But it was the rock cliff that was speaking to her.
It was something inside the rock cliff that was calling her name.
Puzzled, she wandered on and on, looking, without realizing it, for an entrance into the cliff. The sun had disappeared behind the hill on the opposite side of the chasm before she found it. The shadow was cold, but it was still light. No doubt on plains beyond the hill the sun was still shining. She knew it was not yet time for night, and looking upwards she could still see the sun shining on the topmost branches of the trees at the top of the cliff face under which she was standing.
The entrance was half closed over with tangled briars, but she felt the darkness and the emptiness behind them and knew that there was a deep cave there.
She thought about it for a while. Should she return to the others and tell them? Perhaps they were meant to use it for their camp.
She felt strongly, but in an undefined way, that she was meant to find this cave.
But it would take her a long time to return to the others and by the time they had carried all their belongings back to the cave night would be upon them.
She decided to have a quick look inside the mountain herself, and then return to the others.
She peered inside and was surprised to see how deeply the cave had eaten into the rock. It was larger and darker than any cave she had ever encountered before, but still she felt the need to explore it.
She ignored the little chill of fear that rippled under her skin and looked around for a suitable branch to serve as a torch. Having found one, she worked to set it alight and finally she was ready to bend the briar bushes back and enter, in some trepidation, but nevertheless impelled by a force she could not control.
The flame of her torch took her through the fairly capacious entrance hall of the cave, the only thing here to startle her being a sudden flight of bats that fell from the roof and swirled like dark and solid smoke about her head. She could not prevent herself screaming and throwing herself at once upon the dry and sandy floor. Luckily, although she dropped her torch in her panic, it did not go out. After the bats had swarmed once or twice in wide arcs and settled back to their places, and she had given herself a stern reprimand for having given way to such a foolish fear, she was ready to continue.
After a while the cave wall showed two separate crevices, wide enough for a human to pass through. She hesitated, knowing that it was foolish to go further but still unable to resist the urge to do so.
She chose the right hand crack and proceeded down a fairly adequate passage way. She became more and more convinced it was leading her to some special place, and so eager was she to find out if she were right and so easy was the passage to follow that she did not notice that it branched frequently in many directions. She had long since turned off from the main one leading back to the entrance cave. The passage she was following was becoming narrower and narrower, lower and lower, sloping always downwards deeper into the mountain.
The torch light flickered on the walls beside her and suddenly she became aware that it was not bare, smooth rock she was seeing, but that the light and shadow of the guttering flame was throwing up in relief what seemed at first to her to be the most amazing man-made carvings. The walls were full of the shapes of creatures, many of which she recognized from the sea, but some she had never seen or dreamt of before.
She stopped and touched them, staring with astonishment. One came away in her hand and she stood transfixed with the perfection of a sea urchin, each detail of tiny radiating spots where the living spines had been joined to the shell perfectly preserved. But in stone! Cold hard stone.
What skill the carver must have had to bring such detail to his carving!
She gasped again.
The wall was full of them, not only upon the surface, but where she broke them off there were others in the rock behind.
Shells she remembered from the beaches.
But all in stone.
Icily the realization came to her that these were no manmade carvings.
Living things had turned to stone.
She shuddered and touched her own cold flesh.
Would she too turn to stone in this weird place?
Was it some baleful influence, some dark force, that had led her there, and not the spirits of light she was wont to follow?
Fear gripped her now and she began to shiver uncontrollably. As she did so the torch in her hand shook and the creatures in the walls seemed to mock her with a strange dead dance.
She turned and ran, horribly aware that she had come a long way and her torch would not last much longer. The sea urchin was still clutched in her hand. She moved to throw it away, but something made her keep it and she put it in the carrying pouch at her waist. If she ever saw Karne and Fern again, she would show it to them.
She ran and ran, grazing her arms against the narrow jagged walls, scarcely thinking which way to turn as each new gallery of darkness opened its entrance to her blind and hurrying form.
At the peak of her panic she turned the corner in a passage that she now realized she had never been down before, and stood staggered and breathless at what she saw.
Before her, illuminated fitfully by the still burning stump of the torch in her hand, was a gigantic cavern, the far recesses of which disappeared into darkness. But where the light touched, Kyra could see that, from the magnificently high ceiling to the floor, it was hung with spectacular columns of crystal.
Forgetting her fear, Kyra stood stunned. Tumbling in folds like a waterfall turned to ice, great curtains of dazzling white fell around her, gigantic statues of translucent stone arose on every side, icicles of stone hung from the domed roof to join flowers of stone upon the floor.
This was what she had come for!
Her heart rose and it seemed to her a crescendo of splendour, almost like a song of triumph but using no earthly means of sound, soared around her, through her and above her.
