Visitors and tourists arrive in cars and buses to a parking lot surrounded by a few restaurants. The last stretch leading to the entrance of the cave must be done on foot, or on the back of a donkey. It is a moderately steep and stony road surrounded by vegetation which may take half an hour to complete. It is an innocent road, but the stones of the pavement can be slippery. Not so few find the slope annoying as they usually speed, puff and blow during the ascent. Therefore, and although this is the road leading to a sacred cave, you may call it "The Road of Impatience". Some climbers may ask you on your way down:

"How far is it left?"

Discourage them! Tell them they have a long way ahead even if they are close! That deserves he who, thinking only of the Dictaean Cave, ignores the stones, the moss, the flowers, the trees, the ants, the lizards, or the view. For being inside the cave, he will ignore everything again, and think of what he will do once he has left the plateau.

Convenient stairs have been built down the cave, and electric lights have been installed inside with two colours: yellow for the stairs and white for the walls. That is your path, dear friend. A path reminding you of other paths you might find in your convenient world. The same world you left with the vague hope of seeing something different from the appearances and lies that make up your regular world. Your boring world.

Ah, boredom! Not far from the entrance of the cave, you may find wardens crushed by Tedium who occasionally wake up to admonish careless tourists:

"Don't smoke here!"

God bless the tourists who awake the wardens! Pretend to light a cigarette in this place to help them come to life again. If you don't smoke, roll any piece of paper and imitate the ritual gestures of a smoker to upset the wardens. Better an angry life than a life in Tedium! Give the wardens, if not a reason to live, at least a reason to work!

When you come to the entrance, you meet people coming upstairs. They cannot wait to get out; they are puffing and blowing again. You idly reason that they cannot be the same people who have turned your home town into an athletic stadium, running up and down the streets. Whence comes this unathletic race? They breathe hard as they fight their way up. You may think that important duties await them outside the cave. But actually they are hoping for the outside Tedium to release them from the Tedium inside. They perform this effort with considerable speed, for they believe Speed to be a cure for Tedium. To sit still, like the wardens in the Herakleion Museum, is the curse of being incurable: to be the eternal prey of Tedium. Tedium suggests you are dead. You hate it, but still you refuse to go to war against it. The war that will set you free.

"What am I doing here? Will I be supervising this room in this museum for the rest of my life? I hope someone asks me a question to relieve my drowsiness …" Wish fulfilled:

"Excuse me, are these skeletons real?", a visitor asks in the Herakleion Museum.

"Yes sir, they are. They are real skeletons," answers the employee, a young girl.

"From that time?"

"Yes, they are Minoan, sir."

"With those nice teeth, that perfect dentition?"

"Well, they died young at that time, sir …"

"Young? How young?"

"That one there was in her thirties. She was a woman, sir."

"In her thirties? My teeth were full of holes already when I was fifteen! I'm not sure they died so young either, as you say …"

"Well, I don't think so either!"

"You don't?"

"No. To tell you the truth, I believe the Minoans came from another planet and had a high technology. But don't go repeating this, because I must say what my employer—the Museum—tells me to say."

"Are you telling me their high technology killed them young?"

"Well, I surely don't think an eruption or a tsunami can destroy a whole civilization. I believe they came from the constellation Andromeda."

"Andromeda?"

"Yes, you can draw the sign of Andromeda with two epsilons—one of them reversed, like in a mirror—by joining them with two curve lines. You'll get then a double axe, you see?—the emblem of the Minoans."

"So why were you telling me things you don't believe in?"

"That's my job, sir!"

And that may be why you live in Tedium, I suppose … By burying your heart below itself for a job which invites you to tell lies, and by filling it with interstellar theories in which you don't have any faith either … Nothingness pretending it's a dream … But no dream lives without a war. Double axes! Epsilons! The Museum is your Minotaur, young lady! Defeat it before Factology's sleepy potion poisons you! You are as beautiful in your flesh as the teeth of the Minoan lady in her sarcophagus … As beautiful as the designs in Cnossos of Sir Arthur Evans—the secretary of King Minos—who believed dreams are made of flesh and bones.

"There was the entrance to the palace," announces at Cnossos the French guide, followed by tourists disguised as archaeologists. "And there was that, and there was that," the guide keeps telling the water-drinkers … "Don't smoke, Ms.!"

"Don't smoke!" It's for the survival of your flesh, and for the beauty of your teeth in the sarcophagus. Lie to the public, so that you may keep your job. The job that lets you defeat Tedium with Tedium, taking you throughout the world inside flying sarcophagi while paying reasonable prices for unreasonable things. You must! You must go where everybody else goes! How could you be without it? That precious jewel called you. And who knows, who knows … ? A miracle may happen! That same miracle that is waiting in vain at the bottom of your heart, chained like a Titan in Tartarus. A miracle that you, however, never nourish and therefore tortures you with its hope, even when you are jogging. Damned hope which brings so many ordeals with its restlessness, and demands that you be updated! Updated in Tedium! And what about the Tedium of Updating?

