Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  The vans park not far from a farm at the base of a hill and everyone gets out. After a short but vehement set of instructions from the farmer (‘Don’t stray off the path, don’t set off my dawgs’), the group starts up a long, steep, winding path through the wooded hillside. There must be at least fifty of us and we all tramp along contentedly in the heat, talking about poison ivy and sumach.

  All but one. Half a mile up the trail, Erica has an asthma attack. Down she sits on a root in the path and out comes an inhaler. A small crowd, myself among them (grateful for the opportunity to rest), gather around her in concern. She takes a couple of puffs and then—what a trooper, what a gal!—up she gets and marches on.

  As we approach the main body of students gathered in a small grove above us, the heavy, humid air is licked with strands of coolness. The temperature, around eighty-five degrees, drops fifteen as I penetrate the group and stare in horror at the source of this ominous and unnatural chill.

  I expected a big yawning mouth with a souvenir shop to one side. I thought we’d plod dutifully within, along well-defined paths until it was almost dark—and then turn around and exit, going, ‘Boy, was that something or what?’ But clearly this is to be an experience of an altogether different order and magnitude.

  It’s a slit!

  The entrance to the cave is a ragged horizontal slit, like a mouth clumsily hacked into a pumpkin at Halloween. Even more alarming, it’s at ground level. Doughty Christians insert themselves into it with difficulty, slither down in steep descent—and disappear. This is not for tourists. This nasty, malevolent gash which at its highest is no more than three feet, can only be an invitation to something worse. There’s no souvenir shop and not a single reassuring sign saying ‘Mind Your Head’ or ‘Don’t Touch the Stalactites.’ It’s a real cave, one of those narrow, lethal warrens into which children fall and emerge alive only when the TV movie lies about it a year later. It’s a perfect cave for adrenaline-deficient professional spelunkers with miners’ helmets, ropes and pitons. It’s not a cave for a gang of infantile Christians and a middle-aged atheist with a panic attack.

  I move closer. Another Christian crams himself through the orifice. Before he disappears from view, I see him clutching and scrabbling as he skids down and away, and, peering in more deeply, I see that once you’re in it’s instantly as black as the inside of a vagina, although in all other aspects it’s the welcoming vagina’s absolute antithesis: a chilly, jagged, dangerous, claustrophobic place, a nightmarish geological maze full of ancient fissures and loose prehistoric detritus, a place of horror and death.

  I look around to see if perhaps there’s a gang of fellow cowards girding for an act of humiliating resistance—and see Erica raise her arms to put on her bike helmet. My God, she has a tattoo on her lower back! Half obscured by the waistline of her jeans, it instantly disappears as, with the helmet now buckled, she lowers her arms. My curiosity is aroused and fear subsides. At last a friend perhaps, a fellow sinner, albeit a reformed one.

  I hurry over and murmur in her ear.

  ‘Saw the tattoo, what’s it of?’

  She gives me a falsely weary look, turns her back, leans slightly forward, and raises the back of her sweater. My hopes are dashed. It’s an Ikthus, that hollow fish you see on the back of cars, and while it suggests a potentially intriguing frustration—she wants to be tattooed like every other kid, and why did she put it near her arse?—the choice of symbol is a resolute denial of the motives which put it there. There’s no fantastic story to be told, no past degeneracy with which I can identify.

  Which leaves only the cave and its malicious grin.

  Flashlight-less, intensely dubious, I squeeze through the hole along with Erica, the handsome boy, and several others. The downward skid is actually quite short. I find myself inside the cave, muddy but uninjured.

  Blackness. Without a flashlight, I don’t stand a chance. While everyone else is panning their beams around the ceiling of the cave and making exclamations of joy, I am a blind man. Kurt, who invited me on this trip but did not tell me to bring a flashlight, is long gone, scurrying off into the cave, eager but anxious. Perhaps it was a deliberate symbolic omission, a way of showing me how utterly unenlightened I am.

  ‘I don’t have a flashlight,’ I admit, in a weak voice. Several beams of light swing away from the ceiling toward my pallid face. ‘No one told me,’ I whine, blinking in the light and smirking with embarrassment.

