding him from the throat and heart until there was nothing left to animate his bones. They knew that no human should be here, not even themselves, and graced him with a return to the world he knew, and they could never see. They opened his body and dressed it of its organs, then cast him from the same precipice as they cast their own kin during funerary rites, down to his rightful geometries for burial.

I know this because he told me. In a small Jamaican restaurant in Los Angeles, he assured me that all of the above was true. He could not tell me where he found this mountain, or why he chose to brave it bare of modern equipment and crew, but he was vehement about the nature of his end. He knew that he was still dead; it's just that he wasn't dead from our perspective.

He was having the goat curry.