‘It’s well known that Mallard County School Districts teach ‘tip of the pyramid’ rather than ‘tip of the iceberg’ as a common idiom for describing an inconsistency between the understood aspects of a situation, and the larger, concealed truth. It follows that this colloquial variation stems from ‘The Rising Pyramid’ located within Mallard County’s borders. Lesser known, perhaps, is that the Mallard County usage is distinctly negative. This is because the slow migration of ‘The Rising Pyramid’ has only ever wrought devastation.
The colonial history of ‘The Rising Pyramid’ begins with its discovery in 1912, when a small cohort of ambitious gold miners thought they might have discovered one of a number of rumored lost cities attributed to the continent. ‘The Pyramid’ was excavated to about four feet before a sinkhole opened and swallowed all but one of the five men. The survivor was found raving in the woods and near death, though not so near that he wasn’t able to pass the whole sorry story to a group of traveling soldiers before succumbing to a mysterious fever.
A much larger contingent soon arrived at the site of ‘The Pyramid,’ finding that the structure had risen to fill the sinkhole and had subsequently revealed a number of dire-seeming illustrations carved by well-meaning ancients into its surface. A particularly clear-minded Captain, named Mallard, reasoned that the site was bad news and rallied the men to re-bury it.
Three months later, reports of ‘The Pyramid’s’ reemergence reached Captain Mallard and he arranged for a second visit. What he found and confirmed over the next several years, was that ‘The Pyramid’ was rising and that no earthly force could stop it. Fort Mallard was constructed, in part, to study and guard ‘The Rising Pyramid.’
It released plague rats at the height of 15.’
It burned red-hot at 20.’
It tore a man in two at 21’ when he attempted to scale it in the night. The exact mechanism of this attack remains unknown (but was repeated at the height of 124’ under similar circumstances in 1998).
By the time Fort Mallard became a town ‘The Rising Pyramid’ had become a familiar threat, not unlike the Yellowstone calderas or Joshua Tree’s laughing ditch. Stress is high in the town and they do not welcome gawkers, though gawkers inevitably arrive.’
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
