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were the temple premises for long-forgotten gods,
carved in sparkling mica like the salt statues, chandeliers, and
iconostasis in the mines of Wieliczka in Krakow, Poland.
    But despite the apparent desolation that
permeated the underwater city, as if by magic, it had not ceased to
function at all. The ebony-black air ducts were blowing warm but
clean air, the lighting worked, and the tremulous hiss of the
drainage system accompanied the churning moisture; the entirety of
the complex tangle of support systems were in place.
    Therefore the men kept moving. They stopped
occasionally to rest and squished miles of paper that had been
strewn across the floors. Maybe those papers held the annals of all
sorts of the great kingdoms whose inventions have reached our
period of time. Who knows, perhaps the literature and music of
underwater bards were now nothing more than festering corpses.
    Sometimes, the men dozed, spiraling into
wild daydreams as they stared at incomprehensible characters until
they thought that somebody’s life had been laid out before
them.
    But the traveling and vague anxiety remain
covered by the sediment in their minds, which had been narrowed by
the underground gates. The men simply did not have the opportunity
to think too deeply on such things.
    They moved further into the depths and
finally reached the accommodation of Thule. Its halls were filled
with bundles of tubes in which the compressor blades chopped
through air and water. The area was shrouded in cobwebs that wound
miles high and long. From somewhere within the room, a grinding
gramophone began to play music.
    At first, the subtle cracks of music
stroked, scraped, and shuffled like pebbles in a sea wave. Then the
melody gradually seeped like oil; it was a smell choking the throat
with the poison of its hopelessness.
    The gramophone played stories of the birth,
rise, and fall of a world. Interwoven in every sound was a fortune
of all-consuming loneliness, something that contained its own
beauty.
    The song floated along as if it were rinsing
all the folds of the soul. It was also piercing cold, like the
shivering drops of bitter alcohol that had concentrated within it a
thousand unspoken things. It’s difficult to tilt the scales of
dreams and memories.
    Listening to the song, the group sunk into
its weeping vibrations; they seemed to explode within them like a
distant summer thunder.
    They remembered things long
forgotten—memories suppressed in the depths of their minds, dim
reminiscences that whispered of favorite places and people.
    It was the melody of desolation and grief,
cried from the shreds of a soul and bringing to mind its sister:
sadness.
    The men approached, strode into their
sadness, and the dripping water tunnel answered with its own
endlessness.
    It became even darker, slippery and greasy
like eyes that had been gouged out, and the echo from of the music
continued beating.
    Finally, after walking through all the
cavities of the great Kingdom of Thule, the crew had caught up to
its center.
    Here, between the walls and illuminated by
thousands of tons of lava, the command center of the underwater
city flowed from the ceiling and was ventilated by hundreds of
turbines that looked like overgrown mushrooms ; it bent at the end
like a diamond sitting in a bubble over an inferno.
    The men looked at each other, and the song
echoed like a war drum over the earthen pit.
    Chapter
Eight
    The palace complex of Knossos stood over the
hill of Kephala lonely and unsatisfied, an achievement of a
civilization that had been curse by the ragged, thin Moira. It now
stood like an upcoming horror, devoid of any form of life but
somehow still exuding the air of a predatory organism.
    Before the men, like white sleeves tucked
into an oblong shape, were levels upon levels of houses. They were
miserably bleached containers, looking like little more than the
faceted eyes of a torn apart cocoon covered in the mucus of
imago.
    Beside them, on the deserted