We seemed to have emerged quite high up on the side of a rocky slope. My host halted the horse for a moment to let me take it all in. After a moment of looking around, she turned and gazed into my eyes. She was as beautiful as I imagined Helen of Troy to be. Her skin was a beautiful olive color, her hair black as night, and her eyes two mysterious dark pools of excitement and adventure. Her face was fine featured with a cute distinct nose common to those from Mediterranean lands.
“My name is Elatia,” she said, introducing herself with a look so penetrating and invasive that I know I must have flushed. I managed to stumble out that my name was Travis, though I knew she already knew that. Then she smiled a smile so warm and refreshing I thought my heart would stop beating. Her look of vigilant intensity returned as her eyes made a quick survey of the mountainside. “We cannot linger here very long,” she said. “I think we have already been spotted. We must go quickly.”
I must have looked like a school boy in the front row who was dying to ask his teacher a question. She flashed her enticing smile again and said, “All right! What is it that you want to know?”
Curious as I was to know everything about this new and amazing world, I used my first question to ask about the passageway we had just come through. “What were those things down there? That was totally creepy!”
“Those are the rock people. They are spirits that have been bound into the rock strata of the earth. The world we are entering is part physical and part spiritual. There is a purely spiritual dimension which exists beyond this one.”
“How did those spirits get there?”
“Many are from the old world. They lived in the time before the great Flood. Their world became violent, perverse, and wicked and they perished in the great Deluge. The rubble and ruins of their ancient cities and civilizations became their tomb and the prison house of their spirits. They were so joined to the idolatrous works of their own hands, often built at the price of human bloodshed, that they are now bound into the layers of rock that formed from the debris of their once glorious world. It’s now their prison and their purgatory. It is often the fate of unsaved souls that have done many wrong things in a place, to be bound in the spirit to the place or thing they esteemed in life to be more important than God or others.”
“Like haunted houses and things like that?”
“Yes. Something like that, only a little more serious in this case, I am sad to say. The crust of the Earth is one great multi-layered graveyard, a history sandwich, where the ruins of one generation are piled upon another.”
What strange world had I come to—partly physical and partly spiritual? What would I discover here? What dangers awaited me? Who was this strange person I suddenly felt so comfortable with who was to be my guardian and guide in this region that lay beyond my normal senses, in this place of “prisons” and oppressions. And how could there be anything good, any place of hope in such a region, where all hope I presumed to be gone?
My moment of meditation was cut short when out of a crack in the rock a dark creature suddenly materialized, leaped up and began shouting at us. “I knew you were coming. I saw you come through! You will never leave this place, I’ll see to that. Now you are trapped and damned like the rest of us.””
“Oops!” Elatia said. “He’s bluffing, but it’s definitely time to go. You really can’t hang around in this place too long. Hold tight!!” With a snap of the reigns the great horse leaped forward. Brandishing a spear, the crazed creature tried to cut us off. The narrow path we were on led down to a large plain below. The man, for I presumed it was a man under all his dark rags, moved surprisingly quickly over the rocks, intent on cutting off our only way of escape. In a moment he was beside us, his weapon poised to strike.
“Jug Yhet!” Elatia called to her horse, and jabbed her heel into its left side. The horse, clearly trained for battle, suddenly veered out of the way to avoid the thrust from the menacing spear, which narrowly missed slashing my right arm. Then before he could reposition himself, I saw Elatia’s leg kick out in a crushing blow to the man’s chest. He fell backward, lost his balance, and tumbled down the very rough, rocky incline. At least gravity seemed to still work in this dimension. The horse instantly turned and jumped back down on the path, nearly jolting me off, and we resumed our descent.
“Who or what was that?” I queried.
“That was a gatekeeper,” she replied. The brief encounter had taught me two things: one, that we were obviously not welcome here, and two, sometimes the rule that you should agree with your adversary quickly while you are in the way with him might not always apply, especially here.
“It is a good thing his spear didn’t cut you,” Elatia said. “They are dipped in a very poisonous compound, water from the fountain of confusion that infects your body with a most excruciating fever of doubts. Only angel powers can heal one of such wounds.”
“He fell pretty hard. What will happen to him?” I queried. “Obviously he won’t die from his fall, but he is in some sense physical, and can feel and experience things much like a living being.”
“Many of the things you see and experience in this dimension are the manifest realities created by the being itself. His ragged clothing and spear were the appearances of things he used and found to be effective when he was alive in your dimension. They are the visual manifestations of the various things he likes.”
“Do you mean what we saw and what happened was not real? He certainly looked real to me.”
“All I am saying is that not all you see in this region is as it appears to be. Depending on the rank in the spirit of the creature involved, it can change its shape and form to most affect its victim.”
We continued to work our way down the rocky incline until we reached level ground. Before us lay a vast and totally barren plain, and far in the distance I could make out the misty blue line of another mountain range. Off to the left, there appeared to be a great sandstorm in progress. Elatia halted the horse for a moment.
“Where are we going?” I asked, as we seemed to be out of immediate danger.
“Well, first we are going to the Sanctuary or Paradise as it was once called. It’s located in the sacred zone which is where you see that sandstorm. We will spend the night there, and head out in the morning when we have had a chance to rest up a bit.”
I breathed a sigh of relief to hear that they had regular days and nights here and that there existed a place called the “Sanctuary” where we could rest.
“The Sanctuary? That sounds like a place I never expected to find in Hell,” I answered, obviously surprised to discover that there was anywhere in this region that was remotely good. Elatia said we were riding straight for it, but the huge sandstorm didn’t appeal to me at all.
I had only seen sandstorms like this in movies. It appeared to be a great wall of churning, smothering, blinding sand at least as high as a six- or seven-story building, but strangely enough, it didn’t appear to be moving. It remained a dense wall of swirling sand shrouding the Sanctuary and forming a perpetual and impenetrable barrier. As we approached, the sound of the howling wind and blowing sand was almost deafening, and I felt a great apprehension about even coming this close to it.
3. The Sanctuary
We were galloping into a wall of sand in the middle of a barren wasteland in the heart of Hell.
There was no sign of this wonderful place called Sanctuary or Paradise, that Elatia had said was not far away. The sandstorm stood like a great silicon barrier blocking our sight as well as our way. The torrent of driven sand, traveling with such a force that the swirling grains stung my skin, filled my lungs until I began to cough violently. It was impossible to breathe in this blinding vortex of misery. I coughed violently