The valley was essentially populated with strange beings. Instead of faces they had masks that became more beautiful the longer you looked at them. Maybe their masks were their faces. They had houses all along the sides of the valley. They also had their palaces and centres of culture below, under the earth. Their acropoles, along with their fabolous cemeteries, were in the air. In the valley they were all hard at work.
'What are they doing?' I asked [...]
'They are building a road.'
'Why?' [...]
'They have been building that road for two thousand years.'
'But they haven't gone far at all.'
'I know. They have only build two feet of the road.'
'But they are working so hard.'
'What has that got to do with it?'
'All they seem to be doing is building the road.'
'Absolutely'
'But why are they building it?' [...]
'Because they had a most wonderful dream.'
'What dream?' [...]
'They had been living for eterinity as faces on the great tree. They got tired of eternity. They were the ones that the sun didn't melt into precious water. They became beings, people in masks. One day their prophet telled them that there were worlds and worlds of people high up. The prophet spoke of a particular people. A great people who did not know their own greatness. The prophet called that world Heaven and said they should build a great road so that they could visit those people and that those people could visit them. In this way they would complete one another annd fulfil an important destiny in the universe'.
'Why did the prophet call that world Heaven?'
'Because his people are the deads. [...] Heaven means different things to different people. They wanted to live, to be more alive. They wanted to know the essence of pain, they wanted to suffer, to feel, to love, to hate, to be greater than hate, and to be imperfect in the order to always have something to strive forwards, which is beauty. They wanted also to know wonder and to live miracles. Death is too perfect.'
'So why has it taken them so long to build so little?'
'Their prophet said many things they never understood. One of the things their prophet said was that the road cannot be finished.'
'Why not?'
'What their prophet meant was that the moment it is finished all of them will perish.'
'Why?'
'I suppose they will have nothing to do, nothing to dream for, and no need for a future. They will perish of completeness, of boredom. The road is their soul, the soul of their history. That is why, when they have built a long section of it, or forgotten the words of their prophet and begun to think they have completed it, landquakes happen, lightning strikes, invisible volcanoes erupt, rivers descend on them, hurricanes tear up their earth, the road goes mad and twists and destroys itself, or the people become distorted in spirit and start to turn the road into other things, or the workers go insane, the people start wars, revolts cripple everything and a thousand things distract them and wreck what they have build and a new generation comes along and begins again from the wreckage.'
I looked at the road with new eyes. It was short and marvellous. It was a work of art, a shrine almost, beautiful beyond description, created out of the most precious substances in the world, out of amethysts and chrysoberyl, inlaid with carnelian, brilliant with patterned turquoise.
'Why is it so beautiful?'
'Because each new generation begins with nothing and with everything. They know all the earlier mistakes. They may not know that they know, but they do. They know the early plans, the original intentions, the earliest dreams. Each generation has to reconnect the origins for themselves. They tend to become a little wiser, but they don't go very far. It is possible that they now travel slower, and will make bigger, better mistakes. That is how they are as a people. They have an infinity of hope and an eternity of struggles. Nothing can destroy them except themselves and they will never finish the road that is their soul and they do not know it.'
'So why don't you tell them?'
'Because they have the great curse of forgetfulness. They are deaf to the things they need to know the most.'
'Can I tell them?'
The spirit stared hard at me, and continued travelling. [....]
Ben Okri - The famished road