Woo hoo! I guess
Woo hoo! I guess this must be the one-day plague. If I just stay in bed all day except for seminar, I should be better tomorrow! How nice it is to be able to sit up.
Anyway, I was saying about the castle. After dinner (rabbit, which is really really good and has lots of little bones) most of the younger people trickled up the hill (there’s a metaphor for you!) in the direction of the castle.
I was with the first group (Theofilasto and Quintaed) when they climbed in through the old doorway and stood in the front room. There was a hole in the wall some four feet up that one had to scramble through to find oneself on the stone staircase.
Everyone was pleasantly scared and jittery. Exploring a forbidden castle by day is one sort of adventure, exploring it by night with nothing but a torch* of uncertain wattage, something else. I was scared too, of course- as scared as any - but after having been so badly afraid within such recent memory, I could really bring myself to care at all about being scared. It sat on the surface of my mind, like being frightened of a spooky story in a campground - all part of the show.
We all lost our nerve, staring at the hole, and found collective excuses, and chickened out. I think actually that that chickenning out lent strength to the next group (which I joined), since Arditta would have been glad of any opportunity to assert his superior masculinity.
*I discover myself falling into the British usage, probably because all the kids exploring things in the books that I read when growing up did carry torches not flashlights.
Exploring with a "torch" is much cooler than with a "flashlight," even if they are in fact the same thing. I approve of this Anglicization.
October 24th, 2002 at 8:37 pm