dythpop.
Dythpop is the stuff that remains thick and gummy, regardless of temperature. At
Absolute Zero Kelvin (minus 373 farenheit), when Time Itself has stopped, Dythpop will
still ooze and burble a little bit. The same is true of the extremely hot. At
the center of the earth, for instance, where rock and metal boil like chicken broth. Under
such extreme heat, a dollop of dythpop remains sticky and inert.
In direct sunlight, dythpop evaporates. It is dug up at night from the roots of
bao-bab trees. Not just any bao-bab. Whosoever is infected with the fungus that
nitrogenates the soil in just the exact manner (a thing too technical to comprehend), it
is this bao-bab only who produces the substance. Little blobs of it gumbo, stuck to
the lacy tendrils that nobody knows if it's tree roots or mycorrhizae from the fungus.
The principal use of dythpop is to seal cracks in the fissures of rock that reach down into
the volcanic belly of the earth. Especially at the Oracle (at Delphi, and later at
Reno, Nevada), where they kept the maiden priestess locked down in those caverns all day.
Who would have thought that the God Apollo would choose to speak by burping up sulfur fumes
from deep volcanoe magma pits? Sulfur and Divine Inspriation, no less. But such
was the case.
I guess the Priest of the Oracle thought that if a girl was to be steam-cooked and asphyxiated
all day, the least could be done was a remodeling of the cavern in which she hoveled.
Stands to reason, doesn't it? So a lot of dythpop was mined, and stuck in the crevices
and whatnot, and the room was more tolerable, at least from the standpoint of a casual visitor
such as myself.
The Oracle Maiden herself discovered the second use of dythpop. It turns out, you can eat
the stuff. It is nourishing of the whole body, to within one thousandth of a millimeter
(one micron). And then (and I excuse the vulgarity) it poops out your body exactly as
it was eaten. Little blobs of dythpop roll out of the digestive track. And you can
eat them again, and they are equally nutritious the second time. And the third, and so
on. Admittedly, it is a disgusting practice. But I have it on sound authority that
starvation is even worse.
The Oracle went on a hunger strike. The Priests believed this was the case. She
would not eat the pomegranates, she would not eat the boiled sheep. And when they marched
down into the cavern to confront her, she was cagey and healthy and uninterested in
desperation. She bade them eat little dollops of the dythpop. When they had eaten it,
she laughed in their faces, and told them that scant hours ago, she had pooped out the little
blobs, "from my butt!" she cried. "You breathe my screams, and you profit. The God
screams in me. I no longer listen. Now. You eat my shit!"
The junta of high priests was disturbed. They left her cavern, and they have never
returned. It is possible that the Oracle Maiden is still down there. But it has been
three thousand years.