The miracle awaits you in the Dictaean Cave. Of course! It is a sacred cave, it is divine! A god was born there, long ago! Great things always happen long ago. You might have heard that "all is present all the time", but unfortunately you already know that myths are—most probably—archaic nonsense. If only you knew less! But you have learned that people were ignorant in the past … They had no Science, no Progress, no Technology, almost no mind at all. How could they live like that for thousands of years? They believed in things without caring for verification. They were like children. You are different, as we all are. We are all different, only in the same way. We are reasonable and enlightened; so enlightened that we are dazzled by our own headlights.

So we start by installing electricity inside the cave (in AD 1999, they tell me). Electricity is a symbol of Enlightenment, or its evidence. Thanks to Reason, thanks to Science, thanks to Growth and thanks to Tedium! We are the Giants of the Intellect, its Titans, its Hydra. We are brains from top to toe. And we are mighty dragons too. In one week we catch the seven wonders of the world—in pixels. Update yourself, and stand on the line to enlightenment! Don't smoke, and don't eat in the bus! Remember the peasants with the hens in the buses? That's over! We are rich now! There are no longer peasants, and we are the hens.

In the entrance of the cave, birds nest. They seem busy but they are watching you as you make yourself ready to descend into the cold, humid, dark cave (or half-dark, as I said). The birds are watching you more keenly than the plethora of cameras you have installed to watch yourself and the world. You don't know who you are! We must prove it to you and to ourselves. We don't even know if you are at all. You could be worse than a terrorist. You could be a phantom, a shadow from Hades. But the birds know who you are. They know more of man's affairs than he knows of his own cares!

I know you are sometimes afraid of them. They might give you the flu. They jeopardize your vacations, your diet, and the hygiene of your car. Even Hygia is watching you, not without amazement. But the birds cast shadows upon your enlightened world. So you don't look at them; you came to see the cave. Why? Because you must. So you go down, watching your step.

"Watch your step!"

As you descend you notice the forms are impressive. Hallucinations come out of the walls menacing the Catherine Deneuve side of you (the Catherine of Repulsion). Limbs and beasts out of proportion rush towards you and with them cities, harbors, armies of horsemen, and lonely riders too … Fortunately, you are not Catherine. You are not even yourself. You are a healthy citizen with a clean kitchen. No flies there! So watching the tapering structure you tell yourself the truth you had been waiting to tell yourself:

"Oh, stalagmites! Oh, stalactites!"

Well said! Very well said! For "that's all there is", as Peggy Lee told us.

At the bottom of the cave, beneath the thrones of Zeus and Hera, there is a pool of water where you may throw a penny. For after all you're only half-way, and a miracle still might occur. If not now, perhaps later! You know this age is not an age of miracles. You don't believe in rubbish. You don't believe period! You are (for God's sake!) not superstitious! But what the hell! You have your wishes too! And they are many! Many they are! Next week you might be viewing the Chinese Wall! One penny for a miracle cannot ruin you! Look at that legion of pennies! If others have done it, why not you? So, plop! There it goes, your little penny, to shine with the others at the bottom of the pool. You have done your duty towards yourself, and the gods might work for you (if they exist, that is. You have your doubts. But who hasn't?).

That is the end of your descent. Now comes the difficult part. The upstairs section. Damn stairs! The same that helped you down now take their fee. You look up and, through a round hole, you see the sky and the branches of some trees outside. Now you forget about watching your step. Your pace becomes fast and firm. To get out of the cave is your aim. Said and done! Now you think you have seen what had to be seen, and as you climb faster and faster and you breathe harder and harder, the stones watch you. You climb past Atlas, the Wind gods, the Old Man of the Sea, the cup of Hebe, the wrapped stone which Cronos vomited, the libation vessel of Thetis, the horn of Amalthea, Poseidon's Dolphin, the blood of Rhea and her lions, the spot where the umbilical cord of Zeus first touched the ground, the drums of the Curetes, the hands of the Dactyls, the miniature of the Dictaean Cave where you can see yourself climbing the stairs of the Dictaean Cave …

You run and run past the past, your past, and past the future—your future, a relief sculptured on the wall. That was you! But you run with electronic sensors hidden in your shoes which let you know how many steps you have taken. Steps that plunge into the past, and therefore are no more.

For if you think it twice, the past does not exist. It has never been. Nor the future. Just the present is, your running present. The present that shall kill you one blessed day. For that death you fear, or that sickness, or that accident, is not in the future, but in your present and in its unforgiving daggers. Sooner than you imagine, the present kills you for your hard breath, or for your cowardice. Your heart might kill you for telling lies, or for allowing lies to be told, or for suffocating its sacred dream. Or for visiting the Dictaean Cave when you shouldn't …

You lift yourself out of the cave, out of that cold womb made for gods and not for men. Why is the womb cold? Because there is no warmth in your heart. Not yet, or perhaps never! So get out! You no longer ask how many steps are left. You know there are many, and you hurry while the eternal world watches you from countless Acropoleis. A procession of initiates watches you, as do the beasts of the woods and the spirits of the Underworld. As does the Crown of Ariadne just before you emerge from the cave.

Outside you recover your breath. The sun warms you. You hear the birds and vaguely perceive they are whistling meaninglessly. But they are telling the tale that ever is.

Some references to Dicte and the Dictaean cave: Apd.1.1.6; Arg.2.1640; Strab.10.3.21, 10.4.12.