  ‘Here, have mine,’ says the handsome boy. ‘I can share with Marie.’

  I protest with obvious insincerity and snatch the flashlight from his hand.

  I point it now at a young woman who has, with her flashlight, managed to locate some fresh graffiti and a couple of empty beer bottles just inside the cave. ‘I bet it was them,’ she says, meaning the rednecks, the obvious inference being that only infidels would do such a thing.

  Because of the large number of people who wanted to come on this trip (idiots!), Kurt has divided us into small groups, each one departing five or ten minutes after the one before. As Kurt cannot be at every ‘point of interest,’ he has stationed older students at each, all of whom have a piece of paper on which is typed what Kurt would have said had he been there.

  ‘The Flood Did It.’

  That’s the basic message. What 99 per cent of geologists believe took millions of years, Kurt and his fellow creationists believe was done a few thousand years ago in a matter of months when Noah was forced to sea with all the animals on earth, including his family but excluding the fishes, as Bryan so helpfully pointed out. Quite a load, but that’s another subject—the physics of wooden ships, load-potential of—on which the creationists have produced numerous unintentionally comic papers.

  We’re asked by the first of Kurt’s surrogates, a young woman, to observe a well-preserved fossilised brachiopod in limestone. A brachiopod is a kind of shellfish. We are 1,000 feet above current sea level and you can find fossils like this all across America at similar elevations. If brachiopods decay or if they get moved any distance, the muscle that holds the shells together fails, and the shells separate. Modern brachiopods, if they’re found whole at all, we’re told, are usually found with the shell open and the opening facing upward. This fossilised brachiopod appears to be complete, has its shell closed, and it’s on the tilt. To Kurt, this suggests that ‘the critter,’ as he playfully calls it, was still alive when it was deposited, which suggests it was buried rapidly, which suggests, as Kurt puts it, ‘a global diluvial catastrophe.’ When I later read one of his typed sheets, he then adds: ‘Does this sound familiar?’

  To this crowd, indubitably so.

  The student, reading Kurt’s words, goes on to talk about the large stalagmites near the entrance. Kurt argues that as these stalagmites, though large, occupy less than 1 per cent of the available space in the cave, they may not be as old as other geologists think; if they were, they would have filled the place up and we wouldn’t be here.

  We now leave this ‘room’ through a three-foot-diameter hole and enter a subterranean canyon with occasional offshoots. Its floor is muddy and the ceiling craggy and uneven, but the walls are tall and smooth. More of a skinny passage than a canyon, it’s so narrow two people can only cross at certain points. It wiggles and zigzags left and right. Ahead of me Erica wiggles and zigzags too, unerringly locating every available outcropping of rock against which to smack her helmeted head.

  To me the canyon seems like a vertical crack sheared open by some inexplicably potent geological shift, a deep crevice which might, because of some other geological shift, snap shut at any moment. Kurt tells us, however—through another designated student—that this canyon was made either by water dripping through cracks and joints and slowly dissolving the rock over millions of years, or by a massive flood. In the latter case, which is the one Kurt prefers, water would come crashing in, carrying with it rocks and pebbles and then, when the water drained, crash out again, thus creating these canyons in a few months ins
tead of aeons.

  The cave is so grotesquely dramatic, so tortured, that Kurt’s theory—suggesting an upheaval as violent as one’s own alarm—does have emotional resonance. Certainly I can imagine a roiling wall of grey mud and rock roaring and cascading into the cave and carving out this infernal canyon. I can imagine it because I am imagining it—such things and worse—and when each cataclysmic vision jolts into my brain, there’s always a little figure on the receiving end of it who looks a lot like me.

  Perhaps it’s redundant to say, but I am not enjoying myself. However, even in my state of barely controlled panic, it does occur to me that Kurt seems to want to have his cave and eat it too: a deluge so fantastically fierce it burrowed this vast warren out of solid rock in under a year, yet not so fierce as to pulverise the delicate, twin-shelled brachiopod.

