Too Close to the Wind

by Richard Attree

  “Nobody said it’d be easy, mate. But y’made it, like I knew y’would. Welcome to our Shangri-La.”

  We sat outside his cave hut and he introduced me to the tribe. There were about thirty of them, mostly middle-aged, some like him as old as the hills, plus a few children and dogs. Mandu told me that his people, the Karjaganujaru, had been living in the area for twenty-thousand years. He was trying to maintain their connection to this ancient landscape but the young people were drifting back to the towns. Those in the camp still lived the traditional way for part of the year and went ‘Walkabout’ for the rest of the time. The time was indeed right to find him there, he told me, smiling.

  I was welcomed as an honoured guest in the camp. They shared what little they had and Mandu even gave me his own cave-hut. The tribe treated me like royalty and I was intrigued to find out why …

  When I first met Mandu in the library he was sitting there, waiting for me. How was that possible? After our typed conversation, I’d speculated that he was like an Old Testament prophet waiting for the Messiah (me) to arrive and save his tribe. Now, when I turned up out of the blue at his camp in the middle of the desert, again he seemed to be expecting me. It seemed as if he and I were another example of what the Master called: ‘gravitational attraction’—individuals whose orbits were inescapably linked.

  That night, as we sat around the fire, I asked him to explain what he’d meant in the library when he’d typed: “I have been expecting you, Nick. The Master has sent you to help my people ...”

  For a while he said nothing. Silence enveloped us. I gazed into the fire, watching the sparks fly up into the night sky. A shooting star blazed across the blackness. Way out in the desert a wild dog’s cry punctuated the stillness. Then, as we sat in that remote, infinite space, Mandu told me how he met Alejandro Langer.

  Many years ago, when they were both young men, the Master hiked into this wilderness to find a shaman like the one his father had written about. Mandu taught Alejandro about his culture and their mythology: the Dreamtime, Creation, the Ancestor Beings, the Laws of Existence. The shaman introduced him to the consciousness-raising Plant, and they experienced it together several times.

  The Master told Mandu about his Group—a ‘virtual tribe’ of freethinkers financed by Alejandro’s inherited wealth. The Group’s goal was to fulfil Dr Ludwig Langer’s ideals: the evolution of our species to the next level. Mandu wasn’t interested in the Master’s lofty objectives for humanity, but he was worried about his own tribe’s survival. Alejandro told him that one day he’d send somebody else to study with him and that this person would be able to help his people.

  Mandu kept in touch the same way I did: via the Group’s website, and recently he’d received word that the new student was on his way. Alejandro told Mandu his name and where to meet him: in the library in my hometown. Now here I was.

  The next day Mandu began my initiation into his tribe. He scrutinised my surfy dreadlocks and pseudo-Aboriginal tattoos, smirked, and told me that his mission was to give me back my identity. He was going to show me: “who ya really are, Nick, instead of who yer pretending to be.”

  He began by explaining the Dreamtime, drawing diagrams in the sand with a stick—pictures of their cosmology, their understanding of the world and its creation. Dreamtime is the beginning of time, when the Ancestor Beings created the universe and the lifeforms that inhabit it. It’s the beginning of Knowledge and the Laws of Existence. For survival, these laws must be observed. The Dreaming connects an individual to the accumulated knowledge of the Ancestors through rituals and trance-like states produced by psychoactive catalysts, such as the Plant.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this stuff. The blackfellas in my hometown occasionally spoke about the ‘old ways’ and Robo had encouraged me to delve deeper into my roots, but it had never been properly explained to me. I’d always thought of Aboriginal myths as elaborate ghost stories, fairytales, never as something real. For Mandu Dreamtime was as real as TV, movies, the internet—a ‘separate reality’, just as they are. White folk pressed a switch on a remote control, clicked an icon, and pictures appeared on their screen. His people smoked some Plant seeds, entered the Dreaming, and connected to the Ancestors. He promised to show me how this worked … as soon as the time was right.

