The ugly gremlin already got on board of his flying kettle. You hardly have time to shut the metal-sheet door behind you when he pulls back the red handle, and the machine slowly gets a few yards off the ground with an indescribable racket. You can see the tarred stretch of the Styx shrink beneath your eyes.

Then, the aircraft suddenly starts an interstellar speed race. You are literally squished back to your seat. And as the sudden acceleration makes your cheeks hollow and gets your eyes out of their sockets, the little monster gives out a shrill scream of joy that claps your right eardrum.

Now you have one deaf ear. This seems to sound like a gloomy omen for the journey you are about to undertake. However hard the monster tries to give away some information about the destination of that fantastic trip, you can not hear a word of it !

At first sight, he is taking you in front of a massif. But as the aircraft is getting closer, you can make out more precisely what it is. In fact, it appears to be some kind of unique mountain, a gigantic tier with numerous terraces and many openings.
You need 20 minutes to reach it. It tells how much you had underestimated the size of that rock standing right in the middle of Hell !

Now you understand that if you had to go round it by foot, it would take you many months.

But your rocket science calculations are disturbed by your pilot's increasingly persistent agitation. You do not get a single word of what he is trying to tell you. So you take the risk to turn your head in order to hold out your other ear. That one still works. Actually, he simply wants to know which oracle you wish to see.

The Mountain of Punishment is not a mountain. In fact, it is a huge tower whose job is to support the earth's vault. It is at least the impression it wants to give as its top binds the Underworld and the world of the living together.

Soon, a few yards away from one of the circular terraces that run on the circumference of the tower, you can see the crowd of workers who provide its continual maintenance. So the tower would contain oracles ? Through their torments, the damned have achieved a level of wisdom that Diogene or Buddha would have envied. The tragedy is that, down here, nobody cares about their wisdom. Thus it is a real privilege to be able to meet them and return, full of wisdom, among the beings of blood and breath.

The spaceship lands noisily and all the damned around have clung themselves to the floor. You get out. The pilot follows you.
You go behind the columns. Straight away, Erebus gives way to the darkness that a few torches and the smithy red glow light up.

Your steps are led by the sound of a Mass of the dead vibrating on the columns. At the landing of stairs as broad as a river, you see a magnificent organ. In front of it, a prisoner's hands honour the ivory keys with a divine touch. The extension of these hands is the creature without genealogy, made of pieces sewn together. The sound is shaking the space, stirring the millstone and making it shiver. But he, on the other hand, is perfectly impassive. You have never seen such phlegm. All the gracefulness, all the emotion, has gone into these bony hands that seem to be playing on their own device. Whereas his face is blank of any kind of expression, his broad scarred fingers show an ineffable pain. The entire place is impregnated with the grave melody. The notes resound from the deepest up to the outmost vaults of the tower. Yes, from the depths of Hell, a celestial music is being let out !

From then on, so many Babel towers had been built for self-humiliation before Him ! Amazing what men have contrived to escape the frightening feeling of the vanity of their lives ! Master pieces in large numbers, development of ideas, numerous monuments ... a thick sediment of culture has come to dress the good old savage.

Adam's offspring has built a cathedral of superhuman gigantism, which, if it was used initially to filter a divine light too bright for their narrow pupils, eventually ended up concealing that light only to let us see its grey walls for unique horizon.

Your stroll between the tower's columns is leading you astray to unusual heights of mind. And what a shock when, at the end of a column range, you see a convulsed giant ! He looks as if being agitated by a nameless surge of rage. However, as in his anger, and despite his apparent strength, he does not attack anything in particular, you go closer to see what this is all about.

You have in front of you a living metaphor of the unique Body, of the original monad. Many beings are merged to that nebulous monster. Although made of a single skin, he looks as if being shaken by the opposite wills of the fleshes he is made up of.

So here is a discordant being, whose many souls who form him compel him to improbable contortions. In constant conflict with each other, the monster's limbs bustle about in a disorderly fight, the elbow against the arm, the hand against the wrist and the shoulder ; for each body who occupy these functions is bent to do it in a way that inevitably opposes the others'. And there he goes, staggering along, banging the walls. His voice is the rumbling of thousands of laments ; when you arrive where he stands, it is a horrifying uproar.

In his anatomy, those who wanted to join the Saints' communion, the Great Whole or the Nazarene's body suffer eternal agony. Aspiring to join a single body, the superior Being ignoring individualities, they all have had their wish granted... partly. For individualities have remained. Indeed, in this section of Hell, what had been wished happens to those who had wished it... with a few little perversions added. Further away, in the same way, you see those who had believed in energy transfer during their life...

Well, now they learn at their own expense that the only existing invisible waves are electromagnetic. They run right through them and make them cook and burn at times, tousling their hair and bringing foam on their lips.

Which abominable demon is the chamberlain of these amusements ? He must really be horrid. Nevertheless, curiosity surpasses fear and you go back to where you came from in order to ask your guide about it. He is urinating on a column when you hail at him. Straight away, he goes before you and takes you in view of the infernal tower steward.

Time for going back has come... It seems important that you find the Nun of Hell again.