The Traveler Shown the Worlds Stacked Beneath His Feet

The floor felt solid under his feet, and that was the first lie. A voice told the traveler to kneel and press his palm flat against the ground of the settled world, the floor men call Heled, the only floor most of them ever walk. He pressed. The ground gave like the lid of a box, and something breathed underneath it.

"This is the top room," the voice said. "There are six below it, and the lowest is not the end." Then the floor opened, and he fell.

The Bickering Folk of Tevel

He landed in a country where the sun came up in the west and set in the east. This floor was Tevel. Three hundred sixty-five kinds of creatures moved across it, none shaped like anything born above. A serpent's head sat on a man's shoulders, a man's face rode a long scaled coil, and an ox lifted its head from the grass, spoke to him in clear words, and asked why he was staring.

But the creatures that stopped him cold had two heads on one trunk, four arms, four legs, a single belly. Sitting, they looked like two people sharing a bench. Then they stood, and they were one. He watched a pair try to walk. One head wanted east, the other west, so the body lurched a step forward and a step back and ended where it began. They quarreled all day over a pebble, until their shared stomach forced a truce.

Even the truce was a fight. One head wanted the meal hot, the other cold, so they cooked both, the cold dish first so the hot would not lose its heat. For one meal they were quiet. The instant the last bite went down, one head cried, "You ate more than I did," and the other shouted, "No, you ate more," and the war resumed. The demon king Ashmedai had once dragged a creature like these up to the daylight for King Solomon to puzzle over. The worlds below were crowded, and they were loud.

The Mountain Where the Dead Wait

The voice pulled him down past floor after floor until the noise died and a colossal mountain rose out of the dark. It was hollow, its body cut into chambers, and the chambers were full of the dead.

This was Sheol, the gathering place, and it was not one undivided pit. A line ran through the mountain, made of light and of thirst. On one side the upright kept their own hollow with a spring of bright water near them. On the other the wicked crowded in dryness, kept apart, waiting for the Day of Judgment that had not yet come. Nobody here was finished. Everybody here was held.

From the bright side a single voice climbed toward the roof of the world. It was Abel, still bleeding the wound his brother gave him, still crying upward against the seed of Cain and asking that they be wiped from the living earth. The verse about a brother's blood screaming from the ground had never warned the traveler that the screaming did not stop. The dead here were not silent. They appealed, all of them, day and night, and their appeal went up like smoke.

The Southern Edge Where Fire Stands Guard

The voice turned him southward, and the air changed to ash and vapor. Here were the chambers of Teman, packed with fire, and a cave that breathed out tempest and storm and the cold north wind that snows the world quiet. The storehouses ran nearly three thousand years across. At their lip stood an opening, and the opening was Gehinnom.

He watched the wicked arrive there in the blink of an eye. When a soul came loose from its body, destroying angels caught it and slung it to the angels of wrath, who slung it from the hollow of a sling straight into the fire, as a man slings a stone. But the opening sat in a cruel place. Standing in it, the wicked could turn and look east, clear across to the glory of the upright, and see what they had lost. They went ashamed and said, "Woe to us, who sinned and never busied ourselves with Torah and its commandments." Then angels armed with thornbushes drove them northward, down to the floor of Gehinnom itself, and the looking only made the burning worse.

The Storm That Ties the Floors Together

"Now look at what holds it up," the voice said, and the traveler looked down through everything he had crossed. Nothing rested on anything solid. Each floor hung inside a storm tied to the rim of the dome beneath it, and that dome hung inside its own storm, tied to the next. The waters of the world stood on a fire called Chashmal, the Chashmal on mountains of hail, the hail on storehouses of snow, the snow on storehouses of fire and water, all of it on the deep. The lord of the deep had a face like three heads of an ox, and he stood between the upper deep and the lower deep, ordering the one to hold its water back and the other to send its water up, deep calling to deep.

Below the deep lay tohu, a green thread looped around creation, leaking darkness, and below that the sunken stones of bohu bleeding water. Floor hung under floor like one overturned bowl set inside another, never stacked, always nested. The lowest hung from nothing made. It hung on an arm. One arm of the Holy One held up the upper worlds, the other the lower, and beneath everything were the arms of the world.

The Wings Sealed With the Name

The voice carried him back up through all of it, past the storm and the deep and the mountain and the bickering folk, until his palm pressed again to the floor of Heled. This time, when he lifted his hand, he felt the pull on the other side. The wings of heaven were tied to the wings of the earth, and the wings of the earth tied back to the wings of heaven, and the knot between them was sealed with the Name of God. Above and below were not two places joined by accident. They were one cloth, and a tug on the lowest thread ran all the way up.

He stood on the settled world again. It felt solid. He knew now it was a lid, and that under it the floors went down, loud and burning and waiting, all the way to the arm that would not let go.