Chapter 27 – The Relativity of The Stylites
Mungo was alone in the topmast as the day broke once more on the oath-bound fishermen still on the fish's tail, so to speak. Mungo was not happy. He had been aloft now for twenty-four hours now, his meals having been passed up to him by means of a rope which he lowered to the base of the mast and had a basket tied to it, in the manner of a man drawing water from a well.
“What manner of a life is this?” muttered Mungo to himself as the midday sun beat down. “Aloft in a crows nest for the rest of my natural; burned by the Smug by day and frozen by night, whipped by gales and rained on when it pours. Aye, all because of some old man's craziness. What is it that keeps me aloft? Is it faith in our cause, or is it fear? Maybe a little of the two – a potent combination, they are. And nothing but endless white all around, enough to send you blind if you don't squint in deference and keep blinking. But oh, no blinking now. What's that on the horizon? Well bless my behind, if that isn't the strangest sight I've ever seen...”
The story of Simian Stylites is a story of hardship, made all the harder by his own adamance. Some men express themselves through art, others pluck the harp strings and play the lute. Simian was different. Simian expressed himself through suffering. At the age of thirteen he became interested in mysticism, meditation and the interconnectedness of all things, which instilled him the irresistible urge to shun all the niceties of life and take up the mantle of an ascetic. He started by shunning food, by standing in awkward positions for many days, by kneeling in prayer for endless hours; in general he felt happiest when he was discomfitured in some way. He was, masochistically speaking, very creative, a true genuflective genius in fact, and, humble as he was, he acquired quite a following. They would observe him on his fasts, tempting him with food in the manner of a tourist trying to make a royal guard flinch, and they asked him for all kinds of advice and judgement. The crowds got so large and distracting that at the age of fifteen Simian, for the first time, decided to escape them. He joined a monastery and took to strict periods of fasting and silence. But his happy unhappy life in the monastery could not go on for long. On one occasion he bound his abdomen tightly with hooktree cords and abstained from eating or drinking for an entire month. He was found collapsed in his cell, much to the abbot's consternation, and had to be nursed back to life. The cords were bound round his middle so tightly that it took many days of soaking to work them loose from the wound they had circumscribed. Simian was perfunctorily dismissed from the monastery and took up residence in the wastelands around the City, beyond the mist gates. He was just getting down to some decent hardship when he was spotted from an outgoing fishing boat, the crew of which reported his new location to the people of the City. Within hours he was surrounded by a crowd, and the press of bodies, constant gifts and rents in his clothing where people wanted a piece of that sacred fabric became a constant annoyance and quite unconducive to prayer.
In the end Simian could stand it no longer. He took the gifts of gold and silver which the crowds brought, which amounted to a small fortune, and bought a cargo ship. This vessel he had filled with blocks of granite, and, in the dead of a moonless night, slipped discreetly out of port. Simian headed far out into the mist, beyond the mesa, where few fishers ventured. He plumbed the depths carefully with a line he had brought for the purpose and in this way found a mountain on the sea floor some way beyond the mesa, the pinnacle of said mountain being only one-hundred metres or so below the mist. Simian now, a driven man, used one of the cra nes on the ship to lower granite blocks down, one on top of the other. He did this until a higgledy-piggledy tower was formed, which rose some twenty metres or so above the mist. Satisfied with a job well done, Simian attached a long rope to the throttle o f the ship and, carrying this between his teeth, set a ladder against the side of the column, which he climbed. He also took with him a simple fishing kit in a small satchel. When he was atop his pedestal, Simian gave the throttle rope a good yank and sent the ship flying crewless back in the direction of the City. The stories that are told to this day of a ghost-ship returning to port are greatly exaggerated, but they have their foundations in truth.
So about this towering figure: Simian had never been more miserable, which was great (indeed, it could be said that, having given up on escaping men in the horizontal direction, Simian had succeeded in the vertical). Complain as you do, Mungo, atop the mast; here was a man who has bested you one-hundred fold and more. Simian, a youthful eighteen year-old when he first went aloft, survived off a diet of line-caught fish, eaten raw. These morsels being quite succulent in themselves, Simian acquired enough moisture from fish alone to mean that he did not require any form of drink to survive. And survive he did. Gales blew, rain, sleet, snow, hail and thunder tried to bring him down, but still Simian remained vertiginously defiant. His mind worked in this way: if I have stood here for a week, I have committed myself, therefore I cannot step down. If I have stood here for a month, then this is no great achievement, so I cannot step down. If I have remained a year – well, a year is neither here nor there in the big scheme of things, I cannot step down to mediocrity. I have stood here a decade; well, I've been here so long I might as well stay a little big longer. Such devout procrastinating continued, so that fifty years passed and Simian was still aloft.
Now, Simian had relied on fish for a long time. How had the recent shortage affected him? He had, of course, seen it as yet another test, which he accepted humbly. Fasting had always been part of his life, and he was well used to stomach-shrinking hunger – it was sort of an old friend of his. So here he is, standing on his self-built tower, thin as a skeleton, arms cruciform in a particularly painful position, loving every minute of it. It is this figure and his bizarre, rapturous rictus that the mottled Mungo sees looming out of the Mist at him, at about the same level as the crow's nest. The whitish granite of the column is at first largely invisible against the backdrop of the mist, giving this strange, holy man the appearance of levitating.
Mungo is too speechless to cry out at first, and then the ship has passed Simia n and he quickly is lost to stern. Mungo thinks it best not to tell his crewmates of this apparition, for surely they would think he was mad. But suddenly Mungo's hardship seems nothing; the hard plank of wood on which he leans is as soft as eiderdown; the ship's biscuit he eats is gateau; the water is wine; his crewmen, so far below, suddenly seem close by, reassuring him that he is not alone. So think now, about this: would the world not be a better place if we were all granted a vision of this man in the mist? There would be no industry for the mattress makers, no jobs for the top chefs, no bonuses for bankers. We would rock ourselves to sleep on bedrock, gladly eat dry bread, shun money as if it were venomous. We would be happy in our misery, and glad in our suffering. It is perhaps a good thing then, that some men stand aloft on their pillars. They are a little closer to heaven, it is true, but they elevate those around them too. So thank Simian as you pass him in the mist, for one day when you pass, you will see only a pile of bones.
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