The Neverending Story (49 page)

The steps were Bastian’s. When he reached the hut, he said: “Good day. I’ve lost my way. I’m looking for the fountain the Water of Life springs from. Can you help me?”

The miner replied in a whisper: “You haven’t lost your way. But speak softly, or my pictures will crumble.”

He motioned to Bastian, who followed him into the hut.

It consisted of a single small, bare room. A wooden table, two chairs, a cot, and two or three wooden shelves piled with food and dishes were the only furnishings. A fire was burning on an open hearth, and over it hung a kettle of soup.

Yor ladled out soup for himself and Bastian, put the bowls on the table, and with a motion of his hand invited his guest to eat. They ate in silence.

Then the miner leaned back. His eyes looked through Bastian and far into the distance as he asked in a whisper: “Who are you?”

“My name is Bastian Balthazar Bux.”

“Ah, so you still know your name.”

“Yes. And who are you?”

“I am Yor; people call me the blind miner. But I am blind only in the daylight. In the darkness of my mine, I can see.”

“What sort of mine is it?”

“The Minroud Mine, they call it. It’s a picture mine.”

“A picture mine?” said Bastian in amazement. “I never heard of such a thing.”

Yor seemed to be listening for something.

“And yet,” he said. “It’s here for just such as you. For humans who can’t find the way to the Water of Life.”

“What kind of pictures are they?” Bastian asked.

Yor shut his eyes and was silent for a while. Bastian didn’t know whether to repeat his question. Then he heard the miner whisper: “Nothing gets lost in the world. Have you ever dreamed something and when you woke up not known what it was?”

“Yes,” said Bastian. “Often.”

Yor nodded. Then he stood up and beckoned Bastian to follow him. Before they left the hut, he dug his fingers into Bastian’s shoulders and whispered: “But not a word, not a sound, understand? What you are going to see is my work of many years. The least sound can destroy it. So tread softly and don’t talk.”

Bastian nodded and they left the hut. Behind it there was a wooden headframe, below which a shaft descended vertically into the earth. Passing these by, the miner led Bastian out into the snow-covered plain. And there in the snow lay the pictures, like jewels bedded in white silk.

They were paper-thin sheets of colored, transparent isinglass, of every size and shape, some round, some square, some damaged, some intact, some as large as church windows, others as small as snuffbox miniatures. They lay, arranged more or less according to size and shape, in rows extending to the snowy horizon.

What these pictures represented it was hard to say. There were figures in weird disguise that seemed to be flying through the air in an enormous bird’s nest, donkeys in judge’s robes, clocks as limp as soft butter, dressmaker’s dummies standing in deserted, glaringly lighted squares. There were faces and heads pieced together from animals and others that made up a landscape. But there were also perfectly normal pictures, men mowing a wheat field, women sitting on a balcony, mountain villages and seascapes, battle scenes and circus scenes, streets and rooms and many, many faces, old and young, wise and simple, fools and kings, cheerful and gloomy. There were gruesome pictures, executions and death dances, and there were comical ones, such as a group of young ladies riding a walrus or a nose walking about and being greeted by passersby.

The longer Bastian looked at the pictures, the less he could make of them. He and Yor spent the whole day walking past row after row of them, and then dusk descended on the great snowfield. Bastian followed the miner back to the hut. After closing the door behind them Yor asked in a soft voice: “Did you recognize any of them?”

“No,” said Bastian.

The miner shook his head thoughtfully.

“Why?” Bastian asked. “What are they?”

“They are forgotten dreams from the human world,” Yor explained. “Once someone dreams a dream, it can’t just drop out of existence. But if the dreamer can’t remember it, what becomes of it? It lives on in Fantastica, deep under our earth. There the forgotten dreams are stored in many layers. The deeper one digs, the closer together they are. All Fantastica rests on a foundation of forgotten dreams.”

Bastian was wide-eyed with wonderment. “Are mine there too?” he asked.

Yor nodded.

“And you think I have to find them?”

“At least one,” said Yor. “One will be enough.”

“But what for?” Bastian wanted to know.

Now the miner’s face was lit only by the faint glow of the hearth fire. Again his blind eyes looked through Bastian and far into the distance.

“Listen to me, Bastian Balthazar Bux,” he said. “I’m no great talker. I prefer silence. But I will answer this one question. You are looking for the Water of Life. You want to be able to love, that’s your only hope of getting back to your world. To love—that’s easily said. But the Water of Life will ask you: Love whom? Because you can’t just love in general. You’ve forgotten everything but your name. And if you can’t answer, it won’t let you drink. So you’ll just have to find a forgotten dream, a picture that will guide you to the fountain. And to find that picture you will have to forget the one thing you have left: yourself. And that takes hard, patient work. Remember what I’ve said, for I shall never say it again.”

After that he lay down on his wooden cot and fell asleep. Bastian had to content himself with the hard, cold floor. But he didn’t mind.

When he woke up the next morning feeling stiff in all his joints, Yor was gone—to the mine, no doubt, Bastian decided. He took a dish of the hot soup, which warmed him but didn’t taste very good. Too salty. It made him think of sweat and tears.

Then he went out into the snow-covered plain and walked past the pictures. He examined one after another attentively, for now he knew how important it was, but he found none that meant anything in particular to him.

Toward evening Yor came up from the mine. Bastian saw him step out of the pit cage. In a frame on his back he was carrying different-sized sheets of paper-thin isinglass. Bastian followed him in silence as he went far out into the plain and carefully bedded his new finds in the soft snow at the end of a row. One of the pictures represented a man whose chest was a birdcage with two pigeons in it, another a woman of stone riding on a large turtle. One very small picture showed a butterfly with letters on its wings. And many more, but none meant anything to Bastian.

