His left hand pressed firmly against the grey granite walls of the cave. The rock was cold and lifeless, but it provided to the young prince a sense of security against the dragon that lie ahead, known only to his imagination, a dragon with a blazing breath, some said, that pulverized bones as if they were crystals of salt dropped into a glass of water. Pul-ver-ized. All that had survived of the brave princes that had walked before him was their chainmail, which he was reminded of by the shards of metal that lay strewn about in the sand of the passage floor.
The metallic rhythm of his own chainmail caught up with him, echoing, even after he had stopped dead in his tracks, against the full desolation and darkness of the immense igneous trail leading to his fiery foe. It was heavy. And it was many sizes too large, making him appear like a turtle made of tin. Only past his elbows were his arms visible. He wore a distinctive black hat atop his wavy blonde hair, yes, a triangular straw hat of an obtuse angle, fit for one who might dutifully gather rice in the fields, beneath the relentless heat and brilliance of the sun after the dark monsoon clouds had vanished into the ground.
In his right hand, the young prince carried a torch, except this was not an ordinary form of illumination; it was an advanced camping flashlight tied by twine to the end of a stick twice his height. Mother had forbidden him from playing with fire after a bonfire accident (it was his brother’s fault) had left him devoid of eyebrows. For many weeks, thankfully in the summer while school was out, his dog Tom barked incessantly at him, not knowing who this alien being was, and whined for hours without end for his boy Christopher to return and throw the tennis ball far into the field behind the house.
Ahead, the light of his torch glimmered off the sand. Still sliding his hands like an umbilical cord against the cave walls, the surface moistened by the nervous sweat gushing of out of his pores, he crept along. Soon he came to a threshold, whereby on the side he approached from, the ground consisted of sand and pebbles, and on the other, of tiles, alternating black and white, in a mosaic, with their pointed ends aimed at him, such that towers of white and black led his gaze into the distance, as far as the rays of his torch reached.
He hesitated with his first step, not knowing which color, black or white, was safe, and which would lead to his quick demise, a death pained even more by a failure to do battle with the dragon. As all young and good princes know, white is the badge of the moral. So he chose the black. As his left foot approached the tile, it began to shake, violently, until finally he summoned the courage to set it down. He stood motionless, in a straddle, with his left foot ahead, placed delicately on the black tile, his right foot firmly in the sand. Finally, he sighed and smiled – a small, yet early victory along this long odyssey.
With confidence gleaming in his blue eyes, the young prince pressed further onwards, keeping to the black squares on the giant checkerboard that sprawled out before him between the drab walls of the cavern. Every time his foot struck the ground, an exhalation emanated outwards from his silver moon boots. Every time he lifted his foot, the boot in question took a deep breath in, filling its porous sole to expansion, only to have that air expelled with a whoosh upon striking the next black tile.
The floor was remarkably well polished. Soon, he would discover why. An awkward mingling of sounds had him stop on his 487th black tile. It was a rumpus, two parts a-honk a-hink of Canadian geese, but with a lower pitch, one part the cacophony of little chicks scampering wh-tweet wh-tweet for feed, and one part similar to a man screaming ahhhh, while falling into a deep canyon. He started walking again and the sounds grew quicker, louder, and even more disharmonious. Upon the same split second that his torch illuminated shapes about one hundred feet distant, the sounds ceased, except for an electric whir that lagged to silence like a girl who is last in a game of musical chairs; the young prince halted mid-stride. An eerie quiescence held. He could feel his heart crawl further into his throat, choking him nearly, well almost. The shapes in the distance could no longer be discerned.
The electric whir resumed, and, as if by the direction of a conductor’s baton, the bustle of primordial voices began anew, more amorphously and unstructured than before. As he continued forward, his light reflected off a most phantasmagoric scene: a rookery of penguins were melodiously cleaning and waxing the mosaic tile to a brilliant shine. One monstrous penguin, the typical black and white variety, spat at the floor, while another mechanically operated a push buffer back and forth over the saliva. Two others did the same work, except the second tobogganed and rolled across the floor, providing a better luster. From these four originated the a-honk a-hinks. Above them wh-tweeted fluffy charcoal grey beings, their bodies nearly indistinguishable from the quartz-speckled granite from which they hung. Yes, that’s right, they hung from the heights of the ceiling, upsides down.
The sound of the falling ahhhh came from a larger fluff of grey as he, well, as he dove from the ceiling, aiming at a group of similarly-sized penguins below. Just before he would have, in reality, hit the others, or the tiles with a thud, he deployed a parachute of fluff and landed like a ski jumper, seamlessly transitioning into a perfect-10 belly run that took well him across the floor, some 200 feet. The cavern erupted into further, more deafening praise. The young prince similarly clapped with glee, rousing his chainmail into its own metallic acclamation. The torch shook about in the crook of his right elbow, the light pulsating this way and that, the reflection of its beams of light illuminating the cavern with the excitement of a disco ball.
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