The imminence of the solstice hung over them like a blade of light about to descend. The arid horizon and the infinite plain had finally broken apart, revealing a narrow passage of solid ground that allowed the flawless continuation of the straight line toward the south.
Bhāskara did not waste a fraction of a second on the change in terrain. Time was no longer measured in days, but by the traction of the worn rope, tied with absolute precision between his heels. The march continued. Bhāskara was completely focused. His gaze fixed ahead, his mind operating like an unbreakable pendulum, his chest puffed out in pure geometric conviction.
Step.
— Seven hundred and forty-two thousand...
Step.
— ...two hundred and twenty-one!
The rope snapped against the dust, limiting each stride with implacable exactness.
Step.
Number.
Step.
Number.
Tribal kept pace at his side, advancing with the lightness of one who molded his own weight against the arid earth, understanding the hypnotic rhythm of that journey. Behind them, Alaya observed the obsessive cadence, maintaining an attentive silence. The line had to continue perfectly straight. The goal was singular and pulsed like a war drum in the minds of all three: to reach the walls of Suryashan before the Sun touched its supreme zenith.
The count was already gigantic, a numerical magnitude that would crush the sanity of an ordinary man. With his left hand holding the parchment and his right gripping the quill, Bhāskara made records while in full motion, refusing to interrupt the march. He wrote the marks in groups, using a dramatic flourish of his wrist to carve small angular symbols into the thick paper, each extravagant marking representing heavy blocks of thousands of strides.
— Infinity bends before discipline! — exclaimed the astronomer with each new set of recorded marks.
Sweat streamed down his sculpted face, worn by nearly a year of continuous walking, but his eyes blazed feverishly with the inextinguishable flame of reason. They advanced without hesitation into the new gorge that rose ahead. The cadence seemed absolute. Bhāskara's mind, unshakable.
The transition of the terrain swallowed them into an extraordinary geological formation. The open, inclement sky was suddenly squeezed by enormous walls of dark rock, rising like colossal ramparts that formed a narrow, dense, winding valley. The march did not stop. The rope stretched between Bhāskara's ankles maintained the unbreakable precision of each stride.
— Seven hundred and forty-two thousand! — bellowed the astronomer, projecting his voice with his typical theatricality to register the new numerical block.
But before the quill touched the parchment, the mountain returned his voice:
— ...forty-two thousand...
Bhāskara locked his heels into the ground abruptly. The rope snapped in the dusty air. He looked at Tribal. The Son of the Earth, with his absolute perception of matter and its forces, returned the gaze with contained gravity. The sound was coming back. But it was not a simple echo, a mere reflection bouncing off a smooth wall. The walls of the valley possessed different angles, deep grooves, and asymmetric narrowings. They had entered a true monumental acoustic corridor. Tribal took three more slow steps to test the anomaly.
Toc... toc... toc...
And then, the stone responded.
...toc... toc...
The second sound arrived completely merged with the first, in an invisible choreography of aerial shock.
At certain points in the gorge, the echoes embraced and reinforced each other, transforming a simple heel strike into a heavy boom. At others, the sound waves arrived out of phase, causing certain sounds to cancel themselves out before they even reached Alaya's attentive ears. The astronomer's eyes widened. His geometric mind deciphered the invisible instantly.
— The pulses are overlapping! — whispered Bhāskara, watching the sound of his own breathing return amplified by the rocks. — The crests of vibration are colliding with the valleys of air in perfect synchrony... It's a phenomenon of sound wave interference! The topography of this valley is bending the physics of sound!
The gorge was not merely a geographic obstacle. It was an undulatory labyrinth. And Bhāskara's greatest weapon—his counting aloud—had just turned against him.
The resonance within the stone corridor began to feed back on itself, transforming wave physics into a true sensory nightmare. The gorge did not merely reflect sounds; it chewed them, superimposed them, and spat them back with invisible fury. The shock of Bhāskara's heels against the dry earth ceased to be a rhythmic cadence and became a storm of mismatched blows, bombarding the travelers' perception from every possible angle. Each stride seemed multiplied by an army of ghosts marching out of sync.
Bhāskara clenched his teeth. He was a man forged in pure reason. Mathematics could not bow to a simple atmospheric phenomenon. Ignoring the cacophony of his own footsteps repeated by the rocks, the astronomer puffed out his sweaty chest and tried to impose the force of his will upon the acoustic labyrinth.
— Seven hundred and forty-two thousand... — he bellowed, his voice tearing through the air as he positioned the trembling quill over the parchment. But the dark, asymmetric walls did not respect him. The sage's monumental voice was sliced by the angles of the stone and hurled back against his own face in a maddening cycle of interferences:
— ...forty-two thousand...
— ...two hundred...
