Isinglass

by Martin Edmond

  The Bradshaws are now more usually black and red: a deep mulberry colour with blank spaces where other colours might once have been. It is difficult to carbon date them because the pigment is so old it has literally become part of the rock. Some say the reds and blacks remain vivid because the paintings have been colonised by bacteria and fungi, that the pigments somehow initiated an ongoing symbiotic relationship between the black fungi and the red bacteria. They may be the age of, or older than, the Ishango bone; and are reminiscent of figures found elsewhere in rock carvings, in southern and central Africa and also the Sahara: symmetrical, long-legged, elegant humans wearing elaborate conical headdresses, striding out to hunt and coming home to dance.

  The Bradshaws have intricate knotted tails dangling from the crotch and the waist and the armpits and the ears, and they seem to dance on their rock faces: in circles and lines, passing objects from one to the other they represent the gift of ceremony; and the sharing system that ceremony celebrates. Early European observers, like Bradshaw, were inclined to speculate that they were made by people from some lost civilisation from over the sea, whereas today it is believed that the Gwion Gwion are survivals of an Indigenous tradition that has existed for a very long time, still persists, and is now in renaissance.

  And we also know that the seas on the Kimberley coast, as in many parts of the world, were much lower previously than they are now, by as much as eighty or even a hundred metres. What have we lost? What sleeps beneath the ocean waves? Are there drowned cities like Isinglass lying in ruins just off the littoral? Perhaps, I thought, giving my romanticism full rein, Isinglass is the Ur-city, the place before all other places, where humans came together for the first time to make of themselves more than the sum of our parts. Perhaps Ishango stretched from the eastern shores of Africa to the Western Australian coast and included the countries of India and South-East Asia in the land of Once-Begun.

  Perhaps Thursday was both an ordinary seaman lost off some modern freighter and also a lone survivor of that ancient cataclysm somehow translated into the now. Or, which amounts to the same thing, one of Jaynes’ bicamerals who could remember that which the rest of us have forgotten. This is an absurd conceit, but it is also one of those ideas that, having once occurred, it is impossible to resist exploring further.

  I did not hear from C again for some time; and then, just as I was about to take up a two-month writing fellowship in another country, during which I would be able to engage further in extravagant speculations such as these, an email came. She was sailing in Alaskan waters; the note was written during a brief sojourn ashore at Homer in Cook Inlet south of Anchorage. The part that concerns me was brief and to the point: Lee has got Thursday talking! In Bahasa, or at least a version of same (seems to be an eastern form). He’s told Lee what the painting was about and Lee has been taping the conversations and will get them translated—watch this space!—love, C.

  III

  Isinglass

  We came through the Gate of the Crossing in a year that is not remembered and will never be forgotten. There were maybe two hundred of us, the seventeen families who have endured even as each individual therefrom has gone and returned a thousand thousand times. Thin as whips, black as the night upon our skins, really starving, we waited a long time on the original shore for such a day as this one was: the incessant winds ceased to blow, the sea lay dead-flat calm beneath the ineffable blue of the sky, the islands we longed for almost close enough to touch and the rumoured far coast nearer than it had ever been before or would be again; yet distant as the clouds that massed like future dreams along the horizon. And then we knew we must go; for the ancestors had told us this day would come and what we should do upon it.

  Hunger had driven us down into that bare cove where we stripped the shellfish from the rocks, plundered the nests of seabirds on the high crumbling cliffs, dredged from the sands every tough morsel we could eat and pulled out of the waters of the bay with our nets and spears all the fish we could catch; and so it was that we knew we must die or else set out in our frail boats for those islands from which smokes of fires rose, and then onwards perhaps to that other land which was sometimes there, sometimes not: like something we had conjured up out of our own heads, a place made of hunger and despair then transformed by those very longings into their opposite, a place of abundance and felicity, a place where our children could grow fat and our old people go garrulous and easeful into the earth.

  We were a remnant, an already decimated people caught between two fears: the fear of the brown denuded land behind us, its jagged peaks and howling desolate valleys where the bones of animals and the bones of our own lost ones lay; and the fear before us, fear of the sea, fear of drowning, fear of the grey voracious sharks that slid like ghosts through the blue water. One fear had in it nothing but the certainty of extinction while the other, more awe-full by far, because it was unknown, was lined with something else that was the opposite of dread, something silvery, something that would one day be called hope.

  On that day of all days, the day of the crossing, that remembered unremembered day, it was not as if we went down to the sea resolute and calm, determined upon a course of action that did not admit of doubt; no, it was otherwise. We were full of trembling; we kept going down and coming back like a wave that breaks upon a shore and then retreats, again and again, a wave of people unable to leave and unable to remain, drawn down to the sea by hope and then impelled back to the shore by fear, wave upon wave. Even though we knew there was no other way, even though we knew we must go, something still held us to that old dry land, that drear shore: the bones of our ancestors perhaps, or the bones of our children who had died as we crossed the mountains to the sea, the bones of those whom we would leave behind because they were too weak to make the journey or because they were dead and lived on only in us.

