You reach the Gate

"How fucking long can this stupid-ass wall even be?!" you ask yourself, as you plod dejectedly along the path. The wall doesn´t seem to curve. It seems like the Wall just keeps going with neither a beginning nor an end in sight, just an endless, unnegotiable sheet of smooth, seamless grey marble.

Your feet hurt, you´re tired and extremely grumpy. Worse still, your balls, so achingly empty just a few hours ago, are starting to feel menacingly heavy and full in your sweatpants. Strangely enough, though you certainly wouldn´t say no to a beer and something to eat, you don´t feel all that hungry or thirsty...

For hours and hours on end, you trudge mindlessly through the dusty wasteland, not really paying much attention to anything. You´re almost grateful for the chance to just exist, letting your poor, underequipped brain run on autopilot by giving it a break from all unwanted and hard-to-process stimuli such as trees and rocks and numbers bigger than twelve.

Suddenly, you become aware of a yawning emptiness to your side where the Wall should be. After all the hours of its immovable presence, its absence comes as a complete shock, like a sideways version of a cartoon character standing in thin air after running off a cliff before plummeting down only after realizing there´s nothing underneath them.

Before you is a colossal opening, that recontextualises the utter vastness of the wall. Over a mile wide, it´s upper reaches disappear into the haze of the sky. It is a simple square wedge cut into the rock of the Wall. Despite its massive size, against the inconceivable hugeness of the Wall itself, the opening appears like a barely visible black hairline in the endless grey of the Wall. Asking your woefully inadequate mind to process such unearthly dimensions is like to trying to simulate Molecular Dynamics on a Commodore 64.

You shake your aching head and blink your stinging eyes to clear yourself of this unwanted moment of clarity and set out towards the opening.

Suddenly, a blinding flash of light illuminates the upper reaches of the Gate and a booming voice rings out

"HALT MORTAL!"