Nobody
knows when that mountain disappeared. Elizabeth was the only one,
probably, who took the time to guess; she guessed the mountain
disappeared sometime between 1927 and 1937.
She
had been born in the town of Upington in 1907. Her family lived there
until she was twenty. They left to live in Durban which was about
six-hundred miles away. When she visited Upington ten years later,
the mountain was not there.
By
the time Elizabeth was twenty, there were nine in her family: her
parents and seven children, all daughters. Elizabeth was the eldest
child.
Upington
was a small town, and so, all-in-all, Elizabeth's personality
inclined to being claustrophobic at times. Her self-applied cure,
with her parents' encouragement was to go hiking. Alone. At night.
About
five miles north of Upington, a sand desert began, and extended west,
east, and north for thousands of miles. Sandstorms from the desert
was the reason Upington was likely to remain a small town of a few
hundred persons, forever.
Elizabeth
hiked into the desert. She knew, and loved it that she was completely
alone there. Especially at night; the desert itself was utterly dark;
the light from countless millions of stars shed a mythical glow that,
nonetheless, made the desert surface visible, albeit dimly. The
poetry Elizabeth felt when she was in the desert discouraged her from
using her flashlight most of the time. She resorted to it for brief
seconds when she thought she absolutely had to. Sometimes. As seldom
as she could.
It
was one of those sometimes that she came upon the mountain. Suddenly
it was there in her path. A black wall; utterly black despite the dim
starlight everywhere around on the ground.
Elizabeth's
instant reaction was that the blackness was that of a hole. She
stopped, and slowly surveyed the blackness with her flashlight beam.
She made three decisions.
She
would not hike any farther. She would return home. She intended to
return in daylight.
It
took weeks before Elizabeth returned in day time. In those weeks, she
had spent time in the school library, searching for information about
that mountain.
The
library search was easy because she had worked on-and-off part time
at the library, and on weekends her parents were pleased to allow her
to live in the library's workers' residence rooms, whenever
convenient for the library’s administrators.
She
found a few faded aerial photographs only. It seemed that the
mountain was considered so insignificant that even the photographs
had the briefest mentions of the mountain. There was no record of
whom it was that took the photographs.
It
took Elizabeth a few day-trips to find the mountain, again. This
repeated failure was because of the desert high temperatures of 100s
of degrees, and the sunlight blinding reflection off the sand, and
the radiation of the sun’s heat from the surface of the desert.
That invisible but tangible radiation in places was as immediately
destructive as flames of fire.
The
heat was torture. There was insignificant relief from sunglasses
against the fierce reflection of sunlight off desert sand. She did
not wander about searching for long, each time she dared to venture
out.
When
she eventually came upon the mountain, she was stunned. She came upon
it suddenly, as if she had turned a corner, and there it was.
It
was more a massive stone pillar, than a mountain. Because of the
glare of the sun, she was not sure she could see the top of the
mountain. She was disappointed. She gradually became aware why
information about the mountain was so scarce; there was almost
nothing especially remarkable about the mountain.
She
ceased her daytime ventures. In her subsequent nighttime excursions,
she never tried to locate the mountain.
In
Elizabeth's twentieth year, the family left Upington. There were no
plans to ever return. A wild and meaningless thought occurred to
Elizabeth.
Over
the years, Elizabeth's mother had given each of her seven daughters a
Victorian hatpin.
Once
upon a time in the nineteenth century in Britain, Victorian hatpins
had continued being a high-society expensive fashion that had begun
in Ancient Roman Empire times. By Elizabeth's time, the fashion had
practically died out in Britain. The pins had become minor
sentimental keepsakes.
Elizabeth
decided to do something unique with her Victorian hatpin.
Over
many nights, she searched for the mountain. Eventually, she came upon
it; again, eerily, suddenly. With the help of her flashlight, she
looked and felt with her hand for a spot on the side of the mountain.
She inserted her Victorian hatpin for its full length into the
mountain. She promised her pin she would return sometime in the
future to visit.
In
her thirtieth year Elizabeth returned. She was now a school teacher,
teaching at Essenwood Secondary School for girls, in Durban about
six-hundred miles away, where she lived happily on her own. She had
driven to Upington from Durban in her automobile car.
Upington
seemed to have stalled in time. It had changed only a little in only
two ways.
Tourists,
albeit in small numbers. Only daytime excursions because
air-conditioning had practically eliminated the inconveniences of the
terrors of the daytime sunshine.
The
library personnel were still all who were there when she had left
Upington. They were overjoyed to provide Elizabeth with free living
quarters for her temporary stay.
Elizabth
discretely enquired of the staff at the Tourist Agency about the
mountain. Nobody had heard of it. The official records, far more than
there were when Elizabeth lived in Upington, showed the desert to be
completely of sand flatlands. Those few faded aerial photographs were
still there, unbeknownst, obviously, to the staff at the Tourist
Agency.
Elizabeth
paid no attention to the temptation in her to inform the staff at the
Tourist Agency of the photographs.
Elizabeth,
somewhat depressed, was resigned to leave without keeping her promise
to her Victorian hatpin. This time she promised herself that when she
was back in Durban, she would look into the possibility of organizing
a tour group to spend days and nights exploring the desert, in search
of the mountain.
She
paid a visit to the school she and her six sisters had attended. All
the teachers were new. Otherwise, everything was just as it was ten
years ago. She recognized the very desks she and her six sisters had
occupied. A thought teased its way slowly through her that nothing
stood in the way of her returning to Upington as a school teacher.
When she casually asked about a mountain she had heard about in the
desert, she was informed that there was no mountain if only because,
in recent previous years, the desert had been rocked by a few minor
earthquakes. This discouraged tourists and other strangers from
venturing too far out into the desert.
On
her way out of Upington, buoyed a little by her resolution to return,
either as teacher or investigator tourist group leader, she stopped,
on an impulse, at the Tourist Agency shop to buy a souvenir, or two.
There,
for sale at a reduced sale price, on a shelf, gathering dust, was a
replica of Ancient King Arthur's miraculous Excalibur sword embedded
up to the hilt in a chunk of rock-like glass. The glass made the
entire embedded blade section of the shiny sword visible.
On
a closer look, Elizabeth saw, embedded with the sword’s blade
to form an ex pattern inside the glass, her Victorian hatpin!
Contact
Ezra (Unless
you
type
the
author's name in
the subject
line
of the message we
won't know where to send it.)