  Resolution, such as it was, lay behind us; it had been spoken in the night around the fires. One after another the old ones, both the dead and the not-yet-dead, spoke, urging us to remember them and yet go on, telling us again and again what we already knew: there was only one choice for us, one path only, and that path lay upon the sea. But now, at the moment of embarkation, even those who had spoken their consent loudest, who were most eloquent in acclamation, the most convinced, could not make that last breach, could not, it seemed, set forth on the godly sea.

  Until one man, the most daring among us, the most reckless or the most desperate—with a cry that was heartfelt, that came from deep inside of him, a cry like the land itself crying through him, a cry of grief as much as fear but more than that a cry of abandonment, of abandonment to desire—left our huddled masses yearning and wretched upon the shore and went down to his boat and launched it into the shallows and climbed aboard and arrowed out then waited offshore, calling to his kin, his woman and his children, exhorting them to join him and cursing them if they would not, saying he would go on alone; until they waded out, the woman with a babe in her arms, a boy and a girl, the girl older, waded out and joined him in that vessel made of reeds and sticks; and then he turned the prow away from the land and without looking back once began to paddle out into the blue; but the woman did look back, lamenting, and we heard her eerie high keening, mixed with the cries of her older children and the thin mewling of the baby, drift back upon the waters to the land and then fade.

  So then others among us, emboldened perhaps, perhaps ashamed, also took to our boats and launched them, and we went out in a flotilla of black like so many leaves cast on the water, calling to each other, praising each other as heroes and maligning each other as fools—anything to keep our courage up—while those who were too frail or too sick or too old, and those who could not find it in themselves to exchange the hopeless fear for the one that had some weird fugitive sliver of hope within it, fell down on the shore we had abandoned and wept bitter tears, as we thought, or tore at their flesh with stones and shells so the blood flowed down into the sands, or beat their fists upon the rocks until they
bled also, mixing their doomed blood with the doomed shore upon which they had chosen to die.

  While we who had triumphed over one fear embraced the other, and the silvery hope concealed therein, and now began to call out to each other in an intoxication of mad bravery, urging ourselves onwards towards those low black islands ahead where, we told each other, there would be springs of water and deer grazing, where fruit or nut trees grew in small lush valleys, where the cliffs would be home to seabirds whose sweet nutritious eggs we would eat, and the bays full of fish we would net or spear or even catch in our hands … And so we went, telling ourselves things we knew could not be true, saying them over and over so that they might become true and also so that the probable truth, that we were as doomed as those we had left behind on the blasted shore, among whom were those old ones who had spoken loudest and longest in favour of our going, should not prevail.

  Distance is delusive; it is never sure, and the distance that must be covered to reach an unknown destination is the most delusive of all. We thought that, if our boats lasted, we would reach the nearest of those black islands in a morning perhaps; but the sun rose high above the beaten mirror of the sea, wherein we saw our own starved faces grimacing back at us like skulls, and then began to decline into the west, and still they floated out of reach. Were they closer than they had been before? Or still so far away? Were we mad already? Were we numbered among the predestined dead?

  Some of our boats, less well made or less well sailed, fell behind; their crews called out for help but no one listened, no one turned back, not even for a moment—that would have meant certain death. And when, as happened more times than anyone wants to remember, one of those lagging craft foundered and we heard the screams of those taken by sharks diminishing across the water and then gurgling to silence, we did not look back, we did not even look at each other, we just dug our paddles grimly into the water and urged our boats onwards: for what else could we do?

  And then, after another eternity had passed, the lead man called out to say that he could see among the crevices of the black land ahead an opening, a bay perhaps; that we were near enough now to see that what we had come for was indeed to be allowed us, that if we stayed strong we would reach it before night fell; and it was not until long red tassels of light from the setting sun lay heaped dishevelled and luxurious, like a woman’s hair let down for the night, across the burnished sea, that we came close enough to make out features on that nearest island; and then we saw it was a mirror of the desolate land we had left behind. Bare rocky dry gulfs, valleys of bones, treeless slopes, waterless plains: like something vomited from the gullet of a god of stone, with a stone heart and a mind that thought only upon stones.

  We would have howled out in despair, we would have wept, we would perhaps, some of us, have leapt into the sea and given ourselves to the sharks, if it had not been for another cry from one of the lead boats: Look! she said. Look there! Creatures, swimming animals! Our strange fleet was rounding a point into a bay, the shades were falling rapidly, it was hard to see in the gathering gloom; but yes, she was right, there in the water, like seals or dogs, we saw sleek black upraised round heads swimming away from us, some small and some large; and thinking they were animals that we could kill and eat for food, those who still had the energy raised a great shout, we found strength we did not know we had, our small boats leapt forward into the calm waters of the bay, we gave chase in the delirious hope of meat that we could cook around our fires on that otherwise barren land.

