Chapter 12

The Pig-faced Creature

Suddenly, I had an idea. I quickly looked to the left side of the mountains. Under a high top, I saw something grey that I had not noticed before. It was a huge shape with a very large head, but where eyes should be, there was nothing.

As I continued to look around, I realized there were many more shapes in the mountains. Far away, on a high rocky side, I saw a pale animal with a terrible face that looked partly human and partly like a wild animal. Then I noticed even more shapes—hundreds of them! Some looked like gods from old stories, while others were so strange I could not understand what they were.

The mountains on both sides were filled with these shapes—some like animal-gods, others like creatures I cannot describe. I felt afraid and sick looking at them, but I also wanted to know more. I began to wonder: Could the old ways of the past have known something real? Were they more than just people who loved animals and nature? This question stayed in my mind.

As I looked more carefully at these strange shapes, I realized something important. At first, I thought they were just stone shapes on the mountains. But the longer I looked, they seemed different from normal stone. They seemed to be sleeping but still somehow alive. They were not alive like people or animals, but alive in a way that would last forever. The thought that they could never die came to my mind. Perhaps this is what gods would be like—always there, never dying.

While I was thinking about this, something unexpected happened. I had been standing near the dark opening of the break in the mountain. Without making a choice to move, I found myself leaving the dark and moving toward the green house. I stopped thinking about the strange shapes above me and focused only on the house I was now getting near.

I was very afraid, but I did not see anything new or dangerous, so I slowly became calmer. Before long, I was more than halfway to the house. Everything around me was empty and silent. As I got closer to the building, I suddenly saw something moving. It came around from behind a large part of the house.

It was a huge animal, walking almost like a person but with strange movements. It had no clothes and gave off a weak light. The most frightening thing was its face—it looked like the face of a pig. I watched this scary animal quietly. I became so interested in what it was doing that for a moment, I forgot to be afraid.

The animal moved slowly around the house, stopping at each window to look inside and pull at the metal bars. I noticed these windows had bars just like the ones in my real house on Earth. When the animal found a door, it tried to open it carefully. It seemed to be searching for a way to get inside the house.