— ...twenty...
— ...thousand...
The count rebounded violently in the narrow space, mingling with the dry snap of the taut rope. Bhāskara blinked rapidly, his arm rigid, the quill hesitating millimeters from the pale leaf. He took another tethered step. He tried to tear the next digit from his throat, but the sound of his own voice still screamed the previous numbers in the crevices above them.
The collision of sound waves invaded his geometric mind, dissolving the logical sequence he had kept intact through forests and deserts. He swallowed hard, cold sweat streaming down his forehead, feeling the structures of his sanity waver. The panic of an exact mind before chaos began to devour him from within. Seven hundred and forty-two thousand and... fourteen? One hundred and four? One hundred and twenty-four? The astronomer lost a decade. And, in the next jolt, as the valley continued to spit out the distorted fractions of his last syllables, he lost another.
The weight of that failure was a catastrophe of planetary proportions. The entire proof of the world's curvature rested upon two unbreakable constants: the physical stride dictated by Tribal's invention and the absolute count sustained by Bhāskara's intellect.
The rope between his heels remained perfect, guaranteeing the exact distance with each advance through blind, mechanical discipline. However, buried beneath that deafening reverberation, the man who intended to imprison infinity realized that his mind had just given way. The resonance swallowed his sanity, but Bhāskara refused to give up. If the mind wavered, matter must anchor it. He clutched the bundle of parchments against his chest with trembling hands, desperately seeking the last marking of thousands, the physical proof that mathematics still governed the world. But the Valley of Echo did not forgive arrogance.
The same geological strangulation that multiplied sound now channeled air currents into fury. A brutal gust of wind, dense and swift, tore through the stone corridor. The thick leaves whipped violently. The astronomer's fingers, sweaty and exhausted from extreme tension, slipped. The leather bindings gave way, and the pages broke free from his hands, exploding into the air like white birds in panic.
Tribal moved instantly. The Son of the Earth leaped against the wind, extending his arms with the superhuman agility of one who masters his own flesh, trying to seize the fleeing knowledge. But the wind possessed no mercy.
One of the pages spun downward, swallowed forever by the darkness of a side abyss. Another leaf was hurled against a pool of water dammed in the rocks, diluting the ink in seconds and erasing entire strides of the journey. The third, containing the last absolute records, crashed violently against a jagged rock, tearing in half and scattering Bhāskara's quadratic precision across the inhospitable valley.
The astronomer stood paralyzed. The rope still taut between his ankles suddenly seemed a prisoner's chain, no longer a tool of glory.
The wind continued to howl through the crevices, but for Bhāskara, the very structure of the universe had collapsed. He brought his hands to his head, eyes wide, chest heaving as he tried to force his memory to reconstruct the torn sequence.
— I had four hundred and... — his voice came out rough, struggling against the air.
Absolute muteness descended upon him, suffocating the lost fractions. The echo no longer responded, for the footsteps had ceased.
— No.
Bhāskara lowered his arms slowly. He turned his face, shoulders curved under a colossal defeat, and fixed his gaze on the Son of the Earth. The extravagant pose, the proud geometry, the unshakable certainty... All had turned to dust.
— I don't know.
The weight of that confession sank into the damp rocks. This was the brilliant astronomer. The intellectual titan who, months earlier, on the coast of Sodraya, had proclaimed that infinity could be caged on a parchment. The genius who saw the diameter of the entire planet within a small limestone basin. And now, defeated by sound and wind, the man who intended to measure the world could not even say how many strides he had taken.
The silence that fell over the valley was more deafening than the sonic chaos of before. Bhāskara's desperate eyes sought the Son of the Earth, silently begging for a lifeline. Tribal was an immortal being, an entity forged in the bowels of the planet itself, capable of reading the memories of matter and sensing the invisible vibration of every atom of creation. For a creature who understood the passage of centuries as a mere sigh and who watched civilizations be born and die, logic would demand that he could simply search his own mind and retrieve the exact number of steps lost in the dust. But Tribal closed his luminous eyes, and a shadow of genuine helplessness crossed his rustic features. He had not counted the strides in isolation.
During nearly a year of uninterrupted march toward the south, he had anchored his own perception to the astronomer's numerical cadence. And when the gorge fragmented Bhāskara's voice, the anomaly did not fool only the man's ear; it distorted the very vibrational fabric of the air. The clash of overlapping echoes mixed the tens and the hundreds into a physical and sensory blur. The acoustic phenomenon had confused even the immortal's absolute intuition.
Tribal opened his eyes and, with a slow, heavy movement, shook his head from side to side. The realization descended upon both men simultaneously: Both had lost the exact count of the world's circumference. The silent confirmation was the blow that collapsed upon the astronomer. Bhāskara yielded.