These impressions under us are only shallow nests set down some from what may be the only perfectly flat floor of the world. The nests produce the only sustenance our people have ever had. Beyond these nests, our world has few distinguishing features. There are tales of other worlds replete with things, but I have never seen them.  

The legend has it our forebears dug out our impressions by various far-fetched methods, but I expect our forebears were identical to us and would likewise have no means to really alter the ground. Ground cannot be altered. There are no implements for such work that we can wield.  While my own incomplete cosmology presents its own assortment of insoluble riddles, certainly this land is inviolable except by strange and terrible tools unknown to us. 

In other words we have always been helpless and fundamentally at the mercy of the world, despite all our striving, which is, to our credit, considerable.  No, it is most likely these little impressions were fashioned by whatever made the rest.  Anyway they are little pits with a warm water pool conducive to drink and rest, respectively.  Modest holes near the middles feed our reservoirs and we live this way: certainly not exultantly, but with a consistency nobly resolute and hopelessly idiotic.  Were our reservoirs far larger and more fructifying, we should likely view our lives in much the same middling way.  Perhaps due to the way our ground appears to be the center fulcrum of the world, it is said that our minds themselves are fashioned for a balance between extremes of emotional and cognitive possibility, much as we seemingly inhabit the central space of all existence.  Most of what we register--like the stories we tell ourselves concerning the things we want--are  essentially lies: inner and outer deceptions, varyingly intermingled, providing motivations that feel appropriate at opportune times, and do propel us through the days; so perhaps our fundamental duplicity, in the end, is to the good.

This ground of ours is truly level to the extent that we can detect, but outside this place all land slopes.  North goes up and south down, while west slopes down and east up.  This inclining and declining is only slightly noticeable once one passes the perimeter.  But unwaveringly the land steepens exactly exponentially any single way traveled.  It is as if each of the four potential ways were a world unto itself, fabricated entirely at the moment of anyone's witnessing it.  The rising or falling slope in front of you at the instant of passing the perimeter is infinitely extended to your left and right, and otherwise without evident borders.  Behind you--no matter what--our community rests.  You can reverse your progress at any time and find our flat ground, where you can live on just fine for reasons that aren't clear.       

I have often wondered how the different ways could really slope contrariwise.  Really try to visualize this world the way described above, what with north utterly up and west utterly down, and it is simply impossible, because there should be empty space somewhere between every side.  Edges should exist.  Instead there is no gap anywhere.  Once one begins an ascent, there is nothing possible but descent back to the encampment.  A descent is only survived by rising back up.  So we can never venture very far. 

A further hindrance to practical observation is the omnipresent dust limiting our view.  These winds blow more and less fiercely, but the dusts always obscure.  To give you an idea, on a good day neighbors can barely see through from their own impression to their neighbor's.  Another sensible question from an outsider would be what occurs when one tries to go, for instance, exactly between north, which slopes up, and west, which slopes down.  Well, the answer is that we are never quite as precise as we aim, as the slightest inclination north will bring you to the north side, which some call the north face, and you will begin to rise even as you walk at what you believed was a exactingly northwest angle.

This is the real riddle of our world.  Were the ups and downs of these ever-sloping faces more steep initially, then with just eyes we could decisively see the impossibility of the ways things unquestionably are.  But because of its slow angling up or down with the air's relentless opaqueness, the world's impossibility remains, as it were, invisible to us.  Everywhere one looks space appears really ordinary.  But somewhere outside of our field of vision there are necessarily terrible shifts of an incomprehensible kind occurring.  Furthermore these motions are necessarily, inextricably tied to our existence. 

