The Orpheus Descent

by Tom Harper

  ‘We have reconciled. Always, the son comes back to the father in the end.’

  Standing beside him, Ari glowered. His dark skin flushed, a child who’d been caught out.

  ‘Where’s Lily?’

  Ari began to say something, but Maroussis stopped him with a wave of his hand. ‘You have nearly found her.’ He glanced at Adam, who had come out of the tent with a pile of ropes and harnesses. ‘You are ready?’

  ‘Five minutes.’ Something like thunder rumbled through the ground, though the only clouds in the sky were smoke. Adam looked up at the mountain.

  ‘Can you check the instruments? See if we’ve got any readings?’

  Maroussis and Ari went back into the tent. Ren and Jonah stayed outside, watched by the shades. Adam coiled the rope, each loop the exact circumference of the last.

  ‘Do you remember the oracle at Delphi?’ he said suddenly.

  Jonah remembered it. What surprised him was that Adam did. Sitting squeezed into Lily’s car, singing along to ELO with the windows wide open. Surely it was a different Adam who’d been there.

  ‘A long time ago.’

  ‘You remember it sits on a fault line?’

  ‘Gas seeped out. The woman got high and told fortunes.’ He rubbed his neck. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘The point is, I don’t think Delphi was the only place it happened.’

  ‘OK.’ He couldn’t believe he was having this conversation. Perhaps his brain had lost too much oxygen. Perhaps it was easier than thinking about Lily.

  ‘Do you think it’s a coincidence that the world’s most profound philosophy sprang out of southern Italy? Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles – even Plato, it wasn’t until he visited Italy in his forties that his ideas really took flight. Somewhere underneath this mountain, there’s a place the ancients knew. A portal to a higher plane of existence, where we can see the mysteries of the universe firsthand.’

  When Plato went to Italy, he found something that blew open his thinking like a hydrogen bomb.

  ‘Are you familiar with the work of Timothy Leary? The LSD philosopher?’

  ‘Tune in, turn on, drop out.’

  ‘He developed a theory of drug use, that there are two variables that determine the experience. The set and the setting. The set is the physical compound – the drug you choose and its biochemical effects. The setting is the environment in which you take it, not just your surroundings but also your state of mind. Your mood, your emotions, your expectations. The Greeks would have understood it as a ritual. Drugs don’t just write themselves onto your subconscious: they open a conversation.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Take Ecstasy. For years, psychologists prescribed it therapeutically. Patients popped it on the couch and it helped them relax. Work through their issues. Then someone discovered that if you take it while you’re dancing with a thousand other people, listening to overpowering music, it becomes the gateway to something transcendental.’

  ‘So I hear.’

  ‘Our minds are made for so much more than we use them for. We rely so much on our senses, by the time we’re grown up they completely own us. But they’re pathetic. We’re like supercomputers connected to a dial-up modem. There’s a world out there, and we get thumbnail images drip-fed into our consciousness. We need to find a way to rip open the connections, to increase the bandwidth so we can understand the full spectrum of reality.’

  ‘You tried that once before. It didn’t work out so well.’

  Adam ignored him. ‘The problem with drugs is that they’re unreasonable. You can’t control the experience. They throw you into the ocean of the unconscious, but there’s nothing to steer by.’

  ‘Some people would say that’s the point.’

  ‘You know Pythagoras discovered the mathematical underpinnings of the universe. Parmenides is known as the father of logic. Plato maintains that the only way to understand his forms is through dialectical reasoning.’

  ‘They must have been off their faces.’

  Adam missed the sarcasm, probably didn’t even hear what he’d said. ‘Whatever’s down there, it doesn’t bypass our critical faculties like drugs. It liberates them.’

  ‘Does that matter?’ said Ren.

  ‘What’s the point of experiencing the full spectrum of the world if you can’t make sense of it?’

  Jonah stared at the small, square hole that had been excavated from the bottom of the pit. Where’s Lily? He wanted to scream it with all his voice, shake Adam until he told him or the whole mountain broke down. But, at the same time, he was afraid of the answer.