  I asked Mandu about the package of seeds he’d given me in the library. He told me it was one of the Master’s tests—to prepare me for my initiation into the Dreaming. I’d survived the test and I’d found him, so now I was ready for my next challenge.

  It wasn’t quite as simple as that for me. Yes, I’d survived the test, but Robo hadn’t. He was an innocent victim, collateral damage in the Master’s mission for me. I was swept up in a maelstrom of conflicting emotions: guilt over Robo’s death, anger at the Master, but eagerness to learn more from this ancient shaman.

  I decided the time wasn’t right to tell him about Robo, but of course I’d already experienced the Plant once before—in the rainforest bordering Haiti. So I told him my own story: how I’d met the Master, how I’d travelled to the Dominican Republic and learnt about Voodoo from Nicole, and how we’d smoked the Plant together.

  Mandu nodded and told me it was another of the Master’s tests. I wasn’t sure how much he knew about Nicole, so I told him about her art—how her paintings had the power to protect or control people. I showed him her portrait of the two of us: ‘The Kangaroo Kid and his Voodoo Child’.

  He stared at it for a long time, nodding and muttering under his breath. A smile lit up his face, gradually, like a sunrise. He looked up, and I was bathed in the warmth of that smile.

  “Thank you for showin’ me this, Nick. I see what it means f’ya, and I understand ya better now I’ve seen it. It means something for me too. I see a system of knowledge that’s like our own.”

  “You mean you can see connections between Vodou and Dreamtime?”

  He paused, lost in thought, weighing up options before replying.

  “I can show ya these connections if y’like mate?"

  I nodded. He leaned in closer to me.

  “Tomorrow I’ll take ya to a place that’s sacred for our people. A place where no Whitefella has ever bin …”

  He spoke softly, almost whispering in my ear:

  “There’s a cave, where the Ancestors are restin’ …”

  I said nothing. The silence was spellbinding.

  “The cave has paintings like yer one!”

  My eyes widened in surprise. He leaned in, even closer.

  “That’s how I know I can trust ya, Nick, and why I’ll take ya there.”

  He looked at me. I was struck, again, by how he shared the Master’s piercing gaze.

  “We’ll take the Plant together there, in the cave. The time is right.”

  He smiled—an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. Then he winked at me.

  The next morning the two of us set out on a hike deep into the Bungle Bungles. Our destination was an ancient meteorite crater at the centre of the tribe’s land. I was half a century younger than Mandu and wearing hi-tech walking boots, while he was barefoot, but I struggled to keep up with him.

  After a couple of hours we stopped to drink at a waterhole in another canyon. Cactus plants were growing there—strange shapes with human-like limbs. Mandu took his machete and chopped off a cactus hand. He put it on a rock, split it open and showed me what was inside.

  “This is it, Nick. What the Whitefella is after. What he want to steal from us: the Plant!”

  He dug the tip of his knife into the soft cactus flesh and extracted some familiar brown seed pellets. I stared at them and the knot in my stomach tightened. I coughed nervously and swallowed hard. Mandu looked at me and asked what was wrong. There was no hiding from his gaze. The time was right for a confession, so I told him what had happened to Robo on April Fool’s Day. He listened carefully, without reproach or sympathy, and simply asked how many seeds we’d eaten. I told him I couldn’t remember exactly, no more than
half a dozen. He nodded, sadly.

  “That’s why the Whitefella must never have the Plant, Nick. They want t’make money from it, but they don’t understand the danger if y’take it wrong. If y’take it right it’ll put yer head straight. If y’don’t, it’s like a snake—not dangerous, but it can kill ya!”

  He gathered some pellets, put them in a pouch, and we resumed our journey. As we walked he told me more about the Plant. His people had been using it for thousands of years, but not as a recreational drug. No, for them it was a ‘medicine for the head’—a cure for adverse mental states, as well as a way to enter the Dreaming and connected with the Ancestors. But there were also risks attached.

