by JH Fletcher
No, he’d have to go back, but not tonight. If he was in for a thrashing, he might as well make the most of it. Besides, there was no real choice. He remembered the cliffs he had been so careful to avoid on his way up the mountain; no way would he find his way down them in the dark. Hungry or not, he would have to find somewhere up here where he could sit tight until morning.
It shouldn’t be too hard; if it came to the worst, he could simply sit down with his back against a tree, but it would be freezing later, and he’d be a lot more comfortable if he could find some sort of shelter. He’d seen no sign of a cave or anything like that on the way up here. It was worth a look certainly, but where to start he had no idea.
He worked his way precariously downwards until he reached the top of the cliffs he had avoided on the way up. He skirted a succession of faces, one after another. All were more or less the same height as though, long ago, the upper part of the mountain had been raised, like bread in an oven.
At length Colin left them behind, the slopes below him steep but no longer vertical. In their place he discovered a gorge, half concealed amid a dense tangle of scrub, that bit into the heart of the mountain. He wormed his way through the clutching fingers of bushes and peered into the amber depths but, with twilight, the shadows were rising like smoke; the gorge turned through ninety degrees and disappeared, and he could see no sign of shelter nor any way of reaching it if there had been.
Again he went on. Darkness was falling quickly now. Whether he found shelter or not, he knew he would soon have to put down roots for the night. He rounded a corner of the slope and stopped. Before him rose another rock face. In its centre, as though his thoughts had conjured it, he saw in the almost horizontal rays of the setting sun what at any other time of the day would have been invisible: a round opening, black against the lesser darkness of the surrounding rock.
Moving as quickly as he could, he scrambled across the slope towards it. At the entrance he paused. The hole looked too regular to be a natural cave. He inspected the entrance and thought he could make out the scars of chisels but, with darkness almost upon him, could not be sure.
He hesitated, thinking of snakes, then told himself not to be stupid. He’d been looking for a cave to shelter in; now he’d found one. Sure, there might be snakes — they were everywhere, in the tropics — but that didn’t mean they would be waiting for him just inside the entrance.
He took a deep breath and stepped through the opening. Inside the cave it was very dark. He stopped and looked about him, nerves pricking. There was a scent of dust and of something he could not identify: a feral smell, as though a wild animal had lived there once.
Or lived there still.
Heart beating fast, he looked about him, eyes probing the darkness, but nothing stirred. He picked his way over fallen stone until he was a few yards inside the entrance. The darkness pressed upon him but still nothing moved. He told himself it was safe enough. Probably. Cautiously, eyes still watchful, he first sat down, then lay down. He was hungry enough to have eaten the stones, had it been possible. Too bad; he’d just have to wait for morning and hope he didn’t die of starvation in the meantime.
Hunger didn’t kill him but something quite different came close; or that was how it felt at the time.
Within the forest it was almost dark. Beyond the screen of leaves, the blue sky had turned first to white and now to a tranquil apricot. There was no breeze, no sound, no movement at all. Suddenly all that changed.
There came a frenzied explosion as the roof of the cave erupted into violent life. Colin leapt to his feet, every limb trembling, while a colony of awakened bats swept out on membraned wings for their nightly forage. He saw a witches’ flock of shadows — fox-shaped heads, outspread wings in sharp and jagged profile against the darkening sky — then it was gone.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said over and over, as though repetition might build a wall between him and terror. ‘Bloody hell’
Yet, despite the bats, despite the terror of things real awakening further terror of things unknown, the night passed and Colin slept. At some stage during the night the mist descended to shroud the mountain’s lower slopes, smearing the details of tree and rock and fern with its wet thumbs. It boiled at the opening to what Colin had concluded was probably the entrance tunnel of an old and abandoned mine. Its breath would have woken an older man but Colin was ten and used to hard living — in hot weather in particular he had often escaped from the stifling wagon to sleep on the ground — and he did not move until roused by the first faint stirrings of light along the eastern horizon.
He opened his eyes. The mist billowed in the mouth of the tunnel. Although it had not ventured far inside, the temperature had plummeted in the night and Colin was shaking with cold.
‘Crying out loud,’ he told the stone gallery above his head. ‘Let’s hope this muck don’ hang around too long.’
And went out into it; to have a pee first off, and then to inspect what he could see of the day.
‘Freeze the balls off a brass monkey,’ he informed the mist. It was an expression he used whenever he could, especially since Marge had told him not to. There was no Marge to hear him, no anyone, but that no longer worried him. His night-time fears had vanished; even bats with foxes’ heads no longer terrified now that daylight was seeping back, however reluctantly, into the world.
He was bloody hungry, though. He told the mist so, which didn’t help. He could just about see his hand in front of his face, could make out the ghost-like pillars of the nearest trees, but for the rest … He’d just have to wait it out.
He hunkered down at the mouth of the mine, if that was what it was, his mind warming itself on images of hot eggs, a bit of fatty bacon on the side.
The bats returned, scything out of the mist in a chorus of hisses, squeaks and growls. They flapped and clattered inside the entrance until at last they settled. Cocooned in their folded wings, they hung from the roof of the tunnel like bunches of malodorous fruit. Silence returned.
