Chapter 13
So Saul passed his first year as president of the caravan, and nothing noteworthy happened. Then during his second year as president, he gathered groups of his people to go on a mission. Saul chose out three thousand wayfarers; of which two thousand went with him, while the rest were commanded by his son Jonathan.
The mission was to mix and mingle with the Sea People again, to see if more Seeds of Promise could be conceived. (The Sea People lived nearby the caravansary, so this type of mission was frequently embarked upon.)
Saul’s son Jonathan therefore took his thousand wayfarers to the dance hall at the port where the penteconter was docked, hard by the Hidden Fortress whose hangar holds the famous Unseen Airplane. Meanwhile Saul took his horn and went on a tour through all the united states of the caravansary, and everywhere he went, he would blow the horn and say “Come to another dance-a-thon with the Sea People.”
So the Sea People gathered themselves together to attend the festival: they brought thirty thousand seashell-boats, and six thousand sea ponies; and they invited all the Beach People (which are basically mer-folk who, at some point, got stuck on the sand and just decided to live like that): and they came forth, and joined the dance, and there were so many of them that they spilled over and began to rollick into the Hidden Fortress, and caper around where the Invisible Plane is parked, eastward of the House of Nothingness.
Now although everything was going well, as the Sea and Beach People were dancing and playing with the caravansary’s wayfarers, it was unnerving to try to couple within the Hidden Fortress, and in the Invisible Plane, and in the House of Nothingness; for the idea of conceiving Seeds of Promise is to make more souls exist in the world with clarity, not to obscure them, let alone to call into question those who already possess essence: but these domains caused their occupants to become unobservable; although not giving up the ghost, they were stripped of everything except their ghost; and they went out-of-sight wherever they were: within caves, and in thickets, and in rocks, in the high places, and in pits.
So this dilemma, which came to be known as the Mass Phantoming, was brought to the attention of President Saul, who was stationed over in the Great Basin Rainforest, between Oz and Chinatown Plaza, when certain wayfarers who had gone almost pellucid went up from the Hidden Fortress and reported the news to him, trembling.
Saul was very concerned. It was not clear, at the time, whether the Promised Seeds conceived during this event would be more than specters. It was crucial that the volcano of potential bless them with appearances. Now, Saul knew that, once his people began to grill, the Volcano would smell the aroma and join the feast; then he would hear their prayers, and offer them wise counsel; so, to begin the banquet was the solution; but there was one major obstacle: no celebration could start without the Seer, Samuel: for he was a stickler for protocol, when it came to ceremony, thus he demanded that only he be allowed to ignite the grill. And Samuel the Seer was absent at present: he had tarried for seven days, God only knew where. Samuel had promised to meet Saul at this place, but he was apparently running late; for, looking out in every direction from the Hanging Pond, the Seer was nowhere to be seen.
So, having received the report about the Mass Phantoming, and fearing that Sam the Seer might be one of its victims, also knowing how important it was to start the feast in order to summon the Volcano, Saul declared: “Bring hither the wand of ignition; I will fire up the grilling altar myself.” And he began to flame-broil.
Then it came to pass, that as soon as he had finished cooking the first ram, behold, Samuel appeared. So Saul went out to meet him.
President Saul shouted a friendly greeting and saluted the Seer. But Samuel, eyeing the altar, said: “What have you done!?” And Saul answered: “Ah, you’ve noticed, the grill is lit – yes, it was not a decision that I made in haste, believe me. You see, our people are scattered throughout the House of Nothingness, and in the chambers of the Hidden Fortress with its Transparent Jet, and they’re all experiencing a visibility crisis: I needed to ask the Volcano for advice about this, before we lost all those potential Seeds of Promise; and you were so late (you swore that you would meet me in seven days!) – I assumed that maybe you, too, had gone blank, or worse, for I’ve never known you to disregard punctuality. I reasoned within my heart, saying: ‘If I continue to wait for Samuel, our entire caravan might go limpid, in addition to all the people of the sea and the sand. However, if I use the powers vested in me as the President, and simply light the grill myself, then I might, by this act, end up saving everyone.’ Is that not solid philosophizing? Anyway, that’s why some of these steaks are already done. Please, help yourself. And welcome back, by the way. Here, take these tongs and spatula – you should resume the position.”
Samuel the Seer stood staring in astonishment. Then he said to Saul: “You have done foolishly: you have violated the Operating Procedure, which the Volcano implemented. If you had not committed this offense, the Volcano would have allowed your term as president to continue forever; but now you shall be removed from power: voted out of office. Say goodbye to your dynasty. The Volcano has already begun shopping for a candidate to replace you: a man after his own heart, who will be a good commander of the populace, because you have turned out to be a major disappointment.”
And Samuel the Seer went storming away to the Hanging Pond, and from there he hastened to Sweet Beulah Land, to recruit a coterie of insurgents.
Saul was flummoxed by this reaction. “What a hot-tempered Seer,” he remarked under his breath.
Then President Saul and his son Jonathan, and the staff members of the cabinet who worked with them, returned to the Black House; for the Volcano had attended the feast and explained the trick to reinstate everyone’s visibility, and to implement what he advised would require a certain amount of planning. All this while, the Sea People were still partnered up with the wayfarers within the Hidden Fortress, along with the Beach People, and although totally healthy and well in every other way, they were all slowly fading from sight like old monochrome photographs.
The Volcano’s instructions to solve this problem were as follows. Saul and his cabinet members were to place freshly sharpened farm implements into the hands of each disappearing person, and this would cause them to emerge from their camouflaged hiddenness within the midground, and to “pop” into the foreground, where they could be much more easily seen.
So, to help them procure and sharpen these needed farm implements, lake nymphs with metal detectors came out of the camp of the Sea People in three companies: one company turned unto the way that leads to Nara, Japan, the City of Deer; another went into the underwater garden of Samson’s first wife, by Massachusetts Avenue; and the third company turned to the way of the border that looks to the Valley of the Ravine of the Chief of the Hyenas toward the wilderness, deep in the sticks.
But there was no smith found throughout all the caravansary: for the wayfarers feared that if they permitted a smith to do business among them, they might be tempted to turn their tools into swords or spears. (They were still collectively traumatized by what their ancestors had done in Reno, Nevada, at the El Cortez Hotel, when they massacred Fat Ug, not to mention how they routed the Infraboreans; hence their eschewal of weaponry.) So, once they located the requisite farm implements with their metal detectors, the mermaids had to drag them all back to their penteconter, where there was a smith onboard who could hone them.
Thus they sharpened every maid all her plowshares that she had found, and all her coulters, and her axes, and her mattocks, and her sickles, and her three-pronged fleshhooks, and her forks, and her goads. And the filing cost per utensil was just one pim, which is two-thirds of a caesar.
So it came to pass that they distributed freshly sharpened farm implements to anyone partially visible within the Hidden Fortress, and the Transparent Jet, and the House of Nothingness. And they kept a large inventory of surplus tools, in case they met more folks who were fading in the future. But neither sword nor spear was found in the hand of any of the people, except Saul the President and his son Jonathan: for Saul, being an elohim, kept a glittering sword in his girdle, and Jonathan had a harpoon.
Thus did they mostly solve the Mass Phantoming mystery.
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