The "Crystal Cave"

A height of crystal extended around me into which I could see the vivid, blue reflections of my image refracted across a hundred spheres of geometric light. Each crystalline sphere absorbed and expelled a reflection of myself peering back out at me, moving when I moved, speaking when I spoke, and as far as I could tell, with the same intentions, except that a degree of air between us altered and distorted the images with distance so that I could make out the nearest while the further nonetheless became increasingly less distinct and more blurred, seeming to move in unexpected ways and, because of their distance, echoing back my words (when I spoke) with altered voice. I came to feel that I was not speaking to myself anymore, the further I looked ahead into the chamber, but that I was speaking to a symphony of interloping voices, and eventually that my voice was one with them and caught up in a whole, a tide, a flux of changing images and meanings that swirled and swayed about the room. I then grasped at the principle of distance, noting that things nearest to me, those things that I could touch, remained most constant, whereas the furthest and the most intangible were always the most fleeting, dissolving like and impalpable as a mist. But I felt all the less secure when I realized that these mirrors of myself closest to hand nonetheless did not feel like myself: my flesh is warm and my pulse beats, but the crystal is hard, and cold, and sharp. I began to mistrust appearances; I would shut my eyes and think of the corridors of darkness stretching on endlessly and into a world of no tomorrows or yesterdays, a world that is eternally blank, stretching out like a flat plain or a steppe filled with bleary snow into myopic space. Only the snow also and eventually resolves into images: clouds, peaks, hooves, and wings, sparkling equalities traced in a red horizon painted over or perhaps flaking out of the darkness. I would awaken from these encroachments only to the terror of the moving echo of mirrors, and I felt that I had definitvely and finally lost myself.