LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE
THE WORLD BELOW
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A character in and of itself, whose wonders will be revealed episode after episode |
The Spiral Staircase |
The Great Hall and its tapestries |
The faraway Crystal Cavern, where Vincent goes to find a present for Catherine
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The Waterfall, where he loves to sit and meditate
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The Whispering Gallery, where the voices of Above can be heard
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The bottomless Abyss gaping under |
The chamber of the Winds |
Those huge structures were man-built, but by whom, and when?
What civilization, now disappeared, shaped that world? We'll never
know. The present tunnel dwellers just found it so.
A wonderful world, but also full of dangers and traps, like the Maze with its deadly cave-ins that emprison Father and Vincent in Shades of Gray.
The world Below is a labyrinth of galleries and gaverns that seems to go endlessly down
With its sinister Catacombs |
and the nameless river leading to Paracelsus' infernal lair |
A world of darkness, but curiously enough, never utterly dark, even in the deepest tunnels. Some places even seem to get a certain amount of daylight. A twisting of facts for plot commodity? Let us rather attribute it to the magic of the place. In the dimness, more or less illuminated by candles (and some electric light, apparently) everything appears brown, grey or a dull purple, with very few bright colors. The light coming from Below is always golden, the light from Above a cold, blue-ish white.
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Cartesian minds might wonder at so much light coming from a
drainage culvert, or flooding down from a building's basement. But
there again, we must let ourselves be drawn into the story's magic,
where those lights symbolize the opening of a passage between the
worlds.
The Tunnel Community
Vincent, Catherine ...and the others
