Short story 36

I first heard mention of the “Many-Legged God” while traveling Papua New Guinea in preparation for writing my dissertation in 2010. Seated around a fire with several elders of a remote highland village, our interview had stretched long into the night, and the full moon above cast the tree-shrouded cliffs in an ethereal glow. There was a lull in the conversation, and I allowed my eyes to wander the landscape. When I lingered on the deep ravine below, its path winding through a canyon into some farther valley obscured by the green canopy, one of the elders pointed and shook his head.

Only bad could come of looking upon the home of the Many-Legged God, he had told me. Better to dwell on good things, among friends. They had refused to elaborate in detail, only saying that a much-hated tribe dwelt in the hidden valley, and that they practiced foul customs which the highlanders abhorred.

In a land wracked by inter-tribal conflict with many richly varied beliefs in witchcraft, I took it in stride. Even today, stories about cannibalism and trophy heads are told in the harsh, remote reaches of the massive island. I assumed that this was another case of two clans of ancient enemies feuding with one another, and didn’t give it much thought. I wrapped up my trip over the next month and returned to the states with copious notes on language and customs close at hand.

Only in late 2017 did I happen across that strange name again. The old journal of an armed guard for a surveying expedition had been uncovered in a forgotten corner of Papua’s national museum, and a contact I made during my trips to the country asked if I was interested in translating the document. Given this meant I had first access to the artifact, I jumped at the chance to distract myself from the monotony of teaching.

It’s necessary to dive into the history the journal describes for context, but I’ll keep it brief. Early in 1914, an expedition was dispatched by the German Empire’s colonial government in Papua New Guinea to survey the interior of the northeastern corner of the island, known at that time as Kaiser-Wilhelmsland. The hundred or so men involved would continue their survey despite the beginning of the first world war, avoiding Australian capture in the wilderness long after the colony had fallen into allied hands.

Hermann Detzner, who led the expedition, published a memoir of the experience in the wake of the conflict. Filled with stretched truths, it resembled an adventure novel more than a scientific study. Ethnographers and anthropologists have long held it to be mostly fiction, a tall tale woven by a brave but immodest man. The expedition’s few surviving members were either natives intent on keeping quiet or shocked German youths desperate to forget the hardships of the road, with disease and hostile tribes having taken their toll on the wandering surveyors. No other known accounts have been given of this expedition, making this lone, water-stained journal the last remnant of a long-dead adventure.

Its narrator had been Friedrich Hoetzendorf, a freshly-graduated engineering student from Munich. The account was mostly logistical, dry and boring, listing miles traveled and supplies used. Occasional clashes with hostile locals were usually avoided by negotiation, and the few early pages containing personal musings are spent complaining about mosquitoes and the omnipresent heat. It remained this way until late 1916, when the expedition reached a highland village which Friedrich named as ‘ancient tree’ in German. I recognized the name, though today the title was spoken in Papua’s Tok Pisin pidgin language. Then, Friedrich raised further memories when he wrote of the odd legends villagers told of a Many-Legged God who ruled the lower valleys.

As I drew the connection to my own past wanderings, I read that Friedrich and several younger members of the expedition had gotten a village elder drunk on rationed schnapps. During this night of drinking, they had been regaled with stories by the old man about the twisted inhabitants of the valley and the high civilization they supposedly boasted. The valley-dwellers lived in buildings of stone and wore trinkets of gold, the old man had insisted, unlike anything I’ve ever heard described on the island.

Friedrich ends the account of the night with a depiction of a gold totem the elder produced as proof. Supposedly taken as a trophy of war after a clash with the valley-dwellers, it had been sketched on the following page with careful grace. This drawing resembled a centipede coiled into a spiral, its seemingly eyeless head at the center. The craftsmanship was described as superb, but the expedition’s offers to buy the totem went unaccepted, and Friedrich left the village empty-handed.

