The Hidden School

by Dan Millman

  The voice spoke again. And it said, “Damn!”

  “Okay, that’s it!” I yelled, standing up and glaring at the croupier, whom I held personally responsible for this miscarriage of justice. On the verge of swearing off gambling forever, I gave my last dollar to a slot machine. I had turned to walk away when I heard the clink of enough coins to bankroll a serious duel with the blackjack dealer. I’d caught gambling fever. Fever! I thought in a muddled way. Surely a sign!

  Over the next ten minutes, in a philanthropic mood, I donated nearly two hundred dollars to the casino. This personal largesse and tragedy went unnoticed by the dealer and my fellow players, who were, at the moment, too intent on their own life-or-death dramas to concern themselves with mine.

  “I need to remember to bet big when I’m going to win, and bet small when I’m going to lose,” I told the dealer.

  “Sounds like a good idea,” he said.

  I doubled down and lost another hand. “You have the eyes of a saint but the hands of an undertaker,” I said.

  “Amen to that,” slurred a man nearby who appeared to be committing financial suicide while his ashen-faced wife watched in horror. I could practically see the coroner’s report: death by blackjack.

  On the next hand, the dealer had a king showing and a face that revealed nothing else. I had fifteen and, according to the experts, I was supposed to take another card. But I just hate to draw on a fifteen. I tapped the table for another card. Great—an ace. Now I had sixteen. Once again, according to the experts, I was supposed to draw, or odds were I’d lose anyway.

  Blackjack, like life, sometimes offers only two choices: bad or worse.

  I resigned myself. “Okay, hit me.”

  The dealer looked at me, puzzled.

  “Hit me,” I repeated, louder.

  He stood there as if he were deaf. “Hit me!” I yelled. So he obliged, throwing a right hook and knocking me right off my stool. I felt my head snap to the side in slow motion as the chair tipped backward, taking me with it.

  The instant my head struck the casino floor, I woke up in my motel room.

  I squinted at the clock radio on the nightstand: 4:12 a.m. Checking my knapsack pocket, I found my roll of just-in-case travel money still tucked safely away. My gambling-fever dream had a clear message: time to move on.

  Before I left, I grabbed an early breakfast, paid my bill, and made a half-hearted attempt to scale the peaks of Las Vegas. In one ascent up my personal Everest, elevator to stairwell to roof, I found a door left ajar, quickly looked around, and found—dare I say it?—nada.

  Back in the cab of my pickup, I spread out my map.

  To the north lay the air force base and gunnery range, which had some high ground. But I wasn’t going to dodge artillery shells while peering into small craters.

  To the east lay Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam—possible, but not probable (like my life for the past decade).

  To the south, Black Mountain and the McCullough Range. That direction looked promising, but just didn’t feel right.

  To the southwest lay Fort Mohave and Needles, where Route 40 led toward the Nopah and Funeral Mountains, with Death Valley National Monument to the north. What better place to find eternal life than in Death Valley?

  I just didn’t know. This was a dark night of the soul. Despite my earlier training with Mama Chia, I was starting to doubt my own intuition. What did I have to go on? Even if Soc had pinpointed a single acre, where would I dig? No self-respecting gambler would bet on such a long shot.

  I let my hand move across the map. . . .

  All at once, two revelations coincided: my hand passed over a place called Mountain Springs Summit, elevation 5,493 feet, and my neck started tingling. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it meant something. It was just an hour outside of Las Vegas.

  What did Ama say when she was in that trance? Socrates had repeated something about a mountain and water, but then he’d refused to drink. Maybe he wasn’t talking about water but a spring? A mountain spring—or Mountain Springs?

  This summit fit Soc’s description of a high place. There might be a cave or caves and a view of the desert as a hawk would see it. After meeting young Ama all those years past, he might have made it this far west before his fever overwhelmed him. An image of Socrates hiking up a mountain flashed into my imagination. I could see him sitting on a boulder far from the civilized world, wiping his sweaty brow and writing through his fever with the same penetrating focus and discipline he’d demonstrated so many times back in Berkeley. Then, realizing that he was becoming delirious, Soc could have hidden the journal there, intending to retrieve it later. Another ride or rides might have taken him eastward again, back toward Albuquerque. Perhaps he’d mentioned the last place he remembered. It was a good story. It might have happened that way.

