Many know that the Great Desert is impassable, and that anyone who journeys in that direction never returns south, but few know how the desert came to be. Most see the great tan wastes with cracked and dead trees and its dearth of fauna larger than scorpions and reason, “this expanse must always have been a stronghold against life’s more vigorous members.” Even fewer expect that something indeed vigorous and rather infernal lives within, lost among the dunes and hot breezes, endlessly clanking:
FOOMP. FOOMP. FOOMP.
If you go to the edge of the wastes, where the River Called Exqualotico cleaves a clean line between fertile, green valleys and the desolation of the Great Desert, if you were to camp on the river’s northern banks on a quiet night, clean of storms, you might hear that solid thumping, reverberating through the empty air, sounding as it has more or less regularly and without end for the last 500 years.
Long ago, the expanse north of Exqualotico was greener than the south, populated with untold numbers of men and possessed of extraordinary material wealth, far in excess of our own kingdom’s coffers. Of course, in that time, our humble kingdom, blessed though it may be, did not yet exist, and would not for many years. But this is to be praised, for the people who camped these lands then were slaves to those who lived north of Exqualotico, in the Kingdom Said to Be Least Intelligent. This Kingdom stretched from the muddy banks of that river to the ends of the world in all directions but south, and our bolder historians have even claimed that they controlled the moon, though this has been a subject of bitter dispute.
We know only few incontrovertible facts from these early days, such is the dearth of our historical “record.” We know, for example, that the arable land retreated over many generations, far northerly, to a single locus that grew and grew like a sinkhole; that eventually the slaves in our own land were freed for reasons they could not understand, and a war between our ancestors for ownership of this land ensued; that a band of ambassadors from the victorious army went North and only a Lone Ambassador returned, claiming that the northern Kingdom yet lived, and that it was the cause of the wasting land and the source of the eternal thumps:
FOOMP. FOOMP. FOOMP.
Our sole record of this Kingdom’s transformation comes from the Lone Ambassador, who died shortly after his tale was transcribed. His document was kept under lock and key for a century or two, and then the old slave kingdom fell, then another rose in its place, and then that one fell too, and then ours sprang into perpetuity, destroying time and thus decay. But all the while, the document was forgotten, and the simpler inhabitants of these lands propounded heretical doctrines to explain the constant thumping. One such entertaining theory: all the sustenance north of Exqualotico became sucked up by a magnificently large tree, and the thumps come from the report of the Creator’s axe, who will eventually topple the tree and crush the world. It is the singular achievement of the Kingdom Said to Be Least Intelligent that the myths are less fantastical than reality.
For the sake of brevity, I will gloss over the tragic ends of the Lone Ambassador’s comrades; suffice it to say they all died of starvation, dehydration, or mania in the desert. The Lone Ambassador claims to have survived having hidden away an extra waterskin for himself, a fact he confesses painfully multiple times throughout his tale.* Afterwards, he walked alone for many days and thought he would perish, braving hunger and thunderstorms that bruised the pallid sky. He journeyed through clay-orange sandstorms, too, where he had naught to follow but his hearing, which led him closer still to the source of the thumping, and with it, the Kingdom.
One day, having walked for weeks, his path led him to a towering sand dune, and, below, an oasis glistening like an emerald. He knew the Kingdom lay beyond, and though he dreaded walking forward, the lightness of his empty waterskin carried him. By the time he made it to the oasis, the sound coming from behind the dune rattled his skull, scraping up and halting down, booming at short intervals:
FOOMP. FOOMP. FOOMP.
He drank his fill from the rippling waters of the oasis, gritting his teeth all the while. Leaving before completing his task was the last thing he would do, though it also seemed like his task would be the last thing he would do anyway. So he began his climb. He marched through vibrating sands that rose to his knees with each pound, and then, after waiting for the sand to settle around his ankles between thumps, he continued. He proceeded in this way until he finally approached the top. Looking up, the Lone Ambassador could just see the precipice of a dome, glistening bronze in the pale sun. When he finally crested the dune, he beheld the rest of the “dome”: truly, it was no dome at all, but rather the sun-beaten and bronzed crown of a giant metal man’s skull.
Transfixed by the head, which was so alien, wondrous and massive itself, the Lone Ambassador did not notice the body to which it belonged sitting (in the way we call “Indian-style”) with its back to the dune. The Lone Ambassador no longer registered the thumping either, which had at that point become part of the Great Desert, as the crying of cicadas soon ceases notice and becomes a seamless element of Summer. Banded around the circumference of the metal skull was a seamless glass viewing port; inside he could make out men, ten or eleven of them, running back and forth inside the head. They put their ears to large, horn-like devices, nodding, and then scuffled to a large panel of dials and levers. Each man did this at a different interval, and they frequently bumped into one another. Yet the thumping continued to proceed regularly, independent of the disordered hubbub in what the Lone Ambassador reasoned must be a cockpit for an anthropomorphic machine. For a moment, he was confused. Then, between the thumps, he noticed another noise, a faint wailing, which seemed to come from within the metal. Then he finally comprehended the incredible size of the Man-Machine, whose head reached the crest of the dune while sitting, and whose shoulders spanned several widths of Exqualotico in length. Then, with horror, the Lone Ambassador understood the fate of the Kingdom Said to Be Least Intelligent.
From each limb came a different cacophony of voices. There were untold numbers of people in them—the arms, the torso, the legs—all screaming. In the head, which the Lone Ambassador took to be the Kingdom’s new “brain,” the pilots corresponding to each body part and organ obeyed their cacophonous and conflicting orders, which funneled up from the masses in the body to the listening-horns in the cockpit. The people of that powerful land were packed like millions of peas in this megalithic body of metal, which had absorbed all life north of Exqualotico in order to power and build itself: a discombobulated Man-Kingdom-Machine-Beast.
The Lone Ambassador noticed that the Kingdom’s right hand, obscured by its back, moved up and down in time with the noise:
FOOMP. FOOMP. FOOMP.
Invigorated by disbelief, he ran along the crest of the dune to get a view of the Man-Kingdom from the side. Finally seeing the source of that mysterious noise, he collapsed, not in pain or fear, but laughter. See now this mascot of the unplumbable depths of man’s stupidity, mistaken for reason: the Man-Kingdom, cross-legged and otherwise inert, masturbated. Its right hand, large enough to fit hundreds of men in its palm, careened up and down an equally giant and immaculately polished metal phallus, sounding:
FOOMP. FOOMP. FOOMP.
The Lone Ambassador was dumbfounded. All effort and production once contained in that Kingdom had been devoted solely to the construction and operation of this leviathan, which was evidently intended to function as a literal body in which all people were subordinated in its organs and limbs. These masses then directed the will of their limbs to the pilots in the head, who in their confusion and contradiction had only succeeded in leading the Man-Kingdom to masturbate in the Great Desert, alone.
So the Kingdom Said to Be Least Intelligent continues to this day, its indecent thumps sounding more or less regularly and without end as they have for the last 500 years. If the Kingdom ever climaxes, perhaps the world will end, though it seems more likely it will simply perish, having finally exhausted its only purpose.
***
* The contemporary historical consensus follows that he must also have eaten his comrades to have ventured as far North as he did, and as such this brings the rest of his tale into question, though nobody has intimated a more compelling explanation of the Great Desert’s mysteries.
***
“The Kingdom Said to Be Least Intelligent” won second place in Terror House’s Pulp Submission Contest. To read all of the winning stories, click here.
Jaw Santorelli is a writer and musician living in the blessed Northwest. He’d like to keep it that way.