  ‘Isn’t there something you’re forgetting.’

  Just for a moment, a line of uncertainty cracked Adam’s mask. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘In all these myths, nobody says they went to some blissed-out heaven where they lay on a beach and contemplated the universe. They say they went to Hell.’

  Adam stared at him with his deep, soulless eyes.

  ‘That’s why we sent someone down to see if it’s safe. A canary in the tunnel.’

  ‘You’re going to send me down to breathe the air and see if I lose my mind.’

  But he’d misheard.

  ‘Sent – past tense.’

  He still didn’t get it. Adam steepled his fingers, a doctor putting on his white coat to deliver the bad news.

  ‘She’s already down there.’

  Thirty-seven

  In the hollows beneath the earth flow subterranean streams, both hot and cold; and great fiery rivers; and streams of liquid mud, thick and thin, just like the rivers of mud in Sicily, and the lava-streams which follow them.

  Plato, Phaedo

  Down I went.

  A passage stretched ahead of me, deep into the mountain. High enough that it barely touched my head, just wide enough to fit my shoulders. Lamps lit my way, hundreds of them, set in the walls in paired niches every few feet. It was an eerie effect; I wondered who had lit them. Their light showed many pairs of footprints in the black dust that smothered the floor. Were some of them Agathon’s?

  The air in the passage got hotter. After fifty paces, my clothes were heavy with sweat. After one hundred, I stripped off completely, wriggling like a snake shedding its skin. I left the clothes behind.

  The heat got worse. The sweat tapped every drop of moisture in my body and drained it out. It reminded me of being in the exercise yard at noon, high summer, sticky with oil and sand, throwing each other while the instructor screamed instructions and abuse. One in particular, a veteran of the Spartan wars, used to make me lie face down in the sand with a long leather bag on my back. He filled the bag with rocks, heavy as a man, and told me to do a hundred press-ups.

  A memory. The bag crushing me into the hot sand, scalding my naked skin. Just lifting myself off the ground saps all my strength. By the third press-up, I think my arms will snap. The other athletes in the gymnasium stop what they are doing and gather round to watch.

  When I reach thirty, he fetches a basin of water. He puts it on the sand in front of me, so close I can almost touch it with my tongue. He stands over it, daring me to give up. All you have to do is roll over. The water’s fresh from the well, lovely and cold. Let the bag go. No one’s going to judge you. I keep going. Sixty. Seventy.

  I reached one hundred. I barely had the strength to tip off the bag, let alone to stand, but somehow I did. I looked down at the water in the bowl, and then I kicked it over. I still remember the hiss the water made as it boiled off the sand.

  Jonah

  He wanted to take one of Adam’s bright blue ropes and wrap it around his throat until his neck snapped.

  ‘You sent Lily down there?’

  A canary in the mine.

  Adam tossed him a head-torch. ‘No one’s entered that cave for almost two and a half thousand years. The gasses in there could have built up to lethal concentrations. Or there could be loose rocks.’ Another tremor shook the earth. ‘This isn’t a geologically stable region.’

>   ‘Really?’

  ‘Do you think Socratis Maroussis is just going to crawl in there like Indiana Jones?’

  Jonah stared into the darkness in the ground. Despair washed through him and made everything he could do or say futile.

  ‘Is she OK?’

  ‘She’s wearing a transmitter that’s supposed to report back her vital signs.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It stopped transmitting last night.’

  Jonah tried to hold on, but it was like trying to squeeze broken pieces of glass together. ‘It could be the rock, right? The signal can’t get through?’

  ‘Or a malfunction, or she broke it.’ Adam flicked on his head-torch. ‘That’s why we’re going down.’

  Jonah took a last look at the sun. From the edge of the trench, Ren looked down from between the guards and gave him a small, vanishing smile.

  ‘I’ll come back,’ Jonah said. He hated to leave her up there with Ari Maroussis and his father. He remembered the look Ari had given her, like a shark sniffing bait. But he had to.

  ‘Find Lily,’ she said.