The rest of the journal, methodical and meticulous, revealed no more about the Many-Legged God. The valley was fast left behind and worries about Australian pursuit drove away any speculation about what the out-of-place idol might mean. I was far removed from worrying about Australian search parties, however. The nagging feeling that I was at the cusp of something undiscovered would not let me forget so easily.

I droned on through my classes until the summer relieved me of distractions, my mind lingering on that tree-shrouded valley in faraway Papua. Despite how little evidence I had at hand, the whole story which had built up in my mind seemed too tempting to ignore. Moreover, the tale seemed genuine, for the fear in the voices of my old hosts rang clear through my memory every time I looked upon that sketch of the idol in the journal. I wouldn’t be able to convince the university to fund this little expedition, dangerous and controversial as the study of uncontacted cultures could be, but that was alright with me. I didn’t mind tapping into my savings for what might just be the find of my career.

After flying into the capital, I bedded down for several nights to rest up and purchase supplies. The heat was particularly oppressive that June, and the usually hectic Port Moresby seemed almost sleepy beneath its weight. I bought simple provisions, mostly rice and preserves, and tried to enjoy what peace I could before what I knew would be an arduous journey.

On the final night, I confided in several friends from the national museum, showing them where I was headed and giving them a rough timetable for my return. Then, with my equipment studiously packed and laid out at the foot of my hotel bed, I slumbered peacefully for perhaps the last time in my life.

I’ve often dwelt on that final evening in Port Moresby, wondering if the experience which followed would’ve been made more bearable if I had walked a different path. I had wholly abandoned the idea of bringing grad students or professional friends along on my trip. A longtime curator at the museum, excited at the retelling of my story, had offered to accompany me, but I had turned my friend down. The inland regions of Papua could be unpredictable, as we all knew, and I didn’t want to put anyone else at risk.

This was my gamble to make, I reasoned. What a fool I was to make it.

A short morning flight to Lae, a murky industrial port on the northern coast, was followed by a long bus ride up into the highlands. The sun-kissed warmth of the lowland coasts was steadily devoured by the stifling humidity of the conifer forests in the highlands. The towering trees crowded in to cast their shadows over the road, and the ferns and scrub reared up to blot out the spaces between. This blanket of ancient woodland was only broken when the road wound up to the mountainous heights, where grassy rock-strewn cliffs and slopes jutted from the trees down below. When the bus at last rumbled to a stop that night in the highland town of Usino, a local chartered jeep carried me overnight east into the hills, bumping over winding dirt roads and between jagged mountain passes. As the sun rose, I was jolted awake by the driver to find myself in that same memory-haunted village, unchanged by the intervening years and swirling with yet more vibrant mystery than it had boasted in my intrepid youth.

The village of the ancient tree had not forgotten me, it seemed. Jokowa, a gregarious elder nearing a century’s age, greeted me warmly. He remembered my interviews, and the studious interest I’d taken in the region’s many clans. He took me into his home and told me about the many family squabbles and marriages which had filled the intervening years, the woodsmoke scent of the traditional dwelling whisking me away to happier times. We ate a modest lunch, and a much more grandiose dinner, the village going out of its way to make me comfortable. All the while, though, I awaited the perfect moment to produce the old sketch of that strange golden idol.

Only when the grandchildren and great grandchildren had retired and the elders once more ringed the fire did I remove the copy I’d made of that damnable idol’s image. I almost at once felt guilty, for Jokowa recoiled from it, as if it might leap from the page to bite him. Initially, he refused to answer my questions about the old journal and the golden totem, but eventually, he broke into practiced English, ensuring his words couldn’t be understood by his fellow villagers at the fireside.

Jokowa told me that the village’s oral tradition held the idol to be over five hundred years old, and affirmed that it was supposedly the spoils of a raid of some kind. He told me that his grandfather had been the one to meet with the Detzner expedition, and that the elder had sunk the wicked totem in a nearby lake in fear that the Europeans would return looking for those who had forged it. The whole affair had left the community desperate to keep the abhorred valley-dwellers unknown and sequestered in their wooded holdfast, forgotten by all save the highlanders who watched them.