We do not in the main bother much about that.  Be that this is our life and our world and all the same impossible, albeit by our own mental reckoning, rather than simply unlikely or implausible--which other aspects, the existence of our impressions, designed seemingly specifically for our well-being, for example, independently are--you would think that we would find it more difficult to live, surely never feel secure.  But this is not the kind of creature we are.  While we do spend most time within our impressions, very often scared or senselessly preoccupied, it is not the case that we are exactly fearful of the world?s contours, which for reasons unknown we are currently occupying the exact middle of.  Some of us, it is true, are very afraid all the time, sometimes attesting it is a fear of a particular direction (one and only one blighted, invariably).  Sometimes they'll even straightforwardly bemoan the general uncertainty outside our middle ground, with its life-giving impressions, water and growth.  But I find it?s actually other things that typically instill fear in them--for instance anxiety about their rank amongst their fellows--that they then manifest as general dread of the outside sloping.  In fact, in the main, the way the world slopes impossibly, to say nothing of our supremely precarious embodiment and sustenance, is perceived by virtually everyone as nothing too important; a fact other beings should find our most pronounced peculiarity.  Very few are much concerned why, and after all it may be better this way.  Were we consumed by the doubt and terror that, it seems to me, are reasonably commensurate with our unprecedented incarnation and subsequent occupation here, then there would be no end to the fruitless wondering.  Curiosity of this variety, due to our unwavering makeup, leads literally nowhere, both physically and psychologically.  So while I?ve attested our people are someways sleepwalkers, constricted by their inborn limitations in every way conceivable, it is possible underlying their stupefied unconsciousness, if only by good fortune, there is a defensible pragmatism facilitating our incomparable productivity and overall contentment with our lot, which allows generation after generation to thrive.             

Everything about our lives is certainly a mystery but the only really popular inquiry amongst our general public involves the end; specifically the endpoint of any single direction.  No one reliable has yet returned reporting having seen an end, which would be a wall one way or another, we sensibly-enough imagine, or at least as close to a wall as one of us might still climb or alternately not plummet from.  Philosophers will tell you, of course, that no end can be reached or even seen because our physical bodies can't mechanically enact ascension or declension upon ground of sufficiently vertical steepness.  After this we would just fall.  This is undoubtedly true.  So for us there can never be an end quite like we imagine, only the ideal of one, which is, in its way, easy to envision, even comforting, as it does give our world the closed dimensions our folk intuitively understand and positively regard as improfane. 

Reports only suggest there are fewer and fewer notable features the farther an individual goes any one way, except for the feature of continuous steepening.  In addition, though it is difficult to imagine, the winds and dust grow thicker and positively hindering the farther one travels, even as ground, one way or another, grows steeper and harder to traverse.  Any way there is the fear of falling, whether you are ascending or descending.  As it practically effects them, this fear of falling is harder for our people to bear, as it is the fate of all lifeless bodies to be pulled south until a point of decline where that body will continue falling of its own accord, some reasonably speculate forever.  Because there is nothing down there.  Of course the Carrier of Bodies is a figure widely,  justly celebrated for his courage and character, seeing as to the perilous closeness to the ultimate fall that this hero braves to drop our dead out of the world forever.  Every time the Carrier returns to our ground, he relates the tale of how he carried the body down.  He tells of going just far enough, then releasing the body very carefully.  He describes the discarded body rolling and rolling--initially both visible and audible--as it begins to plummet.  At the right time, our Carrier heightens his voice for dramatic effect, describing how the body vanishes into the swirling clouds of infernal dust without a trace.  You'd think it excessively morbid or even boastful to go through this verbal performance for every single discarded body, but it is the crazed and fervent response of the people that sustains the practice, not solely the ego of the Carrier.  If he neglected to narrate this moment in great detail, without debate, consensus would instantly materialize as to the necessity of his replacement. 

Charitably, one could call our people's interest in such salacious material concern over a departed friend, but more realistically, they are concerned because this will one day happen to them.  Another banal, not mutually exclusive explanation is that people are simply bored and gravitate to this moment of bodily release downward to eternity because of its sheer, inherently theatrical irreversibility.  Stories of this kind excite them and give shape to their meaningless lives.  But to listen to the rabble, you?d believe that after utterly disappearing, the body will strike a mythic, flat and harmless ground, then inexplicably stand up again, renewed after a fashion not one fool is even bold enough to venture a guess at.  There are too many problems with this feeble hypothesis to warrant critique.  Those who?ve never really traveled far outside are full of frankly ignorant accounts based on nothing but hope.  

