About the Labyrinth
Who's the labyrinth? you can scream and shout,
You wander around all in the dark,
You'll never find the way-out path,
Path to the left, path to the right,
Run this way and that way all the night,
Deep in the depths you'll fall from sight.
A ceramic fragment marked 415/C on the base. An intelligent man's head out of black ceramics looking at a labyrinth. Its origin can probably be traced back to the foundation of the City. The male face evokes Whuki, the Dream God. On the base, next to some triangular stamps, an inscription can be found applied with ferric oxide (?).
"Depictions of the labyrinth often turn up among the City finds. It is probable that it is an accompanying find to the urns discovered in Sector C3 (known as the bad dreams urns. Ed.) . Its essence is possibly a spiritual adventure, the experience of wandering through the labyrinth, which in some cases, when the exit cannot be found, can lead to hopeless spiritual collapse. I would be happy to infer the existence of some real labyrinths beneath the City, but I am familiar with the City elders' virtually pathological aversion to wandering around on foot ("it's like the interminable and aimless purring of cats"). Naturally, should we at some future date unearth such labyrinths, the above theorising will look rather strange... It is likely that even if such existed they were rarely travelled, and anyway why should there be a labyrinth within a labyrinth, which this ruined city is in itself.
Uncertain surviving references on various inscriptions more than once point to some kind of "Stone Man" which may be brought into contact with the labyrinths. The supposition that at particular points in the labyrinth there were gigantic heads of this type which terrified any who reached them cannot be supported by finds. Some consider the labyrinth ultimately to be a paraphrase of the City, but this theory can safely be refuted.
What is special here lies not in the wall itself but in the decaying man among the walls and his stubborn, almost repugnant attraction to puzzle and mystery. Nine-men's-morris, chess, go, the labyrinth, the precious maze (sic) carved into clay, the adventure that draws such lead-heavy consequences from such featherweight game rules. What eternal tempters are these for a thinking mind encased for a brief lifetime in a fragile bone egg!
Why with its tempting existence are we haunted by this table's worth of adventure, this finger-flick of danger, this deathly clash of pieces, and a quest for a way out that can be traced by the pad of one's finger... when here is the real world in all its immenseness, the millions of microscopic volte-faces of the natural world..."
"For me, the conspicuously deliberate ruined condition of the labyrinth statues raises the possibility of some kind of iconocaust, indicated by some inscriptions found earlier, which in rough translation go like this:
Give dried plums and apples sweet
Statue, great stone man, give good drink
In a cool ewer from a cold spring
Leave me no drink to swallow, and I will set your house afire!
You will turn to ash from the shimmering heat
From the splashing water you will crumble to mud
"Hiszen ez akár a római mészégetések az antik márványokból... egyképpen megy ez századról századra..."
"A C3 szektorból előkerült labirintustöredék szakmai körökben hatalmas vihart kavart. A labirintus-plasztika és a hozzátartozó talapzaton talált héber nyelvű szövegtöredék a tudományos társaságokban teljes zavart gerjesztett, amiről a Robin-kézirat meglepő módon említést sem tesz. Közben a régészek egy csoportja indulatosan fortyogott. Hiszen az útvesztőtől a szabadkőművességig csak egy ugrás... "
Labirinth