“There were three clans who watched, at first,” Jokowa told me, his solemn eyes on the glowing embers beneath us. “One left in the forties, to find work in the city. The next village moved to the coast, took up farming and fishing. We’re the only ones who remember. We are the last that still believe.”

Jokowa proceeded to tell me that it was much more than comfortable stubbornness which kept his people on the hills overlooking the shadowed vale. It was they who had begun the practice of watching the valley, and they who kept it safe. By long tradition, they posted warriors at the mouth of the crag leading in, and burnt back the brush which guarded the entrance. Sun and moonlight were poison to the pale things in the valley, he said, and the whole clearing in the woodland at the valley’s edge was specifically cut to ward off any wandering the wretches might do in the dead of night.

Long ago, when firearms had made their way into circulation on the island, the valley-dwellers had been brought to heel. The stalemate between the twisted tribe within the valley and the highland villages that contained them had become one-sided. Seldom did the things creep from their accursed dwellings in the dark Earth below, and this was just how Jokowa wanted it to stay. Now, only occasional sweeps of the valley were made, yearly incursions into the shadow to ensure the ancient enemy was kept cowering in the dark.

Jokowa wasn’t shocked when I did what curiosity demanded by asking whether I could try and enter the valley. His expression was pained, more with pity than irritation. He reiterated the dangers, telling me that the tribes I sought weren’t entirely human. They were vicious, heartless devourers of men. He conferred with his fellow elders, who each shared stories in their native tongue of horrible legends passed from father to son about the terrors which lurked in the valley, from cannibalism to twisted rituals and effigies of bone beneath the trees.

Again, I was faced with a chance to disengage, to abandon my scholarly interest in an undescribed and unique culture and settle for a calm and collected week recording legends with Jokowa in the safety of the village. Again, that foolish ivory tower certainty pulled me along towards the undiscovered, and I declined to heed Jokowa’s words.

After a last round of questions among the elders, Jokowa laid out the terms. His people, after all, controlled the sole entrance and exit to the valley, and only with his blessing could I set foot in the hated chasm.

“There will be no recording, no pictures or film,” Jokowa ordered. “Your experience is your own.”

I protested, telling him that documentation of so isolated a group was the purpose of my journey, but he insisted.

“There are dark things beneath the Earth,” he told me, wizened face dancing in the dim firelight. “I will not let you to bring word of them to the wider world. You will sate your own curiosity and, if you survive the Many-Legged God, return home with legends no settled man would believe.”

Jokowa grinned. Again, the gesture was soft, sympathetic. I got the feeling he imagined I wouldn’t return. I mulled it over, weighing my need to find the truth.

“I accept,” I told him at last, my eyes darting for the open end of the hut and the moonlit treetops in the valley beyond.

“Very well,” Jokowa nodded. “We will show you down at sunrise.”



I had always known danger was a distinct likelihood, but as I trudged down rough slopes behind seasoned hunters and fighters who jumped at each broken branch while the shadows deepened around us, the drive for discovery which had brought me so far began to ebb. With dawn’s light being swallowed up by sheer rock walls and towering trees, the old bolt-action rifle Jokowa had insisted I carry seemed thin protection indeed.

At length, our band of intrepid intruders came through the suffocating ferns into the open air of a clearing. Opposite us, the jagged stone walls of the chasm leading into the valley loomed out from the morning mist, looking for all the world like some long-abandoned fortress from a dark fantasy novel. Tokua, Jokowa’s imposing grandson, strode forward the last fifty yards or so at my side while the others held back like gawkers watching the condemned.

“Stay above ground,” Tokua urged, his wide eyes meeting mine for perhaps the first time that morning. “You don’t want to get caught in closed spaces. They move fast.”

