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"So yes, you are right, a madhouse of sorts, the Valley of theShadow of Death, the terrible river of monsters over which soulsdread to cross to Paradise. And of course, none had ever crossed up tothat point.
"The first thing I did was listen: I listened to the song of any soulwho would sing to me, that is, speak, in my language; I caught up anycoherent declaration or question or supposition that struck my ears.
What did these souls know? What had become of them?
"And in short order I discovered that there were tiers to thisawful, gloom-filled place, tiers created out of the will of souls to seekothers like themselves. The place had become stratified, ratherloosely and grimly, but there was an order born out of the degree ofof each soul's awareness, acceptance, confusion, or wrath.
"Closest to earth lay the damnedest, those who kept struggling toeat or drink or possess others, or could not accept what had happenedor did not understand.
"Just beyond them came a layer of souls who did nothing but fighteach other, scream, yell, push, shove, strive to harm or overcome orinvade or escape in hopeless confusion. These souls never even sawme. But again, your humans have seen this and described it in many,many manuscripts over the centuries. Nothing I say surely is asurprise.
"And farther from this struggle, nearest to the calm of Heaven?
though I don't speak really of literal directions here梬ere those whohad come to understand that they had passed out of Nature, and weresomewhere else. And these souls, some of them having been theresince the Beginning, had grown patient in their attitudes, and patientin their watching of Earth, and patient with others around them,whom they sought to help in Love to accept their death.""You found the souls who loved.""Oh, they all love," Memnoch said. "All of them. There is nosuch thing as a soul who loves nothing. He or she loves something,even if it exists only in memory or as an ideal. But yes, I found thosemost peacefully and serenely expressing love in immense amounts toone another, and to the living below. Some I found who had turnedtheir eyes entirely to earth, and sought nothing but to answer theprayers that rose from the desperate, the needy, and the sick.
"And Earth by this time, as you know, had seen wars unspeakable,and whole civilizations dissolved by volcanic disaster. The varietyand possibilities of suffering increased all the time. It wasn't only inproportion to learning, either, or cultural development. It hadbecome a scheme beyond an angel's comprehension. When I lookedat Earth, I didn't even try to figure out what ruled the passions ofthose in one jungle as opposed to the groups in another, or why onepopulation spent generations piling stones upon stones. I knew, ofcourse, more or less everything, but I was not now on an earthlymission.
"The dead had become my realm.
"I drew near to these souls who looked down with mercy andcompassion, who sought by thought to influence others for the good.
Ten, twenty, thirty, I saw thousands. Thousands, I tell you, in whomall hope of rebirth or great reward was gone; souls in which existedtotal acceptance; that this was death; this was eternity; soulsenamored with the flesh and blood they could see just as we Angels hadbeen enamored and still were.
"I sat amongst these souls and started to talk with them, here andthere, where I could get their attention, and it soon became obviousthat they were rather indifferent to my form, because they assumedthat I had chosen it as they had chosen theirs, and some of themresembled men and women, and some didn't bother. So I suspect theyactually thought me rather new to Sheol in that I had to make suchferocious displays with arms and legs and wings. But they could bedistracted from earth, if approached very politely, and I began toquestion them, remembering to strike for the truth only, but not tobe rude.
"I must have talked to millions. I roamed Sheol, talking to souls.
And the hardest thing in each instance was to get the attention of theindividual either off the earth, or off some phantasm of lost existence,or out of a state of airy contemplation in which concentration wasnow so alien and required such an effort that it couldn't be induced.
"The wisest, the most loving souls did not want to bother with myquestions. And only gradually would they realize that I was not amortal man but something of much different substance, and thatthere was a point to my questions that had to do with a place ofreference beyond Earth. You see, this was the dilemma. They had been inSheol so long that they no longer speculated about the reason forLife or Creation; they no longer cursed a God they didn't know, orsought a God who hid from them. And when I began to ask myquestions, they thought I was way down there with the new souls,dreaming of punishments and rewards which were never to come.
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