The Echoes in the Chambers of Sihham

by Simon Whitechapel

He knew, he felt it in the flood
Of bright, salt, foretelling blood;
They heard, gainsaid with ready laughter,
All what of ill he saw thereafter.

Who had delved the cave’s high and stately chambers, who fled therefrom or drowned therein centuries before, none now knew, though here and there, survived the scouring flood, ghostly patches clung to the walls of the portraits once to adorn them: a faded eye, mouth, finger; and it could be seen that the chambers’ delvers, or mayhap merely their last habitants, had been of no extant race. Yet the paint-patches were not the sole proof thereof, for their unknown tongue too, after its fashion, was preserved in the cave, being woken therein by any to speak aloud in certain chambers. Aye, the long-whispering echoes were no true echoes, so ’twas said, but voices of the fled folk, and certes they seemed to speak with diphthongs and geminates as unextant as that eye, mouth, finger. Some, though, claimed the echoglossa to be an Ursprache, or the Ursprache, rather, known to the undermind of all mankind, plucking innate cords that would sound later in sleep. For did not those who visited the chambers and woke the echoes dream oft that they lived and loved in the chambers while yet these were folk-thronged and lamp-lit, and that they knew the tongue as maternal, able to converse and sing therein, and jest anent a new-made prophecy of doom-flood.

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