Reproduced below is the tenth entry in the memoirs of Joseph De Ville, a 2nd-century traveler of Route 14. To view other excerpts from his memoirs, click here.

September 12, 102 AT

There is only one reliable map of Route 14, and it is scrawled in black ink upon the black ceiling of a cafe that lies just beyond the northern limit of the known world.

Study it closely and you will find, not so very far along Route 14’s obscene curves, a waypoint so infinitesimal that you might mistake it for an accidental inkblot or an errant coffee grind. This inconspicuous marker is labeled Orchard, and it is the first of three sanctuaries for doomed pilgrims wending their way to Outpost.

At a place so named, we had hoped to make camp under the shade of apple trees, or to enjoy the perfume of ripening pears, or to lie studying stars as a symphony of birds lulled us to sleep. 

But these were desperate fantasies, even then. Even then, before we were baptized in Route 14’s delirium, before we were tested by the Silent Forum in Outpost, before we were unhinged by Recursion Lake — even then, we knew better. We knew that this road was paved by sadists, that it chewed up rational expectations and spit out madness.

We found nothing so simple as birds or fruit in Orchard. Nothing organic at all. Only rows of stone, feigning life.

Statues. They were cyclopean in scale: nearly fifty feet tall, as breathtaking as any of the moai on long-vanished Easter Island, and just as baffling. Like Route 14 itself, their presence defied reason. The cost and effort required to transport these marvels — let alone to sculpt them — would have been unfathomable. What purpose could they serve here, in this endless wasteland at the edge of the earth?

But unlike the mysterious moai, these figures were all utterly unique, hewn in such lifelike detail that I wondered for a moment whether some lazy god had simply enlarged living men and turned them to stone.

There were thirty-two of them, organized neatly into four rows of eight. Route 14 divided them against each other, so that the rows to its east faced west, and vice-versa. It was as though two squadrons of giants had marched from opposite corners of the earth until they had met here, where they now stood at eternal reveille, separated only by the narrow band of asphalt on which we’d arrived.

Perhaps we should have approached these petrified goliaths more carefully, for their penumbral shadows could easily have concealed a dozen bandits — or some less earthly threat. But we were spellbound by the spectacle before us, drawn in like moths to a flame. I pulled our car beneath one of the centermost statues and shut off the ignition.

We climbed out and tilted our heads to peer at a rotund, elderly man in a tuxedo, who held a violin in one hand and a conductor’s baton in the other. His sparse hair was greased back, and a faint smile played at his lips. His whole likeness was, as far as I could tell, chiseled from a single, massive piece of granite, and I gazed in slack-jawed disbelief at features such as the wire-thin strings of the violin, wondering how they could possibly have been coaxed from so stubborn and brittle a material as stone.

At the foot of the statue was a tablet the size of parking space. The following words were etched onto its surface:

ISAAC STERN
Violinist, Conductor
1920 – 2001

 “Incredible,” I breathed.

Andrea said nothing.

We walked south until we were standing beneath another giant: a thickly bearded figure, clad in diaphanous white robes that spilled over the stone pedestal on which he stood. In one arm he cradled a thin staff that exceeded his own height by five or seven feet. His other hand was raised and its index finger was extended, as if to accentuate some important point he was about to make. His eyes pointed slightly upward, giving the impression that whatever wisdom he was about to pronounce was actually written in the sky, and that he was simply reading it to his audience.

The caption at his feet read:

ZOROASTER
Philosopher
c. 10th Century BC

We were about to proceed south to study the next giant — a battered, emaciated figure mounted on a cross and wearing a crown of thorns — when I was seized by an irresistible urge. 

I wanted to draw a map of this place.

The irony of this impulse was not lost on me. For nearly two days I’d been the tallest discernible object for scores of miles in any direction, and now, having encountered thirty-two soaring marvels that stretched into all three dimensions and across dozens of centuries, I wanted to flatten them, to reduce their height to the micron thickness of of ink-on-paper.

But the urge could not be suppressed, and so I rifled through our luggage until I found some notebook paper and a ballpoint pen, with which I set about my self-appointed task.

We walked until night fell, admiring each of the statues in reverent silence. The order in which they were arranged was jarringly random. I remember emptying my mind beneath the lotus-like figure of Siddharta Gautama, only to have it filled with grotesque images of tentacled star-spawn and formless shoggoths by the long face of H.P. Lovcraft, whose effigy stood scarcely fifteen feet away.

In name, the statues ranged from Aristotle to Zoroaster. In human merit, from Jesus Christ to Adolph Hitler. They spanned the professional gamut, too: there were scientists, writers, soldiers, explorers, revolutionaries. And though I recognized most of them as historical heavyweights, there were several obscure characters of whom I knew nothing more than what the sculptor had provided. There was a serial killer named Clifford Olson, a chessmaster called Kholmov, and an industrial-era man labeled “Emperor Norton” whose inscription simply read “Madman.”

