The Great Wall

“I have a dream,” once wrote the poet Muralis, “of a life lived on a great plane – not against one.” For his heresy, he was thrown into the fog steeped depths of the Empty, where his body – presumed to be falling still – starved to death. We who call the many stairwells, ramparts, landings, ladders, and nooks of the Great Wall our home do not talk about general theories of horizontality. Flat things are those small interstices between the Wall and death, the known and the infinite, whereupon you sleep, shuffle, and stand. Muralis went on, “I dream one day of a rapid succession of feet, whose soles tread without the fear of falling.” His words were strangely beautiful, but in the end he was judged a dangerous fantasist obsessed with the impossible. For this, he was killed.

We who love the Wall, and our numbers are many, desire only to live our lives in peace. We climb and descend the enormous iron ladders that disappear upwards beyond sight, and we are filled with good cheer when we pass by friends and neighbours on our way to one of the many hollows that dot the surface. These are our homes, our schools, our places of work. We step from ladders into these holes and recesses, and from them procure our sustenance, our clothing, and our daily bread. Sometimes we stop, our arms twined around the mesh of rope that spans between rungs, and stare down at the Wall’s many narrow ledges that gather rainwater, or allow a few stalks of wheat to sprout in the dazzling sun. We gaze upon these wonders, and adore them, for they are what give us life.

But there are those who oppose our humble existence, and resent the simple beauty of the vertical. They are fools, zealots, and ideologues who seek to deny the undeniable, and plant deep fissures in the core of our world. Inspired by Muralis’ words, they want to bring down the wall, to reunite us with the mythical “flat earth”. They meet in dark corridors, wide and level, dug with bloody hands into the marrow of our home. They are said even to dance – as surely a lie as any other, but poisonous to impressionable minds. Their worst crime, however, is done in whispering that Muralis still lives, and that he walks down below in a world flat and lush and free of vertigo.

They must be stopped from destroying all that we hold dear. But we must not resort to the crude violence they employ; we must be in every respect their betters. Whatever the cost may be, we must show them that the wall extends infinitely in every direction. They will not stop until they are made to see. It has thus been decided that we, true believers in the Great Wall, shall build a ramp as wide and stable as our artisans can conceive. We will use the stone of the Wall itself to construct it, we will live upon it, and it shall descend in a spiral, down and down into the Empty, as far as it need go to convince the heretics of the falsity of their beliefs.