He shook his head, looking up along the switchback path towards the village. I thought he might try to dissuade me one last time, but he never gave voice to the words. Instead, he simply reiterated the warning of his grandfather, urging me to be out of the valley by nightfall. Then, the group departed in silence, leaving me to gather my courage in the shadow of that ominous chasm.

Only in the absence of other people did I realize how silent the primordial forest had fallen. The quiet was broken here and there by the distant call of some hunting bird far above, but that was small consolation. I glanced one last time at the notebook that contained my writings on the Detzner expedition, rallying my thoughts and reminding myself how fortunate I was to be confronted by so potent a mystery. At last, I hoisted my pack onto my shoulders, readied my rifle as best my unpracticed hands knew how, and strode into the misty-mouthed canyon.

During my education, I’d been fortunate enough to wander some incredibly old megalithic sites in Sumatra and Java, an experience at once intriguing and depressing. The long-dead ambience of those jungle-eaten temples and monuments reared by centuries-dead civilizations can make an onlooker feel as if they stand at the cusp of a mass grave. This chasm was somehow much worse, lonelier than anything I’ve ever experienced.

I pushed past fetishes and totems of wood and bone, produced by Jokowa’s highlanders and placed with ritual caution to ward off the evil said to dwell within. In chalk-like pigment, they had etched glyphs and figures upon the walls, mock warriors poised to throw back anything which might dare stand against them. Overhead, trees on the slopes above the chasm seemed to lean in to devour the sky, drowning the crag in semi-darkness. I produced the powerful flashlight I had brought along, shocked at how blinding the shadow had become, ever glancing towards the distant canopy and never once catching sight of the azure morning beyond. Then, the chasm opened up on the valley proper, and I was greeted with a sight which should never have been seen.

The space was relatively thin, some one or two hundred yards across, but stretched away into the mists for many times that distance. Several small streams fell in babbling procession from the sheer stone walls and pooled in a clear pond at the center, breaking the droning silence of the chasm. Up above, on the battlements of the rough stone slopes, mighty trees twisted and intertwined at obscene angles to form a living ceiling, their bulk and range of growth seeming beyond reason. Despite all this evocative scenery playing out beneath the beam of my flashlight, it was the walls themselves that stopped my heart in my chest.

Set into the reddish stone of the valley’s edges, great glowering faces had been carved. They were abstract and elongated, their twisted contours carefully smoothed and rounded. Their mouths and eyes opened onto what I at first took to be small alcoves for display or storage. Upon drawing nearer, I saw that the mouths were doors, awkwardly raised from the ground below and allowing access to the interiors of buildings carved into the rock.

Immediately, I made for my notebooks, sketching their forms as best I could by glow of the flashlight. I might not be able to take photos, but this was too otherworldly a find not to record. Nothing of this sort had ever been found on the island. Indeed, I could think of nothing similar the world over. Turkey’s Cappadocia and Jordan’s Petra come to mind when one mentions underground communities or construction, but these faces were positively chilling.

I could at once understand why the place had such a terrible reputation among the locals. Despite the grace of their construction, the buildings were intimidating, the valley seeming observed from all angles by its unliving guardians. The stonework looked old, to my trained eye, eaten away in places despite the concise cover of the canopy above. Whether the years were measured in centuries or millennia, I could not tell. Given what I was to learn in that time-forgotten hell, I cannot help but assume the latter.

Nearly an hour passed before I mustered up the courage to enter one of those awful carven faces. I wandered the valley, finding it a great avenue of near-identical sculptures, with only the streams and pond to break its symmetrical layout. The remnants of what I took to be gardens of some kind rested here and there among the entrances, empty patches of raised soil perhaps used to raise lichen or fungi in the damp dark of the valley floor. Occasionally, slightly luminescent crickets leapt from my path, the sole sign of life in the unmoving tomb. At last, though, I could stall no longer, and forced myself to clamber clumsily up into one of the open mouths.

The rake of my flashlight across the far side revealed a circular chamber, its walls expertly shaped but left rough and textured to the touch. Its high, domed ceiling grew incredibly low near the floor, which itself buckled inward unevenly like a bowl, making the whole space into a kind of flattened sphere.

