Korridorium

♫ Akashic Spalls ♫

178/398

I enter the corridor. Once again, the throbbing headaches plague me, even though, fundamentally, I don’t even have a head anymore. Instead, I travel through time like a bodiless spirit, always inside the minds of others who don’t notice me—alongside people who fascinated me as a child, even if I have long since forgotten them.

It all began with the diving record of the Trieste. Most recently, it was a journey of a completely different kind, where I ended up in the Lop Nor Desert with Sven Hedin. I sat helplessly behind the eyes of the expedition’s Swedish participant, forced to experience all the hardships, until he finally entered an underground passage in a Bronze Age ghost town they were exploring.

It is their dreams that give me headaches. They often ambush me at night and last throughout the morning. I feel completely helpless against it all, but for a few days now, I have been trying to focus on a thought that keeps slipping away from me: Maybe it’s not an accident, a punishment, or a curse that has befallen me. Maybe it’s an opportunity—or a blessing!

There was this movie where the hero was trapped in a similar way and couldn’t find a way out. He was a meteorologist, I believe, and only when he started to see the hopeless situation he had gotten himself into as an opportunity and fully exploit its potential could he finally free himself from it.

So, I try to rediscover the fascination I had as a child when I read about all these adventures.

I am in the jungle, trapped in the mind of a young local man who accompanies a well-equipped expedition as a porter. Hiram Bingham has us hacking with machetes through the dense vegetation overgrowing large stone blocks. He is convinced that he has finally discovered the Inca city of Vilcabamba. I know better. This is Machu Picchu. But I can’t tell the explorer. I am condemned to helplessness, left only to watch desperately and hope that some corridor will free me from my prison. I wanted to focus on something. But everything keeps blurring and eluding me. I curse my fate. Eventually, the man enters a low passageway in one of the partially excavated pyramid structures…

I am Lord Lindsay—or at least that’s how I am addressed—standing on the third floor of a building. With a mixture of admiration and dismay, I observe a man—that must be the medium Daniel Dunglas Home, I vaguely remember—rise from the floor and levitate. Soon, he floats, stretched out, with his back facing downward in the room. Lord Lindsay is seized by horror, while I sit in his head and watch the spectacle, fascinated. Eventually, Home glides out the window, his face contorted with exertion and his eyes closed. Lord Lindsay stands terrified, while another observer of the scene rushes to another window and opens it. Home floats back in, feet first. He lands upright, opens his eyes, and smiles at his three spectators. Lord Lindsay suddenly feels a pressing need to relieve himself and rushes out of the room into the stairwell…

I stand beside Xu Fu on the bridge of an ancient Chinese sailing ship. A fleet follows us, stretching to the horizon. The Elixir of Immortality! Everything comes back to me. Qín Shǐhuángdì, the founder of the Chinese Empire, equipped a naval expedition out of his paranoid fear of death, which was supposed to obtain the elixir of immortality for him. The sixty barges never returned, and no one knows what happened to them. Will I find out now? My curiosity reminds me that I wanted to focus on enjoying my journey as much as possible—despite my helplessness, despite the frequent headaches, and despite the constant blackouts. Why do I keep forgetting that? I smell the sea breeze, feel the wind on my skin—skin that is not my own. But then the man goes below deck, and I immediately lose my grip on his mind and whirl aimlessly through space and time…

Xu Fu: