This, he understood, was a place of worship, and the inhabitants of the small town had regarded it as so important that they had built the bridge across the stream and the road that led to the pinnacle.
He was also clearly aware of the hunger of the tiny birds, and the alarm of their mother, who was waiting until this intruder left her home, anxious in case he harmed her chicks. Feeling guilty, he made his way out into the sunlight. The bird, which was perched on the tree, quickly flew back inside.
At this point, about halfway up the pinnacle, the path became narrower and rose more steeply. Niall gazed up the sixty-degree slope, then glanced into the depth below, and wondered if it was worth going any farther. In the rock to his left, a round hole had been chiseled, and six feet farther on, a second. He guessed that their purpose had been to hold a rope to serve as a handrail; but this probably had rotted away centuries ago. Without such a rope, the path looked slippery and dangerous. But when he turned the thought mirror again, the surge of energy caused his nervousness to evaporate, and he began to mount the slope, keeping his eyes fixed on his feet.
After twenty feet, he was relieved when the path turned left past a cushion of crystal shaped like a lion’s face, and continued to mount between two walls that were a mixture of dark, granitelike rock and blue quartz. Where it came to an end above another sheer drop, steps had been carved in the right-hand wall. These were shallow, scarcely three inches deep, but at least he could use the higher steps as handholds. Far above him, the peak of the tower looked as if it was made of blue glass.
He decided to remove his backpack, which obstructed him in this narrow passageway, and also to take off his sandals. He left them on the steps, then continued to climb up the steep face — wondering, at the same time, why he was bothering to risk his life like this.
Twenty feet higher, he no longer had the protection of the other wall; it terminated in its own pinnacle. But a dozen feet above him, he could now see another cavelike opening in the rock, this one no more than three feet high and wide.
He paused to recover his breath — climbing an almost vertical wall was hard work, and he was glad he was unencumbered by his pack — then pressed on up the final dozen steps, taking care not to glance down or even think of the drop below. At last his head reached the ledge that was the entrance. Remembering the bird that had startled him last time, he became cautious and braced himself. And in fact, as he reached over the threshold, and felt a groove that obviously had been created as a handhold, there was a loud flapping of wings, and a few feathers descended on him. But the birds flew away through a window inside the tower.
Finally he was standing upright in a chamber about six feet square, its floor covered with bird droppings. The room had two windows, each about eight feet above his head and reached by three tall, shallow steps carved into the wall. The ceiling was high — perhaps twelve feet — and seemed higher because the walls sloped inward, a consequence of the narrowing of the pinnacle toward its summit. Against the left-hand wall a bench had been carved out of the rock.
Niall sat down on it, closed his eyes, and rested his head back against the wall. It was such a relief that he was almost tempted to fall asleep. The chamber was cool; a faint breeze blew through the door and windows.
When his breathing had calmed, he turned the thought mirror away from his chest. The result was a feeling of security, and the total disappearance of his subconscious anxiety about his dangerous position and the problems that would face him on the way down. It was almost as if he had walked into a comfortable room with a fire and been given a seat in a deep armchair. It reminded him somehow of his arrival at King Kazak’s underground city, and the warmth with which he was greeted by relatives he had never seen.
The vibration that he had sensed in the room downstairs was even stronger here. This place was the center of a vortex of force — the same force that he had sensed in the cave of the chameleon men. But there it had been a kind of background vibration that he tuned into by deep relaxation. Here it was so powerful that the relaxation was unnecessary. He could feel it merely by opening his senses.
At once, he knew that this force made the stone of the pinnacle alive, so that it had somehow recorded everything that had ever happened there. All Niall had to do was to open himself to this knowledge and absorb it. The most powerful presence Niall could sense in the room was that of a man, who had lived here for many years. The name was unusual, and it took Niall a moment to grasp it; it was Jan Sephardus.
Sephardus had discovered this place in the century after the Great Migration of the twenty-second century. And from Sephardus’s powerful mind, Niall learned more of the history of the Earth during the last years of human freedom, before the coming of the spiders.
He learned, to begin with, the answer to a question that had struck him when he had absorbed the history of the Earth from the Steegmaster in the white tower: why so many human beings had been left behind during the Great Migration. Was it their own choice, or had they been ruthlessly selected to remain behind and face destruction by the comet Opik?
The answer was that, for huge numbers, it had been their own choice. They simply did not have the imagination to believe that the Earth would be destroyed, and were too lazy to launch themselves on a new adventure. But there were equally large numbers who were deliberately excluded from the Great Migration because its genetic scientists regarded them as subnormal — one notorious official document referred to them as the “dregs.” Of course, this process of discrimination was a closely guarded secret — lest the “dregs” start a rebellion — but the precaution proved unnecessary.
So after the departure of the giant space transports for Alpha Centauri, the “dregs” inherited the Earth. And in a sense they were proved correct: Opik missed Earth by a million and a quarter miles. But so much material from its radioactive tail fell into the atmosphere that nine-tenths of animal life was destroyed. There followed a great ice age, and as the warmth slowly returned, most lands reverted to what would once have been regarded as barbarism. The majority of the surviving human beings went back to the kind of life men had always lived in the countryside. As generators broke down, few made any attempt to repair them or build more; instead they returned to the use of fire and oil lamps. Now there were no more giant automobile plants, cars were replaced by horses, and tractors by oxen. Cities became almost deserted, since they were full of robbers. Now that there were no more fire brigades, whole cities burned to the ground.
Monasteries began to flourish, as they had done in the Middle Ages, and in this new Dark Age, they became the guardians of learning. Sephardus, whose parents were farmers, had attended a monastery school, and had become fascinated by geology. This was how he had come to discover this pinnacle above the Valley of the Dead (which was then covered with grazing land, farms, and tilled fields).
Sephardus had built himself a hermit’s hut at the foot of the pinnacle. He was attracted to it because he had immediately felt its power. After living there for only a few weeks, he had decided he never wanted to live anywhere else.
The nearest farm was at the bottom of the valley, fifteen miles away. The farmer, in exchange for teaching his children reading and writing, had provided Sephardus with the basic necessities of life. Soon Sephardus was regarded throughout the Valley as a holy man, and many came from remote villages to ask advice and pay homage.
Humans had lost none of their belligerence since the Great Migration, and local warlords fought to establish their authority. One of these, known as Rolf the Vandal, built a stronghold in the mountains to the east and often raided the Valley. That was why men built the town on the heights, choosing a position that was virtually impregnable. The pinnacle was an obvious lookout for raiders, and stonemasons worked for three years carving out this chamber in which Niall was now sitting. Then, at the request of Sephardus, they carved out the chapel below.