We attempt what we can not complete

To strangers he'd talk about the silence you experienced, not just some earth bound conception of audio-implacability but silence of all the sense, a true removal from the constrains of the citizen soldier's Possible. To those friends of whimsy and drink he would clamor about the disconnection and connections one let oneself find down amidst the darkness: ideas that had never been able to surface due to some subjugation by light. The religious heard claims of both God and Mammon ruling below, finding bonds with each far more substantial than one could develop topside. But in moments of reflection, when speaking only to himself, he saw in his journey the conflation of realities down there in the blackness; moving from one to another as he so chose. To some the reason was the question, and for them no answer was mystical enough to satisfy; some saw only deviance and shunned even their own curiosity on the subject. The more level-headed knew that each answer was only a facet of the overall Truth of the situation: each one representing some given line-of-approach to the unseen center, shrouded by these causes. They knew to understand, one must move past reason to reach that center, but none had succeeded to remove their logos sufficient to reveal what lay beneath. Perhaps he had seen that below the level of understanding, and had been attracted down into it. Living down there in attempt to become the center, not being able to approach it from the outside but only subsume it into himself. That's why the mystics came, monks of some arcane order traveling to those solitary outposts of humanity on the edge.

The first tip-off to management was the continual appealing to the winds. "There can't be wind, it plain don't exist for us", our more rustic characters would insist. "That don't mean nothing down here, your realities can't trump my truth" he would invariably reply. His voice always full of those cheery melodies of jest, but not fanatically enough as to ensure a total lack of the sanning. When they begin to send the more serious types to him, out came the quizzical face and some baffling phrase, "well there is and there isn't, it ain't exactly what you know to be wind." This kind of Eastern nonsense never went far with those trapped into dialectic modes of thought, which may have just been the inspiration. They reported back general competency and ingeneral irrationality. Never enough to frighten anyone in-office, but it would go on the chart.

His typical pontifications on the subject took the form of some sort of muddled, sailor-ese.  Speaking of currents and eddies out in the blackness, putting up allegorical jibs and insisting on sleeping on the leeward side of walls and posts.  These eccentricities wouldn't put him in the forefront of the mine-crazies, merely part of the effervescent unsettled.  Some a bit more sensitive to the spiritual æther noted right off that he seemed aware of things not yet found, or strictly speaking, not yet occurred.  Those more adventurous of the workmen began to question him about it, trying to find that wind themselves.  Some sat up nights in shoddy boats made of timber and oar scrounged from waste piles discovered on sly expeditions to levels yet unearthed from history.  Often claims would be bandied about as to trips taken under this new-found wind power, some giving accounts of visions with token guest appearances from the likes of King Magnus III, bestowing approval on their own paltry efforts of emulation.  Time slipped by and the those wind ship adventures peaked at some climax of penetration into the quietistic, leaving unanswered questions of wind truth, and tunnel vortices.  Some soul, levels above, was discovered to have lips that mapped  out the veins not yet found; letters to a chief up on ground sealed with a kiss recognized by a young, entrepreneurial topologist working in a part-time, secretarial calling.  Saw the lines meld together, finding common center at the crest of the lower lip, one vien opening up just that day.  The crowds soon shifted out to engage in some oral perversion of spirituality, seeking maps to El Dorado amidst those minute crevacices on every face they could locate through use of tarrot and other, more seemy devices.

Braulio remained, still passing along tales of the moving stillness, and was forgotten for a time pounding out poissonian distributions of history salvage.  Temporal excursions, journeying into the lost corridors of ancient mineralogies.  The Mine had been closing the moment ground was broken epochs ago.  A monument to human progress: detailing the search for minerals at the edge of understanding.  Corridors running down at seemingly random patchworks of madness, countless miles of understanding lost to the passages of eternity.  Now Braulio is discovering again, never sure it was ever truely known as he has come to know.