  Soc’s possible path to Mountain Springs Summit, then eastward again, made sense only when I considered his confused state of mind. He could have accepted any ride, no matter what the direction. Someone could have dropped him off at the summit. He might then have set out on a path leading upward, away from the road. A quiet place where the hawks could soar. So I would do the same.

  TEN

  * * *

  I drove south and then west through this sere land of sagebrush and tumbleweeds. Focused on the road ahead, I dismissed the unlikely notion that someone else might also be seeking the journal. That is until I got a strong sense that I was being watched. Maybe, I thought, it’s Soc’s gaze I’m feeling.

  Still a jackass, I thought, shaking my head at my own inadequacy as I stumbled around the desert. Maybe a fruitless quest was Soc’s way of showing me that I wasn’t up to it, that he’d wasted his time with me. He’d shared so much with me, and I, an entitled young college athlete, had assumed I deserved it. How had he put it in his letter? That I believed myself “wiser than my peers.” I’d won some competitions, graduated, married, fathered a child, found a coaching job and then the faculty position. What did it add up to now? Who was I but a self-absorbed loner on a fool’s mission? If I could find the journal, maybe an answer would lie within its pages.

  I reached Mountain Springs Summit in the late afternoon and parked my car off the road. I’d purchased enough food for several days and had filled my canteen, with an extra bottle in reserve. I’d repacked my knapsack, with the small pick sticking out the top. The kachina doll, my little samurai, and my personal journal, with its scattered notes, added bulk. I took them along anyway, not wanting to leave anything important behind.

  I gazed up toward a rocky grade a hundred yards away, the only higher elevation Socrates would head for if he was seeking seclusion—if he was ever here at all. I crossed the road and walked to a sort of trailhead. The only path leading upward was bordered on either side by steep walls. This ravine, carved by erosion and time, would be vulnerable to flash flooding and therefore dangerous. But now, under a cloudless sky, it afforded a relatively easy hike up a long stairwell, one small boulder to the next.

  As I started up, the sun beat down. It felt like a record temperature until I realized that the heat was internal, like a strange fever. I hoped it wasn’t the same kind that had overcome Socrates so long before. Maybe it was my imagination combined with the physical exertion at altitude. I pushed onward and upward.

  After a climb of about six hundred feet, the ravine ended in a gentler grade, an expanse of rocky soil. I could see what might be the highest point that would grant me a view of the desert below. A hawk’s-eye view. But three paths now lay before me: one on the left, one on the right, and one directly ahead. I had no idea which way to go. Even if Socrates had ascended the same ravine decades ago, which path would he have taken?

  A feeling of isolation, even abandonment, washed over me. Socrates, help me, I pleaded. I’ve never felt so alone. Meanwhile, my head throbbed.

  As the moment of self-pity passed, I took a deep breath and a few swigs of water, splashing some over my hot forehead.

  Just then I
saw, or thought I saw, a fleeting movement in the distance, along the path to my left. A deer or a mountain goat? I squinted in the sunlight. No, it was a man. I could just make out white hair. Overalls. In this heat? I flashed back to a time I had secretly followed Socrates onto the UC Berkeley campus. The figure reminded me of him. Then it disappeared.

  I looked toward the path on the right—and saw the figure there. Impossible, but there it was. Then it started to flicker and fade. When I peered up the path directly ahead, I thought I caught a glimpse again. Left, right, straight—each time I looked, the figure was there, and then vanished. My feverish mind strained to figure out what these visions might mean.

  I sat down, closed my eyes, and poured more water over my perspiration-matted hair. My teeth chattered with a sudden chill. How ironic, I thought. Here at this high altitude I’m at the lowest point of my life. I don’t know what to do, which path to take. . . . Then I remembered Socrates telling me, “Your analytical skills are useful. So is your intuitive sense of trusting your inner knower. Use both analysis and intuition—but not at the same time.”