This image of endless falling haunts us more than it might another people.  Only the last one of us will not fall, because there will be no one remaining to carry that body down.  For the rest of us, we cannot bear the continued presence of the dead and though it is not certain, I should think even were an extremely famished and weakened individual alone with a body, they should find in themselves the unprecedented courage to drag the body down until it can properly pass out of the world.  So despite the special adulation we give to our Carrier, we are all, in a real sense, potentially the Carrier.  It is a matter of innate temperament.  As an outsider you could admire us for this, or think it merely a  peculiarity of our mental architecture; nevertheless these are the traits we are saddled with, for good or ill, in the past and for so long as our community exists.       

I concede we may actually reach the real end of the world, after a fashion, upon giving up the ghost, assuming there is another ground in the south: at the bottom of the world.  Of course, with the way space appears to us, one always intuits a ground that something falling must eventually hit, and there is nothing more obvious than the fact that our intuition only goes so far; but it is possible there are other things, of a kind, eternally down there, even something like ourselves; even better things than we can envision, I will gladly grant you that that's possible.  But the way of things outside our encampment is unsure enough that we can't count on physical ends of the world any more than, for instance, we can say for certain that time ends.  There are some that say beyond where we?d imagine physical ends would be--the vertical flatness of complete steepness--beyond is actually a flattening and reversal of steepening, a contrary rising or falling that would then possibly lead to a flat ground extending infinitely in every direction, the way the world now extends up and down incomprehensibly any one way traveled.  But these stories are certainly mythological, like so much else.  Anyway something of my and others? skepticism seems to trickle down even to the least rational of our people, notwithstanding that they momentarily entertain wild fantasies.  At the end of the day, because of the essential uselessness of risk, and the comparably weak pull of curiosity--especially curiosity likely to be disappointed only by increasing steepness--few in their right minds ever leave our encampment to begin with.

This place we were born into, despite our irrelevance to everything outside, appears crafted for our people?s life; yet there is not a single indication of life outside of this, or the remotest intimation of why any of us might be to begin with.  The Mystic will tell you that there are other layers of reality, the possibility of which one may glimpse in moments of deep, willed removal from the world.  While I respect this possibility and fervently hope it true, at the same time I question the knowledge one receives from reflection of this kind.  Our limitations are severe, if not distinguished by their totality.  Clearly, each morning's attempt to re-imagine a coherent map of the world outside our ground points to nothing so much as our limitedness.  Somehow spaces overlap and occupy spaces occupied by other spaces.  In the beginning--without our understanding--everything began somehow.   For us, there is perhaps to be no end to our final fall; that is, no ground at all after this, just an endless openness completely alien to good sense.  Probably this is the root of the Mystic's belief in cohabiting spaces.  They say God is in the air around us--his fingers even now enfolding us--presumably to some purpose.  Naturally, by this account we are His most precious center.  This feels reasonable to assert for some, but how could beliefs be otherwise for an incarnated things with our inborn outlook?  This talk of the air's fingers, albeit charming and more plausible than other tales, is surely made up.  Perhaps it is even unnecessary to say we believe the world should posses fingers only because we do. 

 Still, even great philosophers would agree that a world incepted independent of forces resembling a purposeful mind, with a mind's attendant desires and motivations, is the sheerest obscenity.  So we may all be fools, some only more sophisticated than others.  While it is no less inadvisable than the Mystic's obfuscation, sometimes when contemplating the angles of the space apart from our ground, I am struck by an image, which I submit here in full awareness of its being suspect.  After all, there is, in reality, not the first reason for crediting it besides my feeling it true.  But in the end our feeling is all we will ever have, and we must exercise that faculty.  In this pondering I see there is only one face.  We are upon it, but cannot ever see the dimensions accurately.  All we see right now is an approximation which has historically benefited our daily well-being.  Indeed, by our meager frames of context, this face has no purpose at all.  And the real face of the terrible and alien system outside our ground will revert to its permanent and single, flat surface after we disappear.  We will never see this face--this one and final wall--because we were never really a part of it at all, only atop it, perched moments that in all likelihood absolutely mean nothing.  We were a kind of voice lost like sound, without place or matter.

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