Under the Green Sun of Slormor

by Bertil Falk

Chapter 6
Part 1 and Part 2
appear in this issue.

Chapter 6: In the World of the Hoverers

part 3 of 3

Then they came: soaring, emerald-green men and amber-colored women, all of them with the characteristic necks of Slormorians merging straight into their arms. They closed in on us, the women dressed in colorless clothes, where the lack of color itself sparkled in varying nuances; the men dressed in brightly colored dresses: the peacock syndrome!

They hung freely in the air and formed a colored, rotating whirl around us that lifted us away like a rainbow of suction between the trees. Under us was an abyss so filled with suspended bridges and branches that the ground was hidden from view. In that way we were transported to the plateau. I was not afraid, perhaps because Parvrin did not show any sign of anxiety, on the contrary.

“Here we can stay and rest tonight,” Parvrin said as the transporting whirl dissolved and we were carefully deposited on the village floor.

“What are they?” I wondered.

“The Hoverers, probably the kindest people of Slormor,” Parvrin replied.

On the huge plateau were lines of cabins, made of trees and separated by alleys.

Our arrival gave rise to a party. Beautiful women in colorless nuances danced fluttering rhythms while the men, in their of Scottish kilts reminiscent of loin cloths and with naked chests crossed by broad leather-like color bands, created the most seductive preparations by a hearth.

A choir of beautiful small children — they caused me to think of my newly christened grandchild — sang or hummed, or whatever they did, strange melodies. At first the songs seemed groping and unstructured, but after we listened some time, they appeared to be a sound of a peculiar, but nevertheless organized and compact melodic structure that lacked neither sharp discords nor striking chords.

At nightfall, multi-colored fires were lighted in big stone receptacles. The blue, yellow and red flames rose up through the air and mixed with each other in green, orange-colored and brown patterns, only to sail away on a vague night breeze wafting between the branches of the enormous tree trunks.

The food we were served consisted of delicious dishes. They turned out to be porously pie-like, filled with different savory ingredients.

Evrydejra was the name of the woman who had been detailed to entertain us, and she told us about the life and history of the tribe.

“In the beginning, Morfola thought that the balance in her creation was not satisfying. Something was missing. She searched the canals, she ransacked the plains, she examined the bottom of the seas, and she scouted in the forests. Nowhere did she find a lack of balance.

“Then she happened to look up to the treetops. She realized that something was missing there. Therefore she created us, and we have been hovering at this level ever since. We are here in order to balance existence through our mere presence. That makes us the most important nation of Slormor, and we are very proud of having been assigned this task by Morfola.”

We let Evrydejra’s story sink in while we warmed ourselves by the multi-colored glows surrounding us. The Bengal lights glowed in shadows of bronze across Parvrin’s face. Her dark emerald eyes had a clairvoyant luster, a brilliance I had not noticed before. It may not have been there before, but it had now been charmed by the legend about the story of the creation of the hovering tribe.

She seemed to look far beyond the ragged covering of the now, as though she could see with a penetrating X-ray vision through the layers of the illusions of existence, through the multifarious veils of Maya concealing the truth, through the emptiness, the meaningless meaning of existing, through an intentionless intention without foothold in anything that could be named life and living.

Existential hollowness exposed itself shamelessly to all of us, though we did not believe our eyes but let ourselves be dazzled by accidental enjoyment as well as by the accidental distress of restless suffering and joyless celebrations.

How Parvrin had matured during our wandering through the apparently endless squalor of Slormor! A bowl of comfort, a clang of tumblers that meet, a consolation of a valuable phantasm, and all this senseless hunger for knowledge and the violent fierceness surrounding us with its mysterious metaphors, an orgy of gangrene. Her eyes were whirling maelstroms that stripped vanity of any capacity to conceal its emptiness. The skin of her face reflected the fluttering of the fires, the blue curtains of groping light growing into rust-colored layers of splendid flames and sparkling shadows in the ultra-quiet blackness.

With a sense of furious melancholy, I let my eyes rest on a flame flickering out, a flame that gaspingly lost itself in silence. Meaning, meaning in this life; what in this land is truth, in truth? A feeling of gloom! Tired, as if hit by jet lag. Burned out.

A guttural voice caused me to turn around. Evrydejra had said something in an indescribable dialect. She was talking to Parvrin, and soon the two were absorbed in conversation, the content of which I rather imagined than understood. I regarded the two women of the races of the slanting shoulders. Were we related? Did we have common DNA? Should we not? We look almost the same, did we not?

It was with such thoughts that I slowly sank into a somnolent saturation akin to sleep. I was in a state where I was neither awake nor asleep, though it was of importance. Ever since I had arrived at this point in the existence, I had never, awake or asleep, been quite able to distinguish dream from reality. As I drifted little by little into the unconsciousness that is sleep, the fires went out, and the shadows ceased to dance their hovering samba between the branches.

To be continued...

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