APPENDIX 5

 

Kharnabhar

 

Kharnabhar is a small town in a remote region of Sibornal. The town has grown up about a remarkable monument, the Great Wheel of Kharnabhar. Previously a sacred site, it now houses criminal elements.

The fame of the Great Wheel is universal. When SartoriIrvrash arrives in Ashkitosh (Bk. 2, XI), he sees a tapestry bearing an allegorical depiction of the Wheel. “Upon a scarlet background, a great wheel [was] being rowed through the heavens by oarsmen in cerulean garments, each smiling blissfully, towards an astonishing maternal figure from whose mouth, nostrils, and breasts sprang the stars in the scarlet sky.”

The main and almost only route to Kharnabhar is from the port of Rivernjk, on the Climent Sea coast, northwards through the mountains of the Shivenink Chain. The distance is about 2400 miles, equivalent to a journey from Gibraltar to the north of Norway.

 

The Great Wheel

 

The Wheel is a granite ring, carved inside a granite mountain of the Chain. It revolves within Mount Kharnabhar, only one small segment being accessible from outside the mountain. The Architects long ago created the Wheel encoding with its dimensions the external world, in a bid for astrological symmetry. “As Above, so below.” The holy men who first occupied the Wheel intended it as an instrument by which to propel their world across the heavens, out of Winter and into the welcoming light and warmth of Freyr.

Originally, the Great Wheel was dedicated to God the Azoiaxic (meaning “something which revolves beyond life”—later interpreted to mean “one who existed before life and round whom all life revolves”).

Penned within the confines of the mountain, the Wheel is inclined at 5° to the horizontal. It rotates above a floor inclined at 4°. This slight difference permits the river flowing round the base of the Wheel to carry mud beneath it, acting as lubricant.

Three-walled cells like alcoves line the outer surface of the ring. The ring is kept in slow movement, day by day. The immoveable fourth wall is not part of die Wheel, although it closes off all the cells; it consists of solid unmoving rock, Mt Khamabhar itself. Into the rock is inset lengths of chain, stapled firmly into die wall. These chains hang at 125 cm intervals.

With these chains, prisoners in the one thousand and eighty-five cells can haul themselves into and through the dark night of granite. When priests’ trumpets sound throughout, all prisoners must pull in unison on their chains. So the Wheel is shifted in its journey through rock or - as some still claim—through the heavens.

 

Some technical data

 

Wheel diameter – 1825 metres (Number of Small Years in one Great Year)

thickness – 13.19 m (1319 being the year of Freyr-set or Mrykwyr at latitude of Kharnabhar, counting from apastron)

height – 6.60 m (12 times 55, the latitude of the Wheel)

 

Cell height – 240 cm (= the 6 wks of 1 tenner X the 40 mins of 1 hr)

width – 250 cm (+ the 10 tenners of 1 year X the hrs in a day)

depth – 480 cm (= no. of days in Small Year)

 

Wall thickness between cells – 0.64159 m (+ cell weidth gives value of pi)

 

 

Figure 6. Diagram of the Great Wheel within the granite of Mt. Khamabhar. (Bambeck projection).

 

After ten years, the Wheel has been tugged by a captive back to the point at which he started his imprisonment. A revolution has been completed. On that final day, one prisoner finds daylight instead of stone for the fourth wall of his cell, and may make his exit to freedom; in the cell leading his, another man will be entering for his first day of the ten year journey into and through the rock.

This ceaseless revolution has been seen by some to be echoed by the ceaseless orbiting of the Avernus, high above Khamabhar.