  The people who were trying to acquire it: businessmen, politicians, even a multinational pharmaceutical company, knew about the beneficial properties but they knew nothing of the dangers: panic attacks, neuroses, perhaps even schizophrenia. Other people were after it as well—bad people: criminals who just wanted to push it on the black market as the latest psychedelic trip. They’d all be putting people’s sanity, perhaps even lives, at risk just to make a quick buck. They were disrespecting something Mandu’s tribe considered sacred. In his opinion, white people shouldn’t be messing with the Plant at all.

  I looked at him and shrugged.

  “No worries, Nick” he said, winking at me, “like I bin telling ya, yer not really white, mate. The Plant is in yer blood ...”

  “Yes, it probably will be, in a few hours” a voice-in-my-head whispered.

  “... but yer mate, Robo, now he is a white kid?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “... and that’s why he shoulda bin more careful.”

  I told him how experienced Robo was with all sorts of stuff. How it was him who introduced me to acid, for instance, at uni. Mandu replied that the “stuff” Robo knew about was white kids’ drugs. They were different from the Plant. It was more powerful and potentially more toxic, depending on how much you took, as well as the age and state of the cactus. You needed to be aware of these things to take it safely:

  “Yeah, mate. The stuff Robo knew about is chemical. The Whitefella make it in his pill factories. It should be the same every time y’buy it from ‘im. The Plant only grows here, on our lands. We’re the only people who know how t’take it safe. Yer mate took too much, too quickly, and he couldn’t handle it right.”

  I tried to explain that it was just one of those things, that Robo was going for a massive back loop and shit can happen in those situations, but he wasn’t having any of it:

  “So, how good is yer mate normally with these loopy things? When ‘is head’s straight?” he asked.

  I told him that Robo had been looping for a decade and had taught me how to do them.

  “Yeah, so there y’go Nick—shit don’t usually ‘appen to ‘im, even when he’s ‘angin upside down, unless ‘is head’s working different.”

  He chuckled to himself, ruefully, and explained how you had to respect the plant’s powers. You had to earn the right to enjoy its benefits by gradually increasing the amount and monitoring the effect.

  Suddenly I had a flashback to my wave-ride in Esperance. I tried to describe it to Mandu—how I could see all the possible lines with absolute clarity like I was watching myself in a slow-mo video.

  He nodded and told me I was lucky I could handle such a big dose. It proved the domino dingo was more black than white! His tribe only used it sparingly and for specific rituals. They collected the cactus plants personally, so they knew their origin and potency.

  This was why his people had such a problem with alcohol—the white man’s drug of choice. It was never a part of their own culture, so they abused it:

  “The booze is Whitefella’s poison for us blackfellas. It makes us weak ‘n sick. It rots our minds and then we’re just pissed Abo fools. That’s how they want us to stay …”

  He tailed off into bitter mumbling—the first time I’d seen him angry and less than lucid. But he didn’t slow his walking pace. Again I struggled to keep up as we climbed the steep trail to the crater rim.

  Eventually, after walking for most of the day, we descended into the crater and stopped outside a cave. Mandu announced that we’d arrived and must prepare our camp before it got dark. He bustled around collecting firewood, lighting a fire, boiling water for tea, unrolling our sleeping bags, and getting us ready to spend the night in the mouth of the cave.

  When everything was in order we sat down beside the fire. He took the cactus pellets from his pouch, crushed a couple into a powder, mixed them into his tea and drank it. I did the same. We sat there in silence for a while, listening to the gentle moaning of the wind.

  Then, as dusk descended, he stood up abruptly and announced that the time was right. He entered the cave and beckoned me to follow him.

  Time jumps. As darkness encloses us I’m aware that I’m entering a special place, a shrine. Mandu switches on a torch as we crawl through a narrow rock passage deeper into the cave interior.

  Eventually, it opens out into a much larger space. Bats are circling above us, their strange cries echoing from the walls. Mandu shines his torch on them and for the first time speaks:

  “This place is sacred f’my people” he whispers. “The spirits of the Ancestors are restin’ here.”

