Font de Bine
Let me tell you of a hidden place, secreted away beneath the feet of three giant kings frozen in stone millenia ago. The stone kings breathe clouds that roll lazily down their cloaks and pool at their feet, obscuring a tiny, tiny kingdom called the Font de Bine. The clouds drip down their talus toes and run together into a stream, cutting a steep gorge into the hillside, feeding the many plants and animals that make it their home. That eternal trickle also feeds the tiny, energetic citizens of the kingdom.
Like mice they run around wild grass as tall as your nose and thick with brambles and burrs. The families that live in this micro-kindgom live their whole lives under the protection of those frozen kings, hidden behind clouds that obscure them from danger, from outsiders. In fact the only way to know of it and to find it is to be invited by one of its citizens.
Even if I told you just how to get there, which high valley and forest to follow, you’d never arrive. To be invited there is an honor but also a challenge, because to arrive there you must navigate the steep gorge only by moonlight. It cannot be found in the day. The few visitors they’ve had usually rely on the full moon, but clear nights are few up there in the high forest, so it takes a brave soul to accept their hospitality.
And such hospitality it is. At the end of the long dirt path, barely visible in the moonlight, is a great castle. It sits up on the hill, looking out across the borders of its lands, down across the gorge and out into the flatlands. The castle is made of stone and earth, with a roof of wood and slate. Clearly, it has been built and rebuilt by successive peoples, since before records were even taken. As the industrious little residents bustle around, they play and dance and shape the earth around them. In that way, the round undulating clay walls inside the castle feel animalistic, like the inside of a hive or a swallow’s daub nest.
When a visitor arrives late in the night, the people fill the castle with candles and torches, blankets and tea. It takes a long time for the senses to adjust, but once they do, they take in the cedarwood and damp cob, the creaking iron kettle atop the oak fire, the instruments, shells, bones, dried herbs, copper pots, spider’s webs, brittle books, baking cinnamon, murmuring voices. Someone is searching the radio dial for a song.
Dawn reveals the wild, bursting garden, and the bubbling stream below. The traveler must be prepared to answer many questions from the people of the little kingdom, for they are intensely curious about life outside of their boundaries. They rarely receive a visit, and none have ever left the kingdom and returned to tell about it. How do those machines work? What do these other people make with their stone and earth? Where are the best places to plant this or that fruit tree? They’ll ask as they guide you through an overgrown maze of flowers and reeds, minding not to trip on the toads or the snakes or the marble statues half buried in the dirt, left over from some other settlers long ago.
At least, that’s how the Font used to be. It once was filled with families nesting like songbirds. But the truth of the Font de Bine– the truth of so many successive pioneers’ building and rebuilding– is that no kingdom can exist in isolation. When the traveler finally accepts the invitation, awaits a full moon and clear weather, and arrives at last, she finds the people have long since left the Spring. They abandoned it like so many others before to search instead for another place, somewhere free of the stifling protection of those great stone kings.
Emigrating from the absolute security of the spring and its hidden land, the people enter towns and cities and see the world for the first time, fresh to it like wild animals. In twos and threes they left until not one remained. Streetlights replaced moonlight; temperate valleys eased mountain storms into distant memory. Drywall and fiberglass supplanted earth and stone. The little people grew larger, fed on a new diet.
If someday they look back in nostalgia, desire obscurity and surety once more, they might wish to return. But, having renounced their citizenship, they cannot. There’s no one left to invite them back. They’re unable to find the way without an invitation, and anyway, no longer content to navigate by moonlight or brave the fickle mountain weather.
The traveler finds what’s left behind, the possessions of future citizens yet to immigrate; the walls, the instruments, metal pots and pan, firewood stacks, cobwebs.