Month: September 2025

You rise to your feet and close the trapdoor. The house is really just a room with four walls. The wall closest to you has an unglazed window. Circling the central bole clockwise, you learn that the only other window, similar to the first, is in the opposite wall. The first wall you pass is furnished with a writing desk and a chair, while the last wall is clothed only with a large map, except that these two window-less walls are fitted with small lamps that bathe the interior in a dim light.

Having returned to the first window, you look out. Far below, you can make out the dark forest canopy undulating in the wind. The air is quieter up here: just a light and cool breeze brushes your face and rustles some papers lying on the writing desk behind you. The sound makes you turn around and go back. A small pair of binoculars rests on the stack of papers. You bring them back to the window. Looking through them you scan the landscape, from the near, where the meadow meets the forest, to the far, where the blanket of treetops melds into a barren land that grows craggier and rises to a dark mountain. You linger there. Suddenly your eyes catch a small glimmering point, right there in the ashen slate, as if the rock had been punctured with a needle to let light escape from behind it. You focus the spying glasses and sharpen your eyes. It looks like a cave, darker than the gray of the mountain, and in that cave a shivering, silvery glow, almost pulsating. Could it be a fire with people dancing around it, or maybe a lamp, even a beacon sending some obscure signal to an unknown recipient?

Realizing you can’t glean more information to solve this mystery, you move your gaze to the right, and then it lands on something closer and even stranger: another impossibly tall oak, which you deem to be very similar to the one you have climbed. Even from this distance you cannot determine its highest point as it disappears in the night sky, but judging by the frail stars visible high above, you presume that its crown dissipates up there. You lower your binoculars to inspect the tree more closely. To your surprise you spy, half-hidden among branches, a wooden hut like this one, with a window facing your way—and in it a figure, silhouetted against a faint amber light. It’s a person, apparently holding something with both hands, but then raising one as if to salute you. You return the gesture. Your mind tries to divine who this could be as you feel an urge to connect. You lower your hand and raise it again, and you get an identical response. But after a while you realize that further communication is impossible at this distance in the dim starlight, so you withdraw into your room—while you observe the other doing the same.

You then decide to cross to the opposite window, which offers an altogether different view: the forest continues until it reaches a glittering expanse below the deep sky. It’s the sea. You lift up your spying glasses and see that the forest dissolves into a hilly landscape to the left, rising steeper near the dark waters. The lenses seem to draw you even closer into the landscape until you can make out little roads and houses by the shore, and waves crashing against the cliffs nearby, and there, further out—a ship roiling towards the port. It looks like a large galleon, but its size is difficult to gauge. Curiously, its central mast towers above the other two and carries a grand and singular sail. The sail looks black or dark blue, save for a design in its center that you cannot discern. But the canvas seems to catch the shimmering of the waves—or the starshine itself.

The meadow is surrounded by trees. But in the middle there stands a lone oak, its thick trunk like a tower shooting up into the sky, and its lower boughs laden with deep-green leaves and bending softly down.

You reach up to a bough stretching out above you—and are able to lift yourself onto it. Grabbing hold of the branches sticking out, you manage to make your way along the bough until another one is within reach overhead. Feeling an urge to climb higher still, you keep grabbing the tree’s boughs in such a manner.

But suddenly you lose your grip and your balance, and fear grips you as you fall. For a moment you rush through the air—then drop onto a cluster of twigs and leaves appearing below. From there you tumble down through a series of springy branches, like ferns catching and releasing you with their fingers—and finally land among herbs and flowers. Lying on your back you look up into a clear sky with some scattered clouds. The sun is hurrying towards the west. The oak’s waving foliage is calling you from surprisingly far away. You promptly decide to try again, and head back to the bending boughs.

Soon you are climbing once more, finding your footing and learning as you go. After a while the boughs seem to be retreating, and you are forced to make your way towards the interior of the oak’s greenery. Before long its bole appears as a wall in front of you. You are surprised to find short rods sticking out and placed diagonally at even intervals around it. You chance stepping on one, then the next, and find that you can climb these steps as on a spiral staircase of great circumference—as long as you keep a steady pace to not lose your balance. For this purpose you convince yourself that if you fell, you would surely land softly as before. You walk like this for quite some time, while to your astonishment the bole never seems to diminish in girth.

The sky with its sun isn’t visible through the layered leaves. And although you’re climbing ever upward, the brightness of the day slowly gives way to enveloping shadows—each branch higher dimming the air a little more. At length, the thickness of the oak’s torso slowly decreases, while still being so great that three men could not reach around it.

Then you notice an obstacle at some distance above you, seemingly square in shape. As you reach it from below, you see that it’s a platform made of wood and pierced by the tree trunk. Strangely, the encircling rods continue upward as if the climber could mysteriously glide through. Then, upon further inspection of the platform, you notice that there is indeed a trapdoor right above and the rods would lead you through it. However, it’s difficult standing in place and looking up in this way, and you feel your balance failing. Your hand desperately reaches for something to  hold—and finds one of several metal handles mounted in the trapdoor itself. Steadying yourself, you grab hold of another handle with your other hand, and try pushing the door up. It swings open effortlessly, almost lifting you up with it, and before you know it you land on the floor of a small square house.

You’re lying on the floor looking up, and see the tree continuing upward as before. This house is built around the trunk, but you realize that it has no roof. Still you cannot see the end of the tree’s crown; it keeps rising up into the distance. But the foliage allows you to see the night sky around it—and it is indeed night now, a deep blue night with pale stars peering out one by one as you’re looking.