At the center, there was a firepit and several raised plinths I took to be stools, and along the curved walls alcoves wracked with dust housed pottery and sculptures of treated clay. Some, upon closer inspection, turned out to be blown glass, speaking to a high proficiency among the craftsmen of this undescribed people. Almost all were shaped like crawling or curling millipedes or centipedes, giving credence to the century-old sketch of Friedrich, with the few outliers generally being insect or arthropod in nature.

Only when I had done several circuits of the room did I accidently bring the beam of my light directly across the sunken firepit. The whole of the room’s ceiling lit up like a signboard, making me jump like a stricken animal. I had to collect myself before I fully realized what had happened and brought the beam back to focus on the pit. Its leaden interior, coated in some sort of dull metal soot-stained by spent fires, reflected upon an unbelievably intricate network of multicolored quartz which had been meticulously inlaid upon the ceiling. The lines formed many elongated men, dancing or posing around a vast coiled centipede, much the same as the one represented in gold those many years ago.

I spent some time sketching the image, marveling at the grace of its contours and the play of my light off the dazzling quartz. I imagined how it must have shimmered in the flickering light of a fire, seeming to shift and waver on a smoke-shrouded ceiling. Then, with a final scan of the stunning chamber, I proceeded through one of several low round doorways set into the wall. The smooth leather divider which had once served as a curtain, chewed to tatters by the march of time, pulled away to reveal an almost identical chamber next door. All around the valley, these dwellings or ritual chambers formed a sort of communal hive, interconnected and accessible, hinting at close clan or familial bonds among the missing inhabitants.

Toward the rear of the dwellings, heading deeper into the rock, small rough-walled tubes had been carved, usually leading into musty, cramped depressions littered with desiccated old rags of a strange, dark fabric. These I took to be bedrooms or meditation chambers, secluded cubbies where the inhabitants could curl up and ruminate on the issues that faced them. Sometimes, though, the tunnels wound off around tight corners, seeming to weave out of view and deeper into the stone below.

Try as I might, I could not bring myself to crawl into these tunnels. The warnings I had received about the darkness which lurked below ground played a part, but I was equally concerned about the claustrophobic awkwardness of the angles and slopes in the tunnel. Fascinating as the valley was, the oppressive mood it inspired was undeniable. The subdued clamor of the waters outside served to coat the shadows in a masking white noise, and the feeling that I was not alone had grated on me more than once as my boots echoed across the stone. I had no desire to become trapped on some slick incline in the dark beneath my feet, my cries for help reverberating down into the unknowable depths.

As it happened, the surface held one final, groundbreaking find for me. When at last I reached the end of the valley, I discovered the building there to be different than the others. It was much larger, with an oval interior soaring cathedral-like overhead, the shadowed floor covered with raised plinths or stools like the ones I’d seen before. The walls were covered in curved shelving carved into the stone, laden with clay tablets in impeccable condition.

On these tablets, a series of elongated triangular depressions formed a language of some kind, its patterns making it unmistakable. Though whatever linguistic tradition had birthed this otherworldly writing was alien to me, I speculate it was legible as both a visual and textural language, allowing its readers to feel its words in the dark, much like braille.

So exhilarated was I by the discovery of etched writing that I made it almost halfway round the room eyeing the shelves before I noticed the effigy looming at the far end. I had at first taken it to be a statue in the shadows, a massive recreation of the smaller clay and glass sculptures the modest dwellings had displayed. When my light played off its jagged form, I realized its contours were of bone rather than stone.

Lashed by leather or skin with meticulous care, femurs and ribs made up the legs and carapace of a great, writhing centipede. It was reared like a striking cobra, its legs outstretched and flailing, its ivory bulk having towered over the raised stone stools that decorated the floor. Protruding from the place where a head should have been was a centaur-like assemblage of bones that preserved the shape of a man, with the long spine bent and its arms outstretched towards the floor below. Its skull, slightly above eye-level with me when standing before it, looked out over the room with unseeing sockets. Something about its proportions struck me as wrong, perhaps speaking to some deformity or birth defect, but I was too unnerved by the structure to draw in for a closer look.