  Here and now, analysis would lead me nowhere. This wasn’t something I could figure my way out of. I had to trust an inner sense that Mama Chia had helped me refine in the rain forest only a month before. . . . I stood up, closed my eyes, and extended that sense of knowing. . . . I opened my eyes and gazed to the left, to the right, to the path ahead. Three figures of the same man, phantom images of my old mentor. Only this time, two of them flickered and vanished. One remained. The path to the right.

  A sage once said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I do?” So I set out, a man on fire, along the path to the right—the right path—acting by faith, not by sight. I could still see the figure in the distance. Sometimes I imagined myself gaining ground. Then he would appear farther ahead. When I reached a level plateau, the figure was gone.

  * * *

  I’d parked the pickup near a roadside sign that read: SUMMIT ELEVATION: 5,493. I’d probably climbed about fifteen hundred feet higher and was now about a mile from the roadway. I heard no sounds here but the wind. Except for the occasional jet streaking across the cerulean sky, I could have been the last person on earth. I stood on a plateau, one of the highest points in miles. Despite the fever and the doubts that possessed me, I sensed that I was getting closer to something. If I was wrong, I’d have to go onward, go back, or give up.

  Now what? I thought, pacing back and forth across the plateau. That figure—whether real or a daemon Socrates inside my mind—had led me here. But where would I look now? And how could I dig deeper than two inches into this limestone or sandstone surface? I should have paid better attention in geology class.

  Suddenly tired, my head swimming, I set up camp on the plateau, sweeping away pebbles and laying out my sleeping bag about thirty feet from the cliff’s edge. Then I crawled carefully to the precipice, lay on my belly atop a stone outcropping, and peered straight down at a sheer drop of five or six hundred feet. I dropped a stone, which bounced once on a protruding sheet of rock before disappearing into the empty space below. This precarious perch afforded a view of the mountains and desert in the distance.

  The sun had nearly set in the west, so I settled in for the night. Huddled in my sleeping bag, alternately sweating and chilled, I asked the universe for another sign. I didn’t expect a painted arrow pointing down that said DIG HERE, or a typical omen like the flight of a bird or a gust of wind. I wanted something that would dazzle me.

  Funny thing about signs and omens: when you’re looking for one, sooner or later it shows up. I didn’t have to wait long.

  When I awoke in the night, I was lying on my back, facing the starry sky. Then I froze as I saw, in extreme close-up, what had awakened me. My crossed eyes looked past the tip of my nose to see the segmented, armored body of a green scorpion straddling my face. My lips clenched involuntarily, and the tail whipped abruptly into view as the creature stung me right between my brows.

  Letting out a shriek, I flailed at my miniature assailant, hitting my own face with such force that I thought I’d broken my nose. My legs tangled with the fabric of my sleeping bag as I tried to climb to my feet, my heart beating so hard I could feel the blood pounding in my head. Watching the scorpion scuttle away, I sat down heavily. It wasn’t the sleeping bag that hindered me. I couldn’t stand; my legs had turned to liquid, and my forehead started to throb.

  My vision blurred, cleared, and then blurred again. I started to shiver, and a wave of nausea passed over me. I alternately sneezed and yawned. My heart felt as if it was skipping beats. I lay back down, fell into a feverish sleep, and tumbled into a place of shadows and shapes undulating in the darkness.

  I sat up, or dreamed that I had. The plateau took on a reddish glow. I sprang to my feet, no longer troubled by the scorpion’s sting, and wandered around the eerie moonlit landscape. My footsteps made no sound as they fell. A fox appeared out of nowhere, standing not far from the edge of the cliff, and slowly turned its head, its snout pointing toward a lone tree scarred by lightning, before fading into the shadows.

  In the next instant, a gust of wind, real or imagined, blew with such intensity that I was knocked off my feet. When I sat up, the lone tree was gone. So was my fever. I walked over to where the fox had stood, less than ten feet from the precipice. To my amazement, the tiny shoot of a plant poked up through the surface of the stone, directly in front of me, and grew rapidly, as if time had sped up. A long, slender, trumpetlike stalk emerged. A thought passed through my mind: The trumpet announces the coming. . . .