It seemed a long time before anything else happened. Colin grew colder and hungrier by the minute. At last the curtain of mist began to swirl as though stirred by some gigantic and invisible spoon. The murky light brightened, turning from grey to silver, then to gold. Diamond sparks of sunlight appeared. The mist shredded and, all at once, was gone. Down the steep flank of the mountain the trees marched, dark and moist and still. Beyond them Colin could see the valley, warm and golden, bathed in sunlight.
Now he would be able to go back. A great prospect that was; he thought Bruce would half kill him. If he was lucky.
No way he could avoid it; all the same, hungry or not, he felt in no hurry to face it. First off, he’d have a poke around this mine — or whatever it was — he’d discovered.
He’d been lucky to spot it at all. The entrance was hidden beneath an overhang, with trees and bushes all around it. If he hadn’t caught it at just the right moment, with the setting sun shining on the entrance, he would never have seen it. He doubted many people knew it was here. That made it extra exciting: it was just the place a bloke could hope to find buried treasure. He imagined himself going triumphantly down the hill, pockets ringing with gold doubloons. There’d be no leathering then: Bruce would be over him like a rash. Or maybe he wouldn’t even tell him. Yeah, that would be more like it. Go right away, buy himself a big place somewhere, live like a nob, looking at the sea. Or buy his own circus, beat up the little kids whenever he felt like it, get his own back.
All he had to do was find the gold.
He went back inside the tunnel. Now it was light he could have a good squiz at the entrance. There were chisel marks everywhere, just as he’d thought. A man-made opening, sure enough. Which had to mean a mine.
He didn’t think the bats would have chosen it as a roosting place if there’d been too many snakes about; he took care where he was walking, all the same, but saw nothing. Unfortunately, nothing was right: the tunnel went straight back into the mountain. It w
as stark and bare, without the slightest hint of treasure or, indeed, of anything else. Nothing but solid rock; the last place anyone would choose to bury treasure. This was a place to take gold out, not put it in.
He told himself there was no harm looking, just to be sure.
He groped along the tunnel. It was pitch dark; Colin had to inch his way with outstretched hands. Finally he came to a blank wall: tunnel’s end, by the feel of it. He checked it out as thoroughly as he could in the dark, but if there were any hidden passages he couldn’t find them. Whatever the miners had been looking for, it seemed likely they’d never found it.
Disgusted, Colin turned round and had begun to work his way back again. He’d got halfway when he came on something he’d missed on the way in: another tunnel, heading off at right angles to the one he was in. He peered, undecided. He couldn’t see a thing. There was no saying where it might go. Get lost under the mountain, he might never find his way out again. A boy could die in there. No one would ever find him. On the other hand, if there was anything to find, that was where it would be. He’d have to be a brick short of a load to get so close and then miss out because he’d lost his nerve.
Give it a go.
Heart beating fit to burst, he edged his way slowly into the new tunnel. It was a lot smaller than the other one: he stretched out his hands and he found he could touch the walls on either side. He couldn’t see a thing. The tunnel jinked once, then again. Get lost in here …
Stop it!
In his imagination he could hear the sound of his breathing, his beating heart, echoing off the walls and the roof which came so low that in places it brushed against his head. He could feel panic, gnawing.
I must get outa here, he thought. And took a step. Go back. Another step. And paused. Ahead of him: blackness. And yet …
Was he imagining it, or was there the faintest hint of light somewhere ahead of him? Another step, and another. He came to a corner and edged around it, fingers brushing the tunnel wall. Relief surged. Definitely there was light ahead of him: very faint still, but undeniable. Cautiously he continued. Slowly the light grew stronger.
Another corner. The light, much brighter now, drew him on. The chisel marks in the tunnel’s roof and walls showed as shadows. Colin began to hurry. Stumbling in eagerness, he rounded a final corner and the opening was in front of him. Eyes screwed up against the light, he walked purposefully forward to claim whatever it was that he had found.
2
At first he could see nothing but a scintillating brilliance that splintered against his retinas. Then, eyes growing used to the light, he saw the sun striking honey glints from the rock wall of the mountain that rose high overhead. In front of him, a narrow ledge traversed a cliff above a vertiginous fall of air that, far beneath, plunged into the distant trees.
He knew at once where he was; the tunnel had led him through the earth and to the edge of the deep cleft he had discovered yesterday. He craned his head. Sure enough, he could see, far above his head, the bush-framed window in the rock through which he had peered the previous evening. Then shadow had blurred detail; now the honey light swarmed like bees in the depths and reflected in warm strokes from the silent and amber-coloured walls.