The giant idol was a wicked thing, and I gave it a wide berth. Though as an anthropologist I told myself my revulsion was born of unfamiliarity with the practices of an unfamiliar culture, that student’s mantra didn’t ease the harsh glare of the unseeing skull scanning the room. I focused instead on the shelves and tablets, gathering those which looked most intact into my bag and wrapping them in wax paper, hoping Jokowa would understand my need to preserve these potentially priceless clay tomes. After all, if the highlanders had actually wiped out the valley-dwellers, then these were the last testament to the community which had been built in the darkness of their sheltered, misty vale.

Then, a very different kind of text came into view. It was a modern supply log, many decades old, rotten and torn. This stranger in a landscape of strange texts had been slipped in among the tablets, just one more tome among the collated knowledge of the Many-Legged God. I suppressed my excitement, and removed it as tenderly as was possible, donning plastic gloves to handle the delicate pages within.

By the light of my flashlight, scored by the soft symphony of the slow streams and chirping crickets outside, I saw that the text was in the French language. Though I speak many tongues, my French was mostly garnered in grade school. Still, collating that layman’s grasp with a solid understanding of Latin, I could make out the gist of most of it. A missionary, ostensibly catholic, was keeping record of supplies and funds being used to establish wells, clinics, and churches in the highlands. The few legible dates in the log placed its origin sometime in the early fifties, and its contents seemed mundane. Then, the pages ceased to be lists, and became something altogether more terrible.

In hurried scrawl which demanded herculean effort to decipher, the missionary wrote of a raid on the wagon which had been carrying their supplies. He described the slaughter of their horses and the capture of he and his companion in the shadowy dusk, another missionary named LaSalle. More chilling was the shaky description of his captors, etched in handwriting made jagged by frayed nerves and spiked adrenaline.

The things he described were men, but stretched beyond reason, gaunt and disturbingly tall. They had moved with a grace he described as disgusting, likening the way their elongated limbs and spines worked to the way a spider’s legs skittered. Their faces, he said, were the worst, sunken and marble-pale. Their heads had no ears, instead boasting great sunken pads that vibrated with every snapped twig or soft footfall. Their massive eyes, almost entirely pupils, danced in electric light like those of animals above mouths of needle-like teeth.

They had dragged them away, the narrator wrote, into a valley I took to be the very one in which I stood. The ghouls, as he termed them, had branded and marked the skin of their captives before ritually butchering LaSalle beneath an effigy of bone. What the writer called their ‘monster’ had taken LaSalle, an offering of flesh for a hungry god. The writer, assuming he was being saved for another ritual the following night, had scrawled these words in hiding, hoping his fellow missionaries might learn what had befallen them. They’d obviously never found them, and the fate that befell the log’s owner was easy to imagine.

I turned my gaze to the idol once more, drawing in to examine that malformed skull, the missionary’s words etched into my memory. The stone beneath it was dark and stained, ancient offerings long ago having blackened the ground. Suddenly, the proportions made sense, the saucer eyes and the gaping cavities where ears should sit coming into sharper focus. It was so close to human, yet so abysmally different. Those who look on Neanderthal or the popularly-named ‘hobbit’ and find them uncanny need only look upon the children of the Many-Legged God to experience true repulsion.

As my mind reeled, trying to piece together what I was seeing, I caught a flicker of movement above me, at the edge of my light. I looked up, and at once understood what it was to be an ensnared fly watching the hungry approach of the spider.

Through a decorated crevice high above in the masonry of the ceiling, is gigantic body contoured to examine the room beneath it, a massive centipede had crawled. It was impossibly large, several feet wide and dozens of feet in length, far larger than any such thing should ever be able to grow. Its antennae wriggled mere inches above my head, twitching as it blindly searched for the prey which had so carelessly stumbled into its temple.