  The top of the stalk opened and blossomed, revealing within its petals an old book—thin, with a reddish leather cover and a metal clasp. Slowly I reached for it. . . .

  ELEVEN

  * * *

  I awoke muttering the words, “Thirsty . . . thirsty.” Emerging from the dream or vision, I felt my cooler forehead, then reached for my canteen. As I quenched my thirst, the dream monopolized my attention. It had to be here—beneath my feet. But the journal wasn’t buried at my feet. It was waiting in the mountain, hidden in a cave, like a sacred source of water.

  Still feeling shaky from the night’s ordeal, I crawled to the cliff edge and peered over once again. Now I knew what to look for. My heart raced as I spied a deep indentation about eight feet below the outcropping—perhaps the entrance to a cave.

  Socrates had once said, “In combat and in life, if you start thinking too much, you’re dead.” The time for action had come. With this resolution, my doubts lifted. I sat for a few moments, breathing slowly and deeply, as Socrates had taught me—not just taking in air but inhaling light, energy, strength. When I felt ready, I shouldered my pack and swung over the cliff edge.

  For a few seconds, I dangled precariously on the promontory of rock, the indentation about two feet beneath my boots. I could see clearly from this point that the shadow below was definitely the opening to a cave. Just below the cave entrance was a slight outcropping. If I released my grip, could I land there? My gymnast’s instincts said yes.

  I started swinging gently back and forth. One more swing, and my fingers released. I arched, and landed on the outcropping. But the weight of the knapsack nearly pulled me backward into space. Throwing my hips forward, I regained my balance, then crawled into the cave, into the mountain.

  Exhilarated, I felt my heart pounding like a drum the way it used to in the gym after I’d landed a risky new dismount from the high bar. Scanning my body for any pain or injury, I found none. So I stood up, slightly crouched, and looked around, thinking, Socrates chose this place, hidden from anyone but birds of prey—where the hawk soars—protected from the weather.

  Dropping to my hands and knees, I crawled forward, feeling my way deeper into the dimly lit cave. As my eyes slowly adjusted, I saw something resting on a stone shelf. I drew closer. It was the journal. My eyes filled with tears as a mixture of fatigue and elation washed through me, renewing my faith in myself and in the
wonder of life. I reached out and clasped the journal with both hands to assure myself it was no illusion. I felt the soul of the ancient woman who’d entrusted it to Socrates so many years before, and something of his soul as well. I hugged it to my chest gently, the way one might hold an infant. I had actually found it.

  I allowed myself to savor a few moments of elation, of fulfillment.

  I knew that such moments do not last. “Emotions pass like the weather,” Soc had once reminded me. That sense of pure joy persisted for about ten seconds.

  Now, I thought, all I have to do is find a way back—

  That’s when I realized that I’d been so intent on getting into the cave that I hadn’t considered how I was going to get out of it. It had been relatively easy, if nerve jangling, to drop down; gravity had done most of the work. But now I had to climb out.

  Leaving the journal where I’d found it, I crawled back to the cave opening and looked up. Now the outcropping eight or nine feet above, an overhang protruding two feet out from a sheer rock face with no discernible handholds, seemed insurmountable. Maybe impossible.

  I wouldn’t allow myself to consider that it might be, at least for me, unclimbable. But after pondering it, I had to face the possibility that I could die trapped in the cave, or from a fall while trying to climb out. A riddle, I thought. Okay, what would Papa Joe advise me to do? Or that rascal Socrates, who got me into this fix?

  Postponing a decision, or any impulsive action, I sat at the cave’s mouth, my feet dangling over the edge, leaving the journal and knapsack well behind me. I gazed at the panorama before me, watching a hawk soaring in a spiral, riding a thermal updraft in the distance. I reached back and picked up the journal, wondering if it might offer needed inspiration, or the key to getting out—