Double Complete Rainbow

Rarely, a thing of pure beauty is instantly matched by something the same but even more beautiful. With double complete rainbow, the pattern alone conjures the image of a third rainbow outside it, even more beautiful, and another, and another, such that the ripples of rainbows keep expanding in radiance until they reach an infinite measure of beauty, which we cannot comprehend. This phenomenon can be applied to all wonders.

Suppose the Grand Canyon crumbled and shattered away to an even deeper and more terrifying canyon within? We would flock there in our millions, jostling and straining to catch a glimpse. Many would topple and fall in the battle to see, but you would be foolish to try, for no one can behold double complete Grand Canyon.

What if the skies of Norway spliced open to solar storms that were met by creatures from other galaxies, swooping in to fight wars of light and dust, mocking former eddies with such clamoring brightness that you should say with cowed brittle eyes, double complete Northern Lights.

And if you then hiked to the foot of Kanchenjunga, and craned your weary neck towards its crest, what if then, from behind its squinting peak there rose a greater and twice thunderous mountain, the mass of five Islands, blotting out half the entire sky, laughing at it? How high can human eyes see? Perhaps, to double complete Kanchenjunga!

You would stand before these wonders in terror and love, crippled by their vastness, imagining the pattern of doubled beauty escalating and rippling into an infinite measure, which you could not comprehend.

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There is a man, who will not be named, who sets out to discover and keep this measure of infinite beauty. Over the valley where he lives there hangs a perpetual rainbow, and the man knows that at the end of the rainbow will be his elixir. The elixir both inspires and is beauty, unlimited, unfathomable and always out of reach. But he knows not how to find it. He lives a lone, wandering soul, grappling and cloying at the dirt, hopeful and avid and always close but never there, until one day he stops and says 'Enough!'

The man assembles a team to build a contraption that will fire him through the rainbow in a perfect arc, landing him in the elixir on the other side. He spends forty years of his life building the enormous and sturdy machine, set up beneath the exact centre of the rainbow, extending gracefully along its radius to the outer band of perpetual colour. The man's employees are loyal and diligent and invested in the task at hand, such is its fierceness, even while his body grows frail and withered from exertion.

Men and women and children from across the land unite in jubilation for the experiment. They gather and rejoice around him, where through the zealous shouts and awed cries, he feels himself catapulted upwards and into the rainbow, charged exponentially through the ether while flashes of gamma and cascades of refracted gold shimmy past his trembling eyes. Soon it is too much to endure, it is too intense, he is too old, it is too late, it is too vast and straining, he won’t make it and will surely crack under the pressure, until he finds, to his wordless alarm, that he has already reached the zenith, and everything has stopped.

The warm liquid air feels still and calm in the unfettered peace of the sky. Cocooned by time and space, somersaulting in nothingness, he looks down. People move and dart around at superhuman velocity, dispersing, deconstructing, reconvening, scheming and trasforming.

Gradually, the town is taken apart, people start to clear away, and the land becomes ragged and wild. He watches, trapped in the light, powerless to connect. The people pack away the enormous crash matt meant for him on the other side. From this height he can see how wrong his predictions were, he would never have made it anyway.

Soon there is little left to see. The man begins to fall downwards through the perfect arc. The earth is drying up, old twigs to brittle sticks. The earth is scorched and barren. There is no one left to see but him, and as he falls closer and closer to the end, he sees, with a wry smile, his elixir. And as he falls, still slowly, the enchanted trove opens up before him. Ethereal shards of silver and charged vapour rubies and solar diamonds and mercury ribbons float up from the chest towards him. In the last breath, in that precious void of gravity, these seedlings of the rainbow slip through his fingers, spilling and curling into the light. He takes them into his hands and holds them to his face in silent prayer, for as he finally finds his infinite beauty, so the jewels find their place inside his skull, pushing him into a darkness from which he will not return.