  He pans the light around and now I see that we’re in a vast, cathedral-like space. Stalactites hang from the roof far above us like enormous icicles. Bizarre stalagmites rise from the floor like smaller versions of the Pinnacles’ spires. We stand there in silence for a moment while I take in the scale of the place. Then he speaks again:

  “No Whitefella has been here before. Not even the Master. Yer the first to see it who’s not one of my tribe.”

  He allows his words to sink in for a moment, and then suddenly, shockingly, he switches off the torch, plunging us into darkness. I jump with fear and he puts his hand on my shoulder to reassure me.

  “Now I’ll show ya why I brought ya here ...”

  He pauses, and then with the timing and panache of a showman, he switches the light back on and illuminates the wall in front of us.

  It’s covered in paintings—hundreds of them, making an astonishingly complex mural, like an Aboriginal Sistine chapel.

  I gasp, and gaze in awe for a long moment.

  “Now y’see why I trusted ya, Nick?”

  “—” I’m not sure what to say.

  “Why I chose ya t’be the first outsider t’see these paintings?”

  I’m overcome with gratitude. I can imagine all the eminent anthropologists and art historians who’d give anything to be standing there, and I wonder if I’m worthy of his trust.

  He moves the torchlight over the paintings, pointing out details, objects:

  “Y’see the connections, mate? How our system of knowledge is like the painting y’showed me?”

  Time jumps. I look at the cave wall more closely, and suddenly I understand. It’s as if Mandu has switched on a light in my brain and illuminated whole areas that have previously been dark.

  In a flash of awareness I see Mandu’s ‘connections’—the connections between Voodoo and Dreamtime; the connections that link all knowledge; the links that connect things; the things that are ‘out there’ in the world and the things that are inside our head, and where they meet: the interface between subject and object. It’s a moment of rational awareness, not a hallucination. The full effects of the Plant have yet to kick in and work their magic on me.

  You had to look beneath the surface, beyond style, to see the connections between these ancient cave paintings and Nicole’s work. There were people and objects depicted in the cave, just as there were in Nicole’s paintings, and they were quite different stylistically … but the relationship between subject and object was supernaturally highlighted in both.

  The choice, and placing, of objects in space around the human subjects was crucial in Nicole’s work. Her art was spiritual. She aimed to harness the power of spirits to crea
te ‘power objects’ that had meaning for her subjects, or even protected them. It looked as if the same thing was going on in these cave paintings. The subjects: people and animals, were surrounded by objects that looked as if they were flying through space: a spear, a rock, cactus plants ...

  Mandu points to the latter: “Y’already know what they are, Nick, but what d’ya make of this ... ?”

  He directs the torch into a corner of the cave he’s previously left dark. There, at the very edge of the painting, are some objects in the sky that look remarkably like spaceships, flying saucers, whatever terminology you want to borrow from popular science fiction.

  I stare at the cave wall, speechless, dizzy. I sit down on the floor and say nothing. Neither of us speaks for a long time. Quite how long I’m not sure.

  Time jumps. Now the paintings are animating, coming to life! Objects start to move. Mandu begins to scrape painted objects from the mural and liberate them. He does this with the elaborate care and skill of an expert mime artist. Soon the cave is filled with painted objects flying through space.

  “This is the Dreaming, Nick.”

  His voice seems to come from everywhere at once: in my ear, six feet from me, from the edge of the universe … I’m not sure how long I remain there, spellbound, saturated, dissolving, vanishing into dark, empty space ...

  Time jumps. Now we’re in darkness, outside the cave. I have no idea how we got here. No recollection of leaving that space. But the paintings are still with me, in my head. Has it been a dream? I don’t think so, but now I’m exhausted. I’m lying in my sleeping bag, gazing at the dying embers of a fire. Drifting. Asleep.

  Time jumps. It’s the next morning. I’m still asleep. The molecules of psychoactive cactus have dissolved in my bloodstream. I’ve left the alternative reality, the Dreaming, and returned to normality.