The Garden of Hope — The Thingness of Things
Once one gets seduced by wanderlust, any reason is a doorway to indulge it.
Cimmy remembered that in one of the remote corners of the island, upon which they stumbled earlier in their quest for firewood, there were shallow pools which filled up with the tide and dried slowly at high noon, steaming up in the fiery sun, which turned their water to almost boiling temperature.
Scattered around the pools’ edges, where the scalding water and foul fumes made them inaccessible, were stunning red rocks. Some were translucent, others matte, adorned with beautiful turquoise veins or speckled like plover eggs.
Something about those rocks fired Cimmy’s imagination: she fancied them magical.
She liked to believe they were the holders of happiness and immortality, appropriately guarded by isolation and danger, a quest only fitting for the most daring.
“You don’t really believe that nonsense, do you?” Rahima taunted her, leisurely sipping her lime flower tea and blowing gently to cool it.
“I don’t know about them being able to grant immortality, but what if they truly are special?”
“What’s so special about a rock?”
“Did you ever see any this beautiful before?”
Rahima agreed the deep ruby color of the rocks was indeed unusual, but pointed out the smell of those ponds and the vapors that rose from their depths like bad miasmas were proof enough they ran into some evil realm best left untouched and unknown.
Besides, even assuming one could reach those rocks without getting burned or melted by the ominous gases, what use could one possibly find for a rock, even one as beautiful as that?
“They look poisonous,” Rahima decreed, closing the argument.
“How can you possibly know?”
“I know,” Rahima enumerated.
“Colorful mushrooms are poisonous, colorful wild berries are poisonous, …”
“What does that have to do with rocks?”
“The law of similarity,” Rahima replied, sure of herself.
“Everybody knows that.”
“I’m not sure if I believe that’s true,” her friend whispered, trying to make sure nobody else heard her.
If Bertha caught wind of even a word of such heresy, Cimmy’s life would immediately become a lot more difficult.
“I don’t know, Cimmy,” Rahima rolled her eyes at the enormity of the statement. “If all the healers swear by it, it’s probably true. You don’t use willow bark to get blue pigment, do you? Indigo flowers are blue, that’s where blue essence is stored: in blue things.”
“Willow bark dye is actually pink,” Cimmy pointed out.
“Besides, if the essence of a color is stored in everything that dons that color, vegetal, animal or mineral, how do those rocks not embody the essence of red?”
Rahima took a moment to consider, and her friend eagerly seized the chance to transform a partial belief into a complete certainty.
“Think about it: by this time tomorrow you can be the proud owner of a garment as red as a rose. Wouldn’t you like that?”
“I would never wear that garment. I’d worry it would burn my skin off.”
“You didn’t worry about the blue dye.”
“Flax doesn’t grow in poisonous looking, foul smelling, bubbling yellow green swamps!”
“Well, the red rocks are beautiful. Don’t you want to know more about them?”
“You’re still convinced they are magical,” Rahima gave in reluctantly. “If they are, they must be committed to the fire element. We could extrapolate their properties from that.”
“We can burn some and find out,” Cimmy doubled down on the persuasion.
“Rock doesn’t burn.”
“We haven’t seen red rock before. Brown-colored rock doesn’t burn, because it is committed to the earth element,” Cimmy pointed out. “Maybe red-colored rock does.”
It sounded well thought through, and Rahima, who was a stickler for the scientific method, had to yield to the wisdom of her friend’s observation, but then remembered the latter’s taste for adventure and flashed her an ironic smile.
“You’d do anything that requires you to get on a boat, wouldn’t you?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
Cimmy pointed towards their underwhelming surroundings.
Safety and boredom often come bundled together, and one only appreciates the former when the latter is gone.
On the following day, they set foot on the island, equipped with knapsacks for rock collection and wearing multiple layers of sheepskins around their legs to shield them from the noxious fumes of the green-yellow swamp.
Rahima maintained her distance as she watched her friend cautiously venture onto the unsteady rocks, giving her advice on which ones were less slippery and how to maintain her balance.
Eventually she grew frustrated with her friend’s lack of coordination and called her back to show her how it’s done.
She skip-stepped the rocks sprinkled through the green miasma with the agility of a young mountain goat, and once she reached the red rocks, she signaled to her friend not to venture there.
“Which ones do you want?”
“A couple of each should be good. I don’t want you carrying heavy loads and losing your balance.”
Rahima dismissed her with an assured hand gesture, filled the knapsack, and confidently jumped back from rock to rock and out of the swamp the same way she went in.
“Let me see,” Cimmy looked in the bag, eager to find out if the rocks were as beautiful up close as they were from a distance.
The red crystals were magnificent, capturing each sunbeam and transforming it into the warmth of a blazing fire.
“I told you they were magical,” she mumbled, filled with emotion.
“How do you figure?”
“Look inside. Look! Don’t you see how they store fire inside?”
“Maybe,” Rahima conceded. “So, what do you want to do with them?”
“We need to find out if they burn.”
“Here?”
“Do you want to try it back in the village, within smelling distance of Bertha and Josepha? We can start a fire on the beach, right there,” Cimmy pointed to a natural hearth made of calcareous rocks, whose raised edges would keep their fire protected from the winds.
The red rocks initially resisted, prompting Rahima to voice numerous protests against the fundamentally absurd concept of burning them.
When they eventually ignited, their bursting enthusiasm cracked them open and caused them to melt, releasing a thick glistening mist that transformed into metallic dew upon touching the cold rocks.
Cimmy and Rahima watched in disbelief as a substance that looked like metal slowly flowed down the crevices of the stone, pooling in its shallow depressions and glistening in the bright light of the sun.
The red rocks were completely consumed by the fire and transformed into black glass.
Cimmy didn’t dare look at Rahima, waiting for the inevitable I told you so, which was delivered with gusto.
“What did I say about the law of similarity? Was it even possible for these rocks not to be evil and poisonous, forming where they did and donning that color? God knows what evil spirits we freed from that rock to make it turn black and cry metal tears! Have you ever seen metal that flows like water, Cimmy?”
“So much more the proof it is magical.”
“And obviously evil! It’s an evil, metal sweating rock!”
“We should find something to carry the liquid metal in.”
“You want to bring this back to the village? You’ll never hear the end of Bertha’s scolding!”
“I’ll hide it. I need to study it. I can’t come here every day for that. What do you think about it?”
“Obviously, this rock exudes metal, as could be expected, since its color commits it to the element of fire, which is also associated with metal,” Rahima started, her scientific curiosity whetted.
“It also seems to have components committed to the element of air, through its vile vapors, and obviously its burned black substance, relieved of its fire and air elements, returned only the essence of earth. It seems to have no water, though. Too hard and glossy to contain water. The aether goes without saying: all things in nature contain aether. You can’t have matter without aether, alive or not.”
“What do you think we could do with it?” Cimmy asked.
“I think we’re better served not to touch it at all: a rock that burns and weeps metal and menacing fumes? I think we should leave it alone, as I said in the first place,” Rahima pouted.
“It would make a good paint pigment.” Cimmy examined one of the non-burned specimens in her bag. “Shouldn’t be that hard to grind.”
All the way home, holding on to the little improvised vial containing liquid metal, which she’d made from a large seashell, she pondered on the essence of things, on how matter changed when it interacted with air, water and fire, how its very substance was transformed, in dramatic or subtle ways, but irreversibly.
It was as if things were made from the essence of those things, tiny portions of their thingness, as different from each other as the things themselves, and if one unlocked the secrets of the thingness hidden in the things, reality itself would reveal its mysteries.