She was in ecstasy with the beauty and the greatness of it.
She moved forward, walking in wonder through the exquisite filaments of crystal.
She could hear water dripping, and in the centre the cavern floor was lower than the rest and filled with a milky liquid.
Staring into it, her light picking out the reflections in it, she was suddenly jerked into fear again as her torch, burnt now to its very end, scorched her hand and dropped into the water.
As suddenly as the darkness had revealed this splendid, dazzling sight to her, as suddenly it snuffed it out and she was in utter blackness.
Fear welled back and she turned her head every way trying to see something, anything, any variation in the dead blackness of the hole in which she was trapped that would give her some idea of what direction she should take to find her way out.
But there was no variation.
She stood very still, listening to her heart beating fast and the drip, drip of the water from the roof. She wondered if there was any way she could make fire, but she had no wood with her and everything in the cavern was wet, the walls, the floor, the rocks, the hanging veils of crystal.
Her own skin felt damp and clammy.
‘I must think,’ she told herself.
But all she could think about was that she was deep inside the earth, deeper than in any tomb.
‘I must move about. I must feel for the entrance,’ she told herself, knowing that if she stood still and thought about her situation any longer the fear that was already clouding her mind would take possession of her completely.
Cautiously she moved.
She established the pool of water was ahead of her by finding her feet and ankles suddenly immersed in icy liquid.
‘good,’ she said to herself, ‘that means the entrance is behind me.’
She turned carefully around. She had never noticed before how difficult it is to be sure how far you have turned when there is absolutely nothing to which you can relate.
But she had to make a decision.
Car
efully she eased herself forward, hands held out in front of her, knowing there were many hanging columns in the way. Where was their brilliant, luminous, crystalline splendour now, she thought bitterly. All their magnificence came from the little flame she had carried in her hand. Darkly they waited now, as no doubt they had waited in the same darkness while the sun a million times a million times shone upon the fortunate creatures of the earth’s surface.
How she longed for light!
Gradually she progressed across the cave, bumping herself against rock, feeling her way, slipping and sliding, but at last coming into contact with what she was sure was the wall of the cavern.
She sat awhile to rest, her heart thumping and her breath coming fast. She told herself there was nothing to worry about, she had found the wall and it was just a matter of time as she worked her way round it until she found the entrance. She refused to think about the confusion of passages beyond.
After a while, too cold to be still for long, she started to feel for the entrance. The cold, damp hardness scraped her fingers, but she found no hole. She moved and moved, always in the same direction, always her hand upon the wall. Time passed that there was no measure for. Only her weariness and despair told her that she had been going a long, long time.
At last she paused. She must have been around the full extent of the cavern. She must have been!
She tried again.
Again.
The fear was becoming uncontrollable. She could feel cold sweat upon her forehead.
If only she could see!
She stared and stared into the dark and for a moment fancied that she saw a lighter dimness to one side.
Her heart leaping she moved swiftly towards it, but she missed her footing, slipped and twisted her ankle. Now tears of pain were in her eyes and she was trembling and shivering with cold, pain and fear.
The lighter patch she had thought she had seen was now upon the other side of her. She turned her head and felt there was another lighter patch where she had looked before. It seemed to her the cavern was no longer so dark.
It also seemed to her that she was no longer alone.
‘Who is there?’ she called, her voice rasping with fear.
The sound echoed eerily around the cavern and came back to her as a hiss.
Trembling, still she tried to see, to listen for someone other than herself, and then she felt presences and could see dim figures.
She called to them and raised herself in spite of the pain of her ankle, and they drew nearer.
But as she saw them more clearly she screamed aloud. Sickly vapours they were, in monstrous shapes.
‘No!’ she screamed. ‘No! No! Not you!’
She pressed her hands to her eyes to shut them out. She tried to run and fell again.
Weeping and bleeding and frantic with pain and fear she felt it was the end of everything for her!
And then...
And then somewhere in her mind a thin thread of memory came to her.
‘These are not real,’ she told herself. ‘It is my fear that calls them into being!’
She remembered the clay ogres and the water, and felt ashamed that she could presume to teach others about the images of fear and yet fall prey to them herself so easily.
She forced herself to open her eyes.
But they were still there.
The fear was still in her.
No matter how she reasoned with herself, she could not drive them from her presence.
She remembered Maal and prayed for his help. He had told her many times of all the spirit helpers in the endless realms of different realities. They too had no form but that which thought gave them. Humans invented forms for them, just as she had invented forms for her fears and for the evil influences she could feel around her.
She shut her eyes again and forced herself with all the inner strength she had to visualize forms of light and love and kindness, spirits that would help and protect her.