  Nothing could have prepared us for what happened next. It was as the old ones said when they were trying to persuade us to go on without them: you will see things that have never before been seen; you will beggar belief with the feasts the world will bring to your sight. The creatures we pursued swam more swiftly than seemed possible, and instead of swimming away to sea, as we expected, they swam towards the shore; and when they reached it, transformed: we saw them in the shady dusk, in the ambiguous air of approaching night, grow legs and arms and breasts and bellies and buttocks. We saw the water streaming down the black hair on their heads, the hair on their bodies, under their arms and between their legs, streaming. We saw these brown-skinned women, for that is what they were, gather their children about them and then run, as fleet as deer, up the sand and disappear into the tumbled rocks above the shoreline.

  We saw them and did not understand how we could follow them into the darkness of a land we did not know. Instead, we beached our boats, pulled them up above the water’s edge, took from them the few things we had left to eat, and upon that unknown shore ate our last food, drank our last water and then, without even trying to build a fire—for where and how would we find the wood?—lay down in our skins lamenting for those we had left behind, those the sharks had taken, even lamenting, so strained and exhausted we were, those of us the sharks would take tomorrow.

  Some of us slept. Others sat up all that moonless night, watching and wondering: watching the stars blazing and falling; watching the sea rocking upwards in the bowl of the bay and then rocking down again; listening with ears tuned by fear for any human sounds that might come from the bare hills behind the bay, as if the men who must inevitably accompany the women might at any moment be approaching, silently as they would, with their axes and knives, their spears and clubs, ready to fall upon us in the early dawn and take from us all that we had, which was only our lives; but how would they know that?

  Yet when the first faint light, like a glimmering into view of a shadow that steps from the blackness to greet us—the ghost of a father or a mother, the ghost of an ancestor—appeared on the dome of the sky; when that orange stain, like burnt umber or smeared ochre, grew in the east, no sound came from above, no wild skirling yells rang upon the air, no rain of stones fell; and nor could we see, as our anxious eyes scanned the ramparts of the bay, any movement there. Even though we thought, indeed we knew in our bellies, that they must be watching us just as we were watching for them; and so it proved.

  When daylight came, certain individuals, all men, wanted to go up there to look for the strangers, to find out who they were and how they subsisted; these men also thought they might perhaps capture some of the women and take them away with us, because the losses we had sustained in leaving, and along the way, had left us with fewer women than there were men; and fewer children too, but that could be remedied, these men argued, if we took some of the stranger women. Others advised caution. They said we did not know the island, did not know what snares there might be, did not even know enough to avoid an ambush if one was set for us. And what about their men? If there were children, as there were, there must be men. It would be far better, these others said, to look for food and water along the shore, to repair our boats, to reprovision them for the journey onwards: since it was clear we could not stay in this land, starveling as it was, inhabited as it already was.

  We were disputing thus upon the shore, where our black boats were drawn above the tide line, when one of the sharpest-eyed among the children cried out and pointed up to the rocks above us, and we glimpsed there a human form, a brown-skinned, black-haired woman, it seemed, clambering back up the hill as if she had been observing us, as if she might even have been listening to us: though how she could understand our speech we did not know. She was like a gazelle, so swiftly did she climb and so soon did she vanish from view; but the sight of her resolved our dispute, at least for those of us who wanted to make contact with the strangers and find out who they were: with a yell they leapt up the slope after her, ignoring we who felt that this could easily be a ruse that might lead to an ambush. We were wrong about the ambush, though right, perhaps, about the ruse: for no sooner had those rough aggressive men of ours reached the place where the woman was last seen than they stopped and gave forth cries of astonishment and beckoned to the rest of us to come and see.

  It was an offering left upon a flat rock overlooking our landing place: many long strips of dried shark meat laid upon a bed made of a green he
rb we had not seen before; and some kind of round dark fruit which we also did not know, growing in clusters on a stalk which had been cut away whole from whatever tree it came from. We were so very hungry yet we did not fall upon this food and devour it as we wanted to do. Because there were so many of us and thus, despite the generosity of the gift, barely enough to go around. Because, too, we were unsure: what did it mean? Was it a trap? We knew about certain poisons that could be disguised in food. Did these people too? Why would they give us something that must be precious to them when we were just unknown vagrants on that bare shore? And so we disputed over that offering as we had disputed before over whether or not to pursue the stranger women. Indeed, so suspicious we were, in such an extremity of doubt, that some among us even said the food was given so that we would argue with each other, as we were, and in those divisions become vulnerable to attack, which might at any minute come.

  And yet, while we talked and gesticulated and marched back and forth, one of our children, the same far-sighted one who had seen the woman up on the hill in the first place, came forward and plucked one of the round dark fruit and put it in her mouth and ate it, with many sounds of pleasure; took from her mouth the pip and sucked the remains of the flesh from that; and then tucked the seed itself away inside the pouch she wore at her waist for later; while we watched to see if she would scream and clutch her stomach, if her face would contort and fluids run from her nose and ears and eyes, if she would curl up and die; but she did not.