  The hole seemed to swallow the light around it, crushing the world down to two dimensions. He thought of Lily going down there. Captive, alone, one solitary light against the darkness of a billion tons of rock. A sacrifice.

  ‘I thought you loved her, once.’

  Ahead, Adam shrugged. ‘Love is Truth. That’s what we’re going to find.’

  Plato

  My mouth burned. My throat ached. The passage continued down, and I wondered how close I was to the heart of the volcano.

  A little way ahead, I saw a gap in the side of the tunnel on my right. I hurried on as fast as I could and stared.

  A rough-hewn goddess, big-limbed and full-breasted, sat in an alcove, emerging from the rock like a face pressed against a sheet. Her lips, breasts, hands and eyes had been polished smooth, like black mirrors. Below her feet, a round pool of black water gleamed in the lamplight, with a bronze scoop lying invitingly on a ledge above.

  I don’t know where the water sprang from, or how it stayed full without spilling out. But I wanted that drink. More than I’ve ever wanted anything, I wanted to taste the water on my lips. I wanted to plunge my head in until I drowned.

  I knelt and grabbed the scoop. As I leaned forward, the amulet around my neck swung out and knocked against the rim of the scoop. Gold chimed on bronze with a sound like a bell.

  Euphemus’ ghost’s hand touched my shoulder. Do you think it’s safe?

  I looked again. The gold locket hung against my bare chest, covered in sweat. I took out the tablet and tried to read the words. The leaf was so hot I worried it might melt in my hands.

  The Mansions of Night, the right-hand spring,

  Black water and a shining white cypress

  Where descending souls cool their fall.

  Stay away.

  The water winked at me and shimmered. The goddess watched me through polished eyes, mirrors of the pool below.

  I put the scoop down and left the water behind. I didn’t look back.

  Jonah

  The long tunnel sloped down into the mountain. The walls bowed out then tapered together above his head, like a sea shell. The air was hot and dry. A row of shallow holes, about chest high, made serrated lines in the walls. When Adam trained his torch on them, Jonah saw dark patches staining the rock walls below.

  ‘Oil,’ said Adam. ‘Originally, they’d have held lamps.’

  There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds, as far as the torch-beam reached. Jonah tried to imagine them all glowing with flames. He tried to imagine who could have come down here to light them.

  ‘Did you know this was here?’

  ‘A flagstone covered the entrance and kept the lava out when the temple was destroyed. The original excavators got as far as the temple floor and stopped. They didn’t realise, and no one ever came back to investigate. With modern imaging technology, we opened it up straight away.’

  For something that hadn’t been touched in thousands of years, the tunnel was remarkably clear. A heavy layer of soot carpeted the floor: otherwise, there wasn’t so much as a crack in the walls. In the torchlight, they were a strange, pinkish colour, with undulating lines, as if a giant worm had bored through it.

  ‘Is this natural?’

  ‘Lava cools with exposure to air. The top hardens first, like a crust, but underneath it keeps flowing. Sometimes, when the eruption finishes, it flows right out and leaves an empty tube behind. A cave.’

  ‘But this must have been here before the temple got destroyed.’

  ‘It’s a different eruption – thousands or tens of thousands of years earlier. The later eruption came down over it. That’s how Etna was made. It’s a giant layer-cake of lava on lava.’

  Adam paused. Ahead, on his right, the torch-beam shone off a black mirrored surface set in the floor of a little alcove. It was so smooth, Jonah didn’t realise it was water until Adam touched it with the toe of his boot. Angry circles rippled out, so close to the rim Jonah thought they’d spill over.

  ‘The right-hand spring,’ Adam breathed. A golden glow bathed his face as he looked down at the tablet. Reflected light wrote tiny white letters on his skin. ‘It’s really true.’

  ‘Is it safe to drink?’ The heat in the cave had sucked Jonah dry. He was dying for a drink.

  ‘Stay away.’ Adam shone his light up. A nude goddess, black as night with gleaming black breasts, stared out of the rock. ‘It’s a trap.’

  He knelt down and sniffed the water. A small mound of green bronze flakes lay next to the well, perhaps the decomposed remains of some long-lost vessel. Adam took a plastic test-tube from his pocket and filled it with water, careful not to touch it.