Ahead of him, the teetering ledge sketched a meandering path across the cliff before disappearing where the cleft itself turned backwards towards the mountain. The ledge was narrow — in places no more than a few inches wide — but Colin didn’t care about that. Careless of the drop, he hurried forward, eager to see where the ledge went. He reached the corner. The ledge continued, and he followed it. Soon it widened into a gallery several yards wide. Overhead, the overhanging rock formed a roof. Along the gallery, a succession of massive stones, each smooth-topped and six feet or more in length, were arranged like seats. In sheltered pockets in the gallery floor lay centuries, a thousand years, of dust, inches deep. Where moisture had at some time seeped down the wall, lichen showed in black streaks against the amber-coloured rock. Here and there, shallow-rooted, slender trees, as thin as whips, craned apologetic heads towards a sky that would be forever beyond their reach. Painted across the length of the wall …
Figures, one beside the other, overlapping in a confused multiplicity of shapes. A creature that might have been a kangaroo, coloured white. Behind it, a naked woman, pendulous breasts projecting from her armpits. Other images: of men and women and beasts, of creatures with tiny heads, their painted eyes menacing the sunlight, figures grey and brown and white. They faded one behind the other like a multilayered dream, as though it might be possible to step with them through the surface of the rock into another time, another world. Images behind images, so closely massed that in places it was impossible to distinguish one from another.
Open mouthed, Colin stared at what he had discovered. On the sun-warmed ledge, amid the rock seats and spindle trees, above the distant drift of trees swooning in a golden haze of sunlight, he had forgotten where he was and why he had come. He did not know what he was looking at, only that it was immeasurably old, immeasurably strange, a succession of voices calling out of a past of which neither he nor the world knew anything. The kaleidoscopic images drew him deep into themselves, into the rock and through the rock. It was as though he were somehow within the reality of the paintings and of the world of wonder and magic they depicted. From that safe and wondrous place he looked back at himself, the Colin Mandale who stood on the sun-warmed ledge, his feet trampling the aeon-old dust, his uncomprehending eyes peering in wonderment at the wall. In that moment all became one: the boy watching, the boy within the wall, the complexity of paintings that tied all — past, present and future — into one being and yet into nothing at all, all obliterated by a knowledge undefined yet absolute, extending even to the distant stars.
Colin was unable to put his feelings into words or even thoughts, yet he knew that somewhere deep within him a fundamental part of his being was responding to what he could see. It was another dimension of the Cloud Forest he had seen yesterday: the echo of worship and imagination rounding out and making whole his experience on the mist-blind mountaintop. Each complemented the other so that mountain and undergrowth and mist became one with this: the ultimate perfection of wonder, residing silently.
He waited, fidgeting on the ledge, not wanting to leave, knowing he must. He must return to the world he knew, but this gift would be a light shining within him forever: the realm of ultimate desire. The wonder, the glory and the dream would be with him always.
3
In the warm light of the North Queensland sun, Colin Mandale went back down the mountain into what had been his old life. He went in the expectation of a leathering, probably a very severe one; his action in running away, if that was what he had been doing, had after all been a gesture of defiance, a finger raised in the face of both his foster parents. To Marge it would have seemed nothing short of betrayal by the child she persisted in the face of biological truth in calling her son, whom she blackmailed by asking constantly whether he still loved her, inviting the honest response she dreaded. To Bruce, Colin’s disappearance would have been a challenge, to which only one response was possible.
So Colin went back expecting trouble and got it, but not in the way he had anticipated.
It was too much to hope that his adventure would be ignored altogether. Predictably, Marge screeched furiously, demanding that he tell her what he’d been up to, high on the mountain by himself. He couldn’t do it; not in order to shut her out of his life, as she claimed, but because he didn’t know. She wept, accusing him of keeping things from her. In part she was right: he told neither her nor anyone about the gallery he had discovered, the flame-eyed figures burning in his memory.
As far as Bruce was concerned, Colin got off a lot more lightly than he’d expected. Amazingly, there were no bashings; not because Bruce had suffered a change of heart but because old Gus Evans, who knew everything that went on in his circus, had told him that if he carried on the way he was going he’d be ou
t on his ear. Had warned him specifically against bashing a child who, in Gus’s opinion, had the makings of a star of the circus ring, but only if his joints and limbs and confidence had not been rearranged for him in the meantime.
No, the trouble — if that was what it was — took an altogether different form, one that neither Colin nor anybody else might have anticipated. The boy who came down from the mountain was a different creature from the one who had gone up. What had caused the change — the Cloud Forest’s green sanctuary of fern and water and mist or the emotional impact of the ochre paintings that had drawn him not only into themselves but into another time and world — he never knew. Nor did it matter. What was important was the fact that the experiences, disparate or combined, had changed him utterly, making him question what he had previously taken for granted. The circus and his place within it were no longer the inevitabilities they had been before. He’d come back in his body because he’d been too young to do anything else, but in his head, at least in part, he had never come back at all. The Cloud Forest and the stone gallery of paintings remained as mute reminders that another world existed, in all its mystery and fascination. When the time came, if it ever did, he would go to it.
In the meanwhile, he went on with the daily rags and bobs of his life. He fetched water, helped with the tents, practised his routines, leapt and cavorted in a ring bright with the carbide roar of lights, kept out of Bruce’s way when he was tanked — some things would never change. Yet, in everything he did, he saw himself as no more than the two-dimensional shadow, drained of substance, of the being he had been before. The white and ochre figures of the stone gallery had seemed like ghosts yet now were of greater substance than himself, while the Cloud Forest peopled his memories with the texture of its moist and frond-populated silence.