Back in the hut with the miner, he asked: “What will become of the pictures when the snow melts?”

“It’s always winter here,” said Yor.

They had no other conversation that evening.

In the following days Bastian kept searching among the pictures for one with some special meaning for him—but in vain. In the evening he sat in the hut with the miner. Since the miner kept silent, Bastian got into the habit of saying nothing, and little by little he adopted Yor’s careful way of moving for fear of making the pictures crumble.

“Now I’ve seen all the pictures,” Bastian said one night. “None of them is for me.”

“That’s bad,” said Yor.

“What should I do?” Bastian asked. “Should I wait for you to bring up new ones?”

Yor thought it over, then he shook his head.

“If I were you,” he whispered, “I’d go down into the mine and dig for myself.”

“But I haven’t got your eyes,” said Bastian. “I can’t see in the dark.”

“Weren’t you given a light for your long journey?” Yor asked, looking through Bastian. “A sparkling stone or something that might help you now?”

“Yes,” said Bastian sadly. “But I used Al Tsahir for something else.”

“That’s bad,” Yor said again.

“Then what do you advise?” Bastian asked.

After a long silence the miner replied: “Then you’ll just have to work in the dark.”

Bastian shuddered. He still had all the strength and fearlessness AURYN had given him, but the thought of crawling on his belly in the black underground darkness sent the shivers down his spine. He said nothing more and they both lay down to sleep.

The next morning the miner shook him by the shoulders.

Bastian sat up.

“Eat your soup and come with me,” said Yor.

Bastian obeyed.

He followed the miner to the shaft and got into the pit cage with him. Together they rode down into the mine. At first a faint beam of light followed them down the shaft, but it vanished as the cage went deeper. Then a jolt signaled that they had reached the bottom.

Here below it was much warmer than on the wintry plain. The miner walked very fast, and trying to keep up for fear of losing him in the darkness, Bastian was soon covered with sweat. They twined their way over endless passages and galleries, which sometimes opened out into spacious vaults, as Bastian could tell by the echo of their footfalls. Several times Bastian bruised himself against jutting stones or wooden props, but Yor took no notice.

On this first day and for several that followed, the miner, by wordlessly guiding Bastian’s hand, instructed him in the art of separating the paper-thin leaves of isinglass from one another and picking them up. There were tools for the purpose, they felt like wooden or horn spatulas, but Bastian never saw them, for when the day’s work was done they stayed down in the mine.

Little by little he learned to find his way in the darkness. A new sense that he could not have accounted for taught him to distinguish one gallery from another. One day Yor told him silently, with the mere touch of his hands, to work alone in a low gallery, which he could enter only by crawling. Bastian obeyed. It was very close and cramped, and above him lay a mountain of stone.

Curled up like an unborn child in its mother’s womb, he lay in the dark depths of Fantastica’s foundations, patiently digging for a forgotten dream, a picture that might lead him to the Water of Life.

Since he could see nothing in the eternal night of the mine, he could not choose or come to any decision. He could only hope that chance or a merciful fate would eventually lead him to a lucky find. Evening after evening he brought what he had managed to gather from the Minroud Mine into the failing daylight. And evening after evening his work had been in vain. But Bastian did not complain or rebel. He had lost all self-pity. Though his strength was inexhaustible, he often felt tired.

How long this painful work went on it is hard to say, for such labor cannot be measured in days and months. Be that as it may, one evening he brought to the surface a picture. It moved him so deeply the moment he looked at it that he needed all his self-control to keep from letting out a cry of surprise that would have crumbled the picture to dust.

On the fragile sheet of isinglass—it was not very large, about the size of a usual book page—he saw a man wearing a white smock and holding a plaster cast in one hand. His posture and the troubled look on his face touched Bastian to the heart. But what stirred him the most was that the man was shut up in a transparent but impenetrable block of ice.

While Bastian looked at the picture that lay before him in the snow, a longing grew in him for this man whom he did not know, a surge of feeling that seemed to come from far away. Like a tidal wave, almost imperceptible at first, it gradually built up strength till it submerged everything in its path. Bastian struggled for air. His heart pounded, it was not big enough for so great a longing. That surge of feeling submerged everything that he still remembered of himself. And he forgot the last thing he still possessed: his own name.

Later on, when he joined Yor in the hut, he was silent. The miner was silent too, but for a long while he faced Bastian, his eyes once again seeming to look through him and far into the distance. And for the first time since Bastian had come, a smile passed briefly over the miner’s stone-gray features.

That night, tired as he was, the boy who no longer had a name could not sleep. He kept seeing the picture before his eyes. It was as though this man wanted to say something to him but could not, because of the block of ice he was imprisoned in. The boy without a name wanted to help him, wanted to make the ice melt. As in a waking dream he saw himself hugging the block of ice, trying in vain to melt it with the heat of his body.

But then all at once he heard what the man was trying to say to him; he heard it not with his ears but deep in his heart.

“Please help me! Don’t leave me! I can’t get out of this ice alone. Help me! Only you can help me!”

When they awoke next morning at daybreak, the boy without a name said to Yor: “I won’t be going down into the mine with you anymore.”

“Are you going to leave me?”

The boy nodded. “I’m going to look for the Water of Life.”

“Have you found the picture that will guide you?”

“Yes.”

“Will you show it to me?”

Again the boy nodded. They went out into the snow where the picture lay. The boy looked at it, but Yor directed his blind eyes at the boy’s face, as though looking through it into the distance. For a long while he seemed to be listening for some sound. At length he nodded.

“Take it with you,” he whispered, “and don’t lose it. If you lose it, or if it is destroyed, you will have nothing left in Fantastica. You know what that means.”