The trudging, climbing folk crawled up the hillside. They reached a
place high above the valley Burl had led them to. That valley grew misty
in appearance. Presently it could no longer be seen at all. The mist
they had taken for granted, all their lives, hid from them everything
but the slanting stony wall up which they climbed. The stone was mostly
covered by bluish-green rock-tripe in partly overlapping sheets. Such
stuff is always close behind the bacteria which first attack a
rock-face. On a slope, it clings while soil is washed downward as fast
as it is formed. The people never ate rock-tripe, of course. It produces
frightening cramps. In time they might learn that when thoroughly dried
it can be cooked to pliability again and eaten with some satisfaction.
But so far they neither knew dryness nor fire.
Nor had they ever known such surroundings as presently enveloped them. A
slanting rocky mountainside, which stretched up frighteningly to the
very sky. Grayness overhead. Grayness also to one side,--the side away
from the mountain. And equal grayness below. The valley from which they
had come could no longer be seen even as a different shading of the
mist. And as they scrambled and trudged after Burl, his followers
gradually became aware of the utter strangeness of all about them. For
one result, they grew sick and dizzy. To them it seemed that all
solidity was slowly tilting. Had they been superstitious, they might
have thought of demons preparing to punish them for daring to come to
such a place. But--quaintly enough--Burl's followers had developed no
demonology. Your typical savage is resolved not to think, but he does
have leisure to want. He makes gods and devils out of his nightmares,
and gambles on his own speculations to the extent of offering blackmail
to demons if they will only let him alone or--preferably--give him more
of the things he wants.
But the superstitions of savages involve the payment of blackmail in
exact proportion to their prosperity. The Eskimos of Earth lived always
on the brink of starvation. They could not afford the luxury of tabus
and totem animals whose flesh must not be eaten, and forbidden areas
which might contain food.
Religion there was, among Burl's people, but superstition was not. No
humans, anywhere, can live without religion, but on Earth Eskimos did
with a minimum of superstitions,--they could afford no more--and the
humans of the forgotten planet could not afford any at all.
Therefore they climbed desperately despite the unparalleled state of
things about them. There was no horizon, but they had never seen a
horizon. Their feeling was that what had been "down" was now partly
"behind" and they feared lest a toppling universe ultimately let them
fall toward that grayness they considered the sky.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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