  Next stop is the ooids and oolites. Pronounced oh-ids and oh-lights, these are found in the next cave along, a low-ceilinged, dripping cavity. Ooids are formed by grains of sand rolling around collecting calcium carbonate deposits. When enough of these ooids are found in a rock, the rock is called an oolite. I don’t really understand how all these ooids and oolites, which are found only in oceans and caves, suggest once again the old in-and-out-in-a-year theory, but needless to say they do. As the pleasant girl who is reading Kurt’s notes concludes, ‘Anyway that’s what Dr. Wise says, which I think it makes sense, although I am an accounting major, so I haven’t really studied the subject much.’

  ‘What would the evolutionists say?’ I ask.

  ‘They would say it took millions and millions of years,’ says the girl.

  ‘That’s the only words you need to know if you’re an evolutionist—“millions of years, millions and millions of years,” ’ chimes in a second female in a tone of weary but tolerant exasperation: when will those credulous evolutionists get with it?

  Kurt’s surrogate now draws everyone’s attention to a stalactite descending from the low roof. A steady trickle of water forms a succession of drops which dangle for half a second on its tip and then fall with a plop onto the receptive tip of a stubby but erect stalagmite growing up towards it from the floor.

  Erica, who has asked a couple of irrelevant questions in a careless tone (‘If the water was flowing this quickly, wouldn’t Noah’s boat get turned over?’) which would suggest rebellion if it did not more suggest attention-seeking, and who, in spite of her own dumb questions, narrowed her eyes when I asked mine, now plays a trump card to regain centre stage.

  ‘Can we lick it?’ she asks, approaching the stalactite.

  Nervous laughter betrays group prurience, but disapproval can only be voiced by admitting it, so Erica extends her tongue and gives the stalactite’s scrawny glans a thirsty lick.

  Before I can slam on the brakes, I hear my voice echoing into the cave: ‘My God, will you look at the size of that tongue!’

  It is indeed a whopper. In fact, it’s the longest tongue I’ve ever seen and, as now becomes evident, it is a famous tongue.

  ‘Show him what you can do with it!’

  ‘Do that thing, Erica! Go on.’

  ‘Show him! Do the wave!’

  Once again, Erica rolls her eyes, emits a sigh in the gratifying glare of a dozen flashlights, and looking me in the eye with an expression that’s both provocative and yet completely devoid of sexuality, opens her mouth so I can peer inside.

  The tongue is undulating.

  The undulation starts at the back and moves forward like a gently sloped but fast moving wave. It’s a more or less straight line, this approaching ripple, and as it reaches the tip and narrows, another wave starts at the back and begins its undulation toward the front, and then another and another. I’m enraptured. I’ve never seen anything like it in all my life, these sets of soft pink breakers, and I’m in the process of imagining what it would feel like if … when the mouth shuts and Erica struts off amidst applause.

  Next stop, the Rough Room. If only. But no, it’s merely a room with rough walls, a contrast not only to Erica’s tongue but to the smooth walls elsewhere, proving, so Kurt theorises, that erosion here was caused by long-term chemical reaction from water getting stuck in here after the Flood. And now, the theorist himself appears, Dr. Kurt, scampering out of the darkness, his big glasses muddied, the eyeballs behind them anxious and intent, hands filthy, clothes in disarray—and then he’s gone!—without a word, scurrying onward to who knows what disaster, and soon we are scrabbling and slipping and squeezing along to our next destination, Hanging Falls, another awful passage, and at the end of it a circular room where, at last, we stop.

  Inside the room lurks our new guide, a smiling, sanctimonious young man. When we are all gathered inside the room, he tells us to sit down and switch off our flashlights. Then, out of the absolute blackness, comes his pious young voice:

  ‘Why don’t you lead off, Brittany?’

  ‘My God is an awesome God!’ sings Brittany in a sweet, high voice, and then the rest join in, ‘Be praised!’ and then they all sing together: ‘My God is an awesome God! Be praised!’ The room sounds like a small cathedral, more bass, less echo, but it is, I have to admit, pretty awesome, particularly in the darkness.