Though I could make no sense of the placement — or even the selection — of the sculptor’s subjects, my appreciation for his skill deepened with each statue that I beheld. He had reified a mind-boggling array of human emotions in these giants, and he had done so through the colorless, eon-dead medium of granite. In his hands this primitive rock had been as pliable as clay, as precise as fine paint. With it he had suggested a brooding madness in Emily Dickinson’s slightly-askant gaze. He had planted lyric fire behind Homer’s cataracted eyes, and simmering frustration in Clifford Olson’s pursed lips. Bloodlust oozed from Saladin’s eager grip on a half-sheathed sword, and in Tesla’s features a fascinated child commanded a frightful intelligence.

One of the giants, Erwin Schrodinger, actually appeared twice in Orchard: once to the east of Route 14 and once to the west. This redundancy seemed conspicuous enough to mean something — if there was any meaning in this place — and so I committed nearly half an hour to its exploration.

Schrodinger’s eigenstates were, of course, not identical. Both Schrodingers wore wire-rimmed spectacles and bow-ties, and possessed the unusually large foreheads that are so often characteristic of brilliant men. Each, too, was holding a simple, featureless box big enough to contain a cat (which was doubtless its purpose). But on the east side of the road Schrodinger was smiling broadly and staring out across an expanse of space. It was difficult to tell with any certainty, but it seemed almost as though this first Schrodinger’s eyes were aimed between the other statues and across Route 14, at his twin. This latter Schrodinger did not seem to notice, for he had lifted the lid of his box ever so slightly, and was peering in at its contents.

I crossed Route 14 several times to compare the Schrodingers, and on my third trip I noticed something in the middle of the road gleaming in the twilight. I discovered that there, directly between the four centermost statues, a golden plaque had been stamped into the surface of the blacktop. It had escaped me thus far because my eyes had been turned upwards, fixed on the empyrean splendor of Orchard’s giants. But now I stopped and lowered my gaze to the asphalt, where I read the following poem engraved in gold:

The least of these is treble
The greatest living king.
Yet each is but a pebble
On endless Route 14.

I added the location of the plaque to my map of Orchard. Then, looking over my work, I smiled. It was complete.

I have no idea how long we drifted about Orchard, passing from one colossal inhabitant to the next. It felt like years. Perhaps it was. Time is so slippery in this place that I have, on more than one occasion, suspected that Route 14 is in fact a passageway between worlds in distant universes, and that these worlds revolve about their alien suns at incalculably different speeds. I do know that eventually, after we had viewed each statue at least three times, darkness fell. And in Orchard, which lay far beyond the reach of any power grid, the darkness was Stygian black, an ocean of ink.

With the aid of our last working flashlight, we built a fire at the foot of Charlemagne. We felt safe, I suppose, under the watch of a man whose Carolingian Empire had spanned half the known world.

As we huddled over the fire staring into each other’s eyes, it occurred to me that Andrea and I had not exchanged a word since our arrival in this strange place.

“Why?” I asked, breaking the silence. When I realized my question was so simple that it was incomprehensible, I restated it: “Why would anyone build this here?”

Andrea only shook her head.

“Do you think it means something?” I asked. “Is there anything special about who’s represented here? Any common thread?”

She considered this for a moment. “Yes,” she said, finally. “But I don’t know what it is.”

I nodded. At the start of our tour I’d been astonished by the randomness of the place, by the seemingly happenstance placement of the statues. But over the course of our exploration I’d begun to second-guess my own impressions. I now suspected that all the randomness was a ruse, and that some inscrutable logic dictated Orchard’s every detail.

I started to speak again: “Do you get the impression –”

“That it’s trying to tell us something?” said Andrea, completing my thought.

We could have talked until morning, debating the meaning of the poem engraved in Route 14 or comparing the merits of the sculptor’s thirty-two masterpieces. We did not. We sat by the fire until we were warm, then we folded ourselves into a blanket and fell asleep.

Just before I lost consciousness, I wondered whether I was making a mistake. Would I awaken seven times taller, set in stone, cursed to look out over this barren plain until the end of time? Such a notion would have been absurd, anywhere else. Here, I wasn’t so sure.

I know now that Orchard was trying to tell us something. Its message was encrypted, of course, but if I had spent more time studying the map I’d drawn I might have deduced the key. As it turned out, I did not solve the puzzle until nearly a week later, and even then I only managed to do so with the help of an amputee named Farmer in the terrible town of Outpost.

But that is a story for another time.