Chased

Yes we live in large cities round here and that always allows us to conceal the dirty truth - that we're little more than naked apes. We're still tribal you see. There is Us; and then there's the other tribes. The other.

We fear attack. Each of us in the city has built many mazes (each must remember where he's put every one of them) to give ourselves some small chance of flight in the event of being pursued by Another. All the mazes are of a similar design. Imagine yourself  being pursued through the streets of a large city at night. It's pitch black and the street lighting is poor. You can hear the thuds of your own flight and the clattering running steps of your pursuers sometimes a bend behind and sometimes (when they've put in an extra rush) breathing in your ear. When you've strained yourself to the limit to regain a bend's distance between you and them, how would it feel to you to know that just ahead lies a maze, the location and complexity of which must be unknown to your tormentors, and down which you can dive unseen, just as they curve into view? And even if you weren't quite quick enough and they're in time to see your leg just disappearing seemingly into a wall, surely even then, they're unlikely to seize you? For these mazes begin with nothing more than a narrow gap in a long wall. Difficult to spot in the shadows, these narrow alleys squeezed between high brick walls run straight, then turn at a right-angle, and then turn again and again in ever decreasing squares until you reach the dead centre. In the dark, you know its simple secret while your pursuer fumbles. And should your pursuer, half way round the maze, divine its lack of tricks and hurry on to the centre thinking Ah! I've cornered him there - he would be mistaken and thwarted once again; for we have a trap-door beneath our feet in the centre, impossible to see in the dark, down which we can leap in a flash. How relieved would you feel with all this escapery just around a few corners?

Of course we dwell on these eventualities a lot. Even though we've not had to use our little mazes so far. Furthermore we imagine (perhaps more often than is healthy for us) the flight down our trap-doors, then coursing along damp tunnels beneath the city and coming up some miles distant in a deserted apartment. Then we raise up in our minds anxious dramas in which we crouch behind curtains in some upper storey, peek beneath them with our cheeks pressed against the sill, and finding our pursuers there, outside, searching the street and even now crossing our ceiling with their torch-lights, we dash down imaginary lanes and through barely-known courtyards and along tight gaps between vast apartments, all of which is coming to nought for our pursuers are still there in the main streets alongside our narrow ones. We imagine ourselves fleeing through the narrow ways and into the wider ones, opening our elbows bit by bit as we go, reaching the outskirts where small churches and the first farm are, and then bursting into open land. And can we feel free of this dread even there. Yes we can see them coming from further off now, but what if they have stamina and run us down with determination until they have us at their mercy, hard-up against a cliff face? And more! What of the danger from above? What of that?

Only recently have I admitted to myself that this fear of ours is taking up so much of our monies and our individual energy, that we have become, for a long time now, a city in decline. We are a nervy and a shrunken people; and even literally so, for most of us are dramatically shortened these days to a dwarf-like stature; I'm sure you have noticed it without quite knowing why we are so, perhaps. Yes, it is a terrible thing to be cowed; but the alternative - to be always pleasuring oneself and closing ones ears to the clamouring threat outside (which is what you people do) - the alternative is far far more risky.