I screamed. As I stumbled out from beneath the creature and frantically dashed for the exit, I didn’t have time to consider how foolish that cry had been. My only thoughts were of the pass to the sunlit forest beyond the valley, and the muted clatter of chitinous limbs on the stone behind me as the Many-Legged God gave chase. It was not until I burst from the temple into the near-blackness of the vale that I realized how costly that scream had been.

Skittering from the once-vacant mouths of those glowering faces and through cracks on the cliff face above with a flexibility and ease that seemed supernatural, the valley-dwellers came. They moved on all fours, bent at the back to allow their overextended arms to aid in propelling them along the ground. Their legs jolted like a frog’s, twisting at painful angles, their pallid skin translucent with the purple tinge of bulging veins. Blades of flint or obsidian were clasped in their hands, but it was those glinting, bulging eyes that made my blood run coldest.

I sprinted, the centipede-thing left somewhere behind me as it hesitated to leave its dark temple, its dozens of servants loping in to meet me. I skirted the edge of the pond, moving faster than I’d ever moved, but realized there was no way to outpace the things near the exit. They already closed in across the pass, barring my way, hopping forward to meet me at the pond’s edge. I focused on them as I neared, preparing to fight, considering whether it was too late to swing the rifle down from my shoulder and attempt a shot.

The two between me and the pass shrieked, an awful hyena-like sound made with vocal organs alien to our own. The light of my flashlight’s beam was on them, and they stumbled over themselves to avert their eyes. Glottal and hacking, I thought I heard breaks in their cries, something that I now assume was language. I wheeled around, bringing the light to bear on the things approaching my side of the pond, driving them to their knees and setting the whole mob to shrieking.

I wasted no time, starting up my sprint again, waving the beam at any who drew too close, thrown rocks whistling past my head as the things yowled their fury at the light. As I pressed through the pass, I kept the light angled over my shoulder, ever aware of the coyote-like chorus in pursuit. Only when I stumbled out into the late afternoon sun of the meadow and put a thirty second run between myself and the valley’s mouth did I dare look back. I curse that I did, for I would certainly sleep more soundly if I’d spared myself that last, eerie image.

Deep in shadow, hanging from the rock with tapering fingers as if they had been born to the stone, the valley-dwellers decorated the walls of the chasm. They hung at varying heights, visible as still silhouettes more than solid shapes in the gloom. Their eyes caught the ambient glow of the sun upon the meadow, and gleamed hungrily after the foolish soul they’d sought for prey.



In the years since my fortunate flight from that night-cloaked vale, I’ve ceased to be an anthropological interventionist. When the argument arises whether the hands-on or hands-off approach is best when dealing with documentation of uncontacted or undescribed cultures, I always advise the academy to keep far away.

I’ll tell colleagues who ask why so great a shift has taken place in my stances that preservation through awareness has proven fallible in my eyes. I’ll opine that the uncontacted are better protected by their isolation than they could ever be by documentation. If ever the true rationale got out, my academic credibility would go up in smoke.

Delving in the wake of that awful day has dredged up myths about the Vedic Agartha or the Mayan Xibalba. I’ve become keenly aware of how common human mythology about civilizations beneath the rock and stone truly are. I wrack my brain, wondering how deep the tunnels beneath that forgotten crevice in Papua wind. I crack open my books and scroll tirelessly through articles on evolutionary divergence at my desk, taking note of the many close relatives we once had as a species and how widely they vary.

What path, I wonder, might a group driven underground have taken? What twisting of the hominid form might take place if it were dragged from the sunlight into the shadows of the Earth’s winding interior?

Often, I look from my study’s desk to the chest where those treated clay tablets rest unseen, unknown to all but me, and shudder. It is best, I’ve decided, that I never know the answer to those questions. If the children of the Many-Legged God are anything to go by, I believe it better that no one know the answer to those questions....