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Show hub of Hell!" He felt the need to come up with something more than a vivid metaphor for them, something suggesting Hell and the Prince of fire and darkness. Besides our frontier relish for tall tales, we had a similar reason for repeating the conductor's homespun myth. We used it as a playful front for uneasiness we felt around the place. Part of our fascination with the Springs sprang from their gray-white weirdness. Those spectral ridges quivering in the sun or gleaming in the moonlight. . .how had they grown in defiance of gales? After ages of sandpaper winds, the mounds did not diminish-they rose with "erpings" and hiccupings down below. To peer into the holes which dotted the mounds and to watch the water seethe up out of the mysterious depths. . . .To trace trickles that nourished reeds close to pools where we boiled our eggs. What manner of plants were these, dark green angular stems with no proper leaves, only a few blossoms that looked like devilish insects poised to dart, to sting? How could grass grow out of those heaps of salts and sodas and who-knew-what? The grass was short, stiff, sharp enough to prick bare feet. It too was ghostly gray-white. That water. Even after it cooled and dropped much of its mineral burden, it took plants from normal seeds and turned them yellow and thin. We imagined we could hear faint rumblings down below. Likely we could. Some of that water comes out of the core of the planet, the rest of it from far down too. It forces its way up through small and large cracks, fissures, caverns. |