  ‘How is it a trap?’ Jonah asked.

  Adam stood and screwed the tube shut. ‘The key to Orphic philosophy is memory. They believed in the immortality of the soul, that it comes into this world again and again in its quest for perfection. How you lived your past life determines how you come back.’

  ‘Isn’t that Buddhism? Karma, or something?’

  ‘Similar. In Orphism, the twist is that it isn’t fate that determines how you come back. You get to choose – but you have to make the right choice. You pursue virtue in life so that when you get to the underworld, you’ve got the knowledge to make the best decision. And to do that, you have to remember what you’ve learned.’

  Jonah rubbed his nose. Dust danced in the beam of his head-torch, just above his eyeline. ‘Is that so hard?’

  ‘The water makes you forget. That’s why the tablet tells you not to drink it. You’ll forget who you are and find yourself at the mercy of Hades.’

  He looked down the passage. A little further along, the slope levelled out.

  ‘Everything we are is memory. Without it, we’d live and die like goldfish. Do you know what the Greek word for “truth” is? Aletheia. A is the negative prefix and Lethe is forgetting. Truth is simply not forgetting.’

  Plato

  The passage levelled out, then began to rise. The lamps in the walls led me on. They didn’t hiss or spit; none of them had gone out. Again, I wondered who kept the lamps filled and lit. Did they burn here in the dark, hour after hour, waiting for a traveller to pass? It was as if I’d arrived at a friend’s for dinner, to find the tables ready but the house empty.

  Though I didn’t always feel exactly alone. Sometimes I thought I saw a pale circle of light dancing across the floor ahead of me. Sometimes, when I glanced at the walls, there seemed to be an extra shadow overlapping mine, a blurred edge that didn’t belong to me. Every so often, the sound of my footsteps seemed to skip a beat, or add one, like a drummer playing out of time.

  The passage ended suddenly in a round chamber. Cunning shadows hid it so well I nearly walked into the wall – or rather, into the statue facing out of it. A three-figured woman. One was the firm body of a young girl; the second, a woman in the ripeness of motherhood; the third, a wither
ed crone.

  Hecate, the witch-queen. She guards crossroads, keeping off evil spirits and helping travellers choose the right path. Even here. The mother’s head stared back down the passage I’d come by, while the daughter and the crone looked left and right down the two new paths that split away into the darkness.

  I followed their gazes down the two passages. This was where the lamps ran out: everything beyond Hecate was darkness. Even the footprints couldn’t guide me here. In front of the statue, and down the tunnels, the floor had been swept clean.

  I took a tentative step along the right-hand passage. If anything, the air smelt even fouler than the chamber, as if some vast rotting carcass lay waiting at the end. I tried the left-hand passage instead. Here, the air was warmer but also dryer. My soul tugged me towards it, like a leaf turning towards the sun.

  There are two ways, says Parmenides, and one is impossible. Nothing comes back that way.

  I went back to the statue and stared into her faces for clues. The young woman looking left had smooth skin and wide eyes. The old grandmother looking right had a pointed chin, sunken eyes and deep lines scored across her face. Her shrivelled breasts hung low towards her belly, where thin ribs pushed against the papery skin. I shuddered, and marvelled at the sculptor’s skill, chipping this hag out of the rock so deep below the earth.

  Her eyes defied me with a lifetime’s experience, hard won from the girl on the left. This is wisdom, they seemed to say.

  I made my choice, and set off up the right-hand tunnel.

  Jonah

  They picked their way forward. Sometimes the roof soared out of reach like a cathedral; sometimes it came so low it brushed his shoulders. The walls bulged and shrank away, but the floor remained perfectly flat. He wondered how many feet must have walked the same path to wear it so smooth.

  ‘The path should fork soon,’ said Adam.

  Jonah kept his eyes on the ground. His head-torch made a wan circle of light on the floor, chasing Lily’s footprints into the darkness. Adam’s boot-marks looked huge and square beside them, as though a toeless animal had pursued her into the cave.