  As the hymn (which turns out to be awesomely repetitive), continues, I start to think about the Flood theory, which I like—the drama of it, the simplicity—but then, all of a sudden I hit a problem, something I’d never thought of before.

  Where did all the water come from?

  One day the earth is dry except for rivers and oceans. Then it starts to rain and there are ‘fountains’ which spring up from below. A few weeks later, the water level over the entire globe has risen so high it covers even Mount Everest. That’s a lot of extra water to appear out of nowhere.

  The song ends and in the reverent silence which follows, the young man says ‘How about that?’ in a soft, unctuous voice.

  How about this, think I, and pose my question.

  All the flashlights snap on and point my way again, but even before I’m blinded by their glare, an answer comes out of the darkness.

  ‘The canopy theory?’ says one of the girls, the question mark at the end a gentle chiding reminder, as if I’ve forgotten something I must surely know somewhere back there in my fuzzy old head.

  I shrug. No idea—ready to learn. Enlighten me.

  ‘Well, it’s the theory that the earth was surrounded by a vapour canopy before the flood, and it didn’t rain, it was like a greenhouse effect, and that would explain why they found greenery in the Poles and like frozen mammoths in the North Pole and they had like green leaves and stuff in their stomachs and the theory is that it was like a tropical forest the whole way around it, like a greenhouse with the canopy all around it, and God caused the canopy to fall and that’s what would create all that water.’

  A boy speaks up, better informed than her, closer to Wise’s wisdom.

  ‘Dr. Wise says that the canopy theory can’t on its own explain the Flood because if there was more than five feet of water in the canopy, the canopy would have to be so thick the vapour would be all the way down to about five feet off the ground, all the way up and all the way down to five feet.’

  ‘All the way up to where?’ the girl asks defensively.

  ‘The atmosphere.’

  ‘What if the atmosphere was different then?’

  ‘You never know,’ the boy says, dismissing her politely from the conversation, and goes on to explain an additional theory having to do with water trapped underground and a ‘mantle’ at the bottom of the sea moving and pushing up the water.

  ‘And all this took how long?’ I ask.

  ‘Sixty days,’ says the boy.

  ‘Sixty days,’ repeat several other voices with absolute authority. (When I check later, the Bible seems to say forty days, but maths was never my strong suit so maybe I missed something.) Anyway, I’m impressed. They’ve thought about the question and come up with an answer to conform to their Bible; but I can’t help thinking th
ere’s something about the whole exercise that’s painful and contorted, and almost tragically self-defeating. After all, if you believe in a God who can create the entire universe in six days, why entangle yourself in science to explain how he got the H2O for a mere flood? Unable to resist the lure of science, creationists have been seduced into a rationalistic trap. Their attempts to explain miracles through science can only end in sorrow: a miracle explained is a miracle destroyed.

  But I don’t say any of this because everyone is now wandering off toward the final and most horrific room of all.

  Imagine a vast, meandering, asymmetrical cavern, whose furthest reaches cannot be seen by even the most powerful flashlight. Imagine that the floor and ceiling are smooth and flat, and eerily in parallel with each other. Now imagine that some force has lowered the ceiling so it’s only two to three feet from the floor and, making matters worse, the whole thing appears to be supported only by occasional rough columns formed by stalactites and stalagmites fusing together, each column tapering in the middle like some weirdly guttered candle. Then imagine that on top of this massive slab there’s a billion tons of mountain. And now imagine some loony creationist asking you to crawl into this awful, ill-supported geological death-gap, which, if it collapsed, would spread you a hundred yards in all directions and leave you flatter than a dime, all so he can expound, through delegates, some nutty theory which every reasonable man on earth knows is utter hogwash. Only a fool would enter.

  In I crawl. Like most people I’d rather die than look ridiculous. As we scrabble along on our bellies, the new guide informs us that if you tap the floor you’ll discover it’s hollow. Within seconds, all the kids are hitting at it with their fists and hammering at it with their boots, making an ominous drumlike sound.