The Carpet Crawlers - of Sheep, Death and Birth

To say that Carpet Crawl has religious imagery is a bit of an understatement. There's the Lamb back - no longer lying down on Broadway, but instead in the form of a woollen carpet. The fleas cling to the golden fleece.

The corridor is decorated in red ochre - colour of blood and life, and popular ritualistically (ie we don't really know why...) to the Ancients. This corridor is a spiritual birth canal.

Another use of red ochre is as reddle - remember Venn the reddleman in Hardy's "Return of the Native"? Reddle / red ochre was used to mark sheep as belonging to their owner. Are the Crawlers the sheep that are finding their way to the true Shepherd? Are they marked as belonging to his flock?

We've gotta get in to get out
We've gotta get in to get out 

Echoes of Lewis's "Last Battle" there - as the people of Narnia and of Earth find their way to the land where Aslan lives, the cry goes up that you have to go further up, further in. Which sounds a bit Freudian to me, but then we've already had a spiritual birth canal so what the heck.

 The corridor leads to a candlelit harvest feast - the Supper that is ready? Do the Crawlers stay there? Or are they the people who will shortly be running around at the top of the stairs? And is the harvest feast the meal that sustains the Crawlers as they head on their stairway to heaven?

Whatever. Rael heads up the spiral staircase. He has further excitement to come, with the Lamia. He hasn't got to the point of giving up on fleshy delights for spiritual ones. And the Crawlers?

If they got in, maybe they got out.