"THE HOLLOW EARTH" ON THE GREAT OLD ONES:
GODS OF A HOLLOW EARTH
MATHEMATICIAN AND COMPUTERSCIENTIST RUDY RUCKER IN HIS BOOK
"THE HOLLOW EARTH" ON THE GREAT OLD ONES:
GODS OF A HOLLOW EARTH
MATHEMATICIAN AND COMPUTERSCIENTIST RUDY RUCKER IN HIS BOOK
The answer is at first a surprise, almost cynically ridiculous, though Eddie explained to me that their appearance is a confirmation of what modem paleontological science might have predicted.
In fine, the Great Old Ones are huge woomo, watery bags similar to the creatures that sailors call beche-de-mer, trepang, or sea cucumber. A zoologist would place them in the class Holothurioidea of the phylum Echinodermata, which means that the barrel-shaped holuthurians are cousin to such echinoderms as the starfish and the sea urchin. So humble to see are the Lords of Creation....
....I shy away from our universe's humble mystery: the Titans at world's end are graven not in Man's image, nay, nay, the Great Old Ones are ludicrous slippery sacks. Even so, let me now stress, their minds are clear, wise, and beautiful. Indeed, it was their minds whose emanations I had thought to be from God Almighty!...
...Examining three Great Old Ones in detail with Eddie, I found them to be enormous thick-walled meatbags proportioned, severally, like a rolling pin, like a Turkish hassock, and like a gourd. All three had flexible bodies that were deeply striated as a sea urchin's shell. The five longitudinal stripes that run along their bodies consist of warty bumps in double rows, the warts the size of small mountains. These warts resemble a starfish's tubefeet and are flexible and roughly cylindrical, with somewhat concave tops. The extremities of the great sea cucumbers' bodies are as two poles: cloacal and ingestive. The cloaca is a thick turnedin pucker, but from their ingestive ends the trepangs evert ten branching treelike limbs of enormous intricacy.