When she opened her eyes again the crystal rocks seemed to glow with inner light.
She forced her mind to obey her will.
She drew herself up to stand as straight as she could.
Her ankle hurt but she ignored it.
She told herself again and again she was not afraid.
She was protected by hierarchies of helpers who came when they were needed.
Her fears had created the others. Her confidence would destroy them.
‘I will think only of love and those I love,’ she told herself, and thought of Maal, of Karne and Fern, but mostly of ... someone else.
Another figure appeared to her now and the shadowy ones she had hated seemed to draw back and begin to fade.
Standing before her was the one she had called most urgently, one of the powerful Lords of the Sun, the young priest from the desert temple across the sea. The young priest she had met in ‘spirit-travel’ when she was seeking help against Wardyke.
He held out his hands to her but did not approach, and although she gazed at him with such joy she thought that her heart would burst, she did not dare make a move towards him.
‘You have passed the first test,’ he said quietly.
She looked her question.
‘The illusions of fear are powerful, but you have recognized them for what they are.’
She noticed there was no sign of the demons now, only the beautiful young man shining with the same strange light as the crystal columns.
‘Can you do the same for the illusions of love?’
She stared at him.
She longed for him.
She began to reach out her hands, to move forward.
He stood still, appearing very real, watching her with great kindness, but with a question in his eyes.
She paused.
‘The illusions of love?’ she asked herself, and then, ‘What am I doing! As a priest people will come to me for help and I must not fail them.’
‘You are here and not here,’ she said aloud, steadily, looking directly at him, ‘as I am. What we appear to be and what we are, are very different.’
‘This shell I use, called “Kyra”, I can throw away this moment and will suffer no loss. I am more than Kyra. I am God’s creation, and God “creates” by “becoming”. Nothing can be separate from Him.
‘The real me is Forever and Everywhere. I am one with All that Is.’
She was in the dark.
She was not afraid.
* * * *
When Karne and Fern found her the next afternoon, she was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cavern, her face composed and calm. She looked up at them as they stood, their faces grey with anxiety lit by the torches they carried, as though it had only been a few moments that she had been waiting for them, instead of a whole night and the best part of a day.
3
The Birth Of Isar
About the time the moon reached full for the third time since they left their home village, Fern began to feel the child in her body was ready to be born. She who had always been so lithe and agile was beginning of late to be clumsy, to feel her body cumbersome and heavy, and many times she accepted the helping hand of Karne over rocks and ridges where before she would have scorned to be so dependent.
At night she could feel it moving inside her restlessly, and she lay under the stars staring all night into the immensity of the sky and wondering about the child that was to be born.
It was not Karne’s child, but Wardyke’s, the result of rape and fear. Karne and she had discussed it many times since he had recovered from the initial pain and shock of the knowledge and they were agreed that the child who would be born was an individual in its own right and must not suffer in any way for something which was not its fault, the manner of its conception. Fern had carried it and nourished it. Karne would father it and protect it. Wardyke was long gone, punished and banished for all the things that he had done, and he had no more part in this new life.
Fern believed passionately that
everything that lived was its own self and belonged to no one but to the great source of life itself, and that was not belonging in the “slave to master” sense, but in the “lover to lover” sense. The loving and the wanting to belong and to be part of the whole harmony of existence was the only binding force. It was your choice if you chose to be part of it and to flow peacefully with it. Just as it was your choice if you chose to reject it and to drift into disharmony and chaos, suffering pain as you beat your head against the constricting walls which were of your own construction.
Fern, who had once said so ringingly, ‘No man can own a tree!’ knew more than anyone that no one could own a child either. Children were born through the medium of male and female flesh, but this was just a door through which they stepped into the world from regions where they had lived millennia before.
The role of parents was to cherish and nourish the infant in its bodily form and teach it how to use the new and unfamiliar tool of flesh it had been given, until they sensed that it was ready to recognize the obligations and powers of its nature and walk freely as it was meant to do.
One morning, after such a night of staring at the stars, Fern told her husband and Kyra, calmly, that the baby’s birth was very near.
They had made camp in what had once been a clearing in the woods. From the charred marks on boulders and the remnants of animal bones upon the ground, it appeared it had once been inhabited and then deserted. Nature had started to reclaim it and young slender saplings of birch, hazel and alder were growing from the undergrowth of bracken, bramble and flowering plants. It was a beautiful place, full of bird song and early sunshine.
Kyra and Karne looked at each other. They had planned to rest at the next community they found while Fern had her baby among friendly and helpful people, with a priest at hand knowledgeable in the ways of healing in case anything should go wrong.
But Fern insisted that she could go no further and that indeed she could wish for no better place for the birth of her child.
The Temple of the Sun Page 5