The Forsaken Wilderness, page 10
‘Worry not about him!’ she proclaimed with a graceful swish of the hands. ‘The intelligence that dwells down there will see to his accommodation.’
‘Intelligence?’ I stumbled.
‘As to its nature,’ she stipulated, ‘I cannot as yet tell you what it is.’ She shook somewhat agitatedly. ‘But then perhaps you have already had occasion to encounter one of its spawns.’
‘You mean to tell me,’ I quivered, glancing down into the glowing pit with only my peripheral vision. ‘That whatever it is that’s down there has a settlement of some sort? An accommodation? As you called it?’
‘Not exactly.’ She gathered her limbs together. ‘You see, in our terms it would translate to something closer to an installation, not merely a settlement.’
‘I see…’ I murmured, retreating my gaze from the lure of its light. ‘And what I glimpsed down there?’ I pointed at the water body behind the dim, shabby entrance from which we had emerged. ‘In the lake?’
‘That’s not a lake, my boy…’ her eyelids crinkled into a faint smile. ‘For God’s sake, that’s not even drinking water you swam in.’
‘Th-then?’ I stuttered.
‘Containing fluid for a vessel. Didn’t you meet it?’
‘Meet it?’
Her craggy features grew deadly still as if a heavy thundercloud has passed it. Her jowls now started trembling, her emaciated arms again began to jitter—she caught hold of my hand and began to guide me back down the precipitous walkway of the mine-shaft we had earlier climbed with such confidence as might be mistaken for idiocy.
At the stalactite-ridden entranceway to this shelf, she halted a moment, caught some of her breath and began to look back above the deep crater that still shone, by now a burning amber colour hue which drew shadows from the features of the descending walls.
‘We will hear from him soon…’ she nodded to herself.
‘How can you be so sure?’ I turned my neck back and forth to emphasise an act of banishment that was unveiling before our very eyes. ‘Have any of you managed to go down there all this while?’ I asked.
She fidgeted at her belt-pouch, then removed a rolled cordage of nylon dynamic rope from the inside pocket of her windcheater to elaborate on a rusty belay device fastened around her waist. ‘I’ve tried,’ she whispered. ‘God knows I’ve tried. We had an instance of one of our brethren,’ she rattled out while pointing about, almost in the manner of a geriatric tour guide, ‘who attempted to bungee jump. With the use of this very kind of elastic roping.’
‘Did he make it?’
‘If he did, we’ll find out. Same goes for the Professor.’
‘Is that why you had us come up here?’ I asked, before she could turn upon her heels to exit the mineshaft. ‘To act as guinea pigs?’
‘You came up here of your own accord.’ She turned, ever so gently—the veins that bulged out of her wrists and forearms stolidly tightening up.
‘Come to think of it, why did you have me go down there into the water to see what I saw?’ I thought.
‘It is a sort of initiation rite,’ she replied. ‘Merely a custom.’
‘For what? What is this, some sort of cult?’
The word no doubt frightened her.
‘The Sarmoung brotherhood? The Central Asian Mystic Society, Theosophical Taoist and Tantric Buddhist Studies, a Masonic order that knows the secret of some remote civilization? One of those demonic tribes in communion with the other world.’
‘Your nonsense becomes you,’ she said. ‘It is to be expected of one who has spent his livelihood blasting open mountains.’
‘How do you know that?’ I shrunk from her in an instant.
She hesitated to form an adequate answer, only her right arm trembled in reply.
‘Who is that old man out there?’ I demanded, looking out of the entranceway. ‘And why is he going to die?’
‘We have known all about you,’ she clenched her jaw. ‘The Professor, Shera, Swaami Shree Shree Gurudev Atal-Anivaarya Natija, the firm for which you work, Ms Pratyusha Negi and the Institute. Everything.’ She spat out a tooth.
‘How so?’ I beckoned.
‘The waters,’ she breathed faintly. ‘That containing fluid.’ She began to chew on her gums. ‘You heard the sound?’
‘Of what?’
‘Of the horn.’
The sight of that swollen shell being by played by the saadhu wandered out of my recent memory.
‘A kind of aural morse code,’ she stated. ‘Can be heard by the precious few. Through the minutest vibrations only the truly sensitized can grasp. We had been in communication with the Professor from Uttarkashi, you see. Had been able to relay certain commands through Swaami Gurudev.’
‘I thought the old man outside said that he doesn’t exist?’
‘Oh, he exists alright…’ she smiled. ‘He is well and in good health. Occupies a fine house in Haridwar, an ancestral property near the Rajaji National Park. He knew of this peak. Had even attempted to climb it once many years ago, but failed…miserably. Even has a malfunctioning knee to show for it. Which is why he had you make the toil.’
‘Nonsense…’ I protested. ‘He had asked the Professor to mark a rock at the summit where a temple was to be built.’
‘And who would build the temple?’
‘An engineer?’ Just then it dawned on me.
‘But as you can see young man, the temple has already been built,’ she murmured.
‘In the name of the queen goddess…’
‘And who do you think is that queen goddess?’
Her entire rumpled visage began to now approach the countenance of the Tree. Her caterpillar creases and stony wrinkles assumed the aspect of a divine personage touched with a sort of unerring command over all things living and dead.
‘Hah…’ her mouth flew open in a burst of cackles. ‘Not me, I can assure you!’ Her wrinkles formed concentric semi-circular smiles all along her cheekbones. ‘I may be old, but I’m not that old…’ her neck dropped into a slouch. ‘Not as old as all this.’ Only her eyeballs lifted to encircle this intestinal alleyway into the bowels of the mountain.
Castles of stalactite abounded in terrifying repetition, miniature dominions of microscopic activity, endless turrets and irregular apertures dotting the conical tips of their terraces. Just then it occurred to me that some of the grey cadaverous shapes and protrusions camouflaged in its contours and bends were not unlike the curled-up wings that might cocoon a sleeping bat. I caught at second glance an infinity of such features on the stalactite hanging from the rocky ceiling of the mineshaft. And when the shrill cry departed from some of the sprawled-out wings, out swept from over us a swarm of the same hideous creatures I had met at the trench of the water-body. They swooped into the pit and vanished in a matter of seconds, their dull ringing cry lingering after them only a moment.
‘Did you know that a vulture was found at a height of some ten thousand metres once?’ Karma Bodh informed me. ‘Its wings were tattered because of the air pressure.’
‘Wait a minute, that containing fluid you talk of…’ It occurred to me. ‘I get the distinct sense that it had in it, beyond a doubt, an unmistakable taste of the saline.’
Her eyes glowed. ‘There you are right,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect you to be able to determine that unless you’ve been spending a lot of time offshore on petroleum drills.’
‘How did you manage to get sea-water up at this height?’ I looked up above me. Some of the winged gargoyles were gone.
‘We didn’t,’ she said. ‘They did.’ She pointed deep down into the glowing mine. ‘It came from the inside of the mountain. After all,’ she spread her quavering palms about. ‘This was all saline once. Did you know they found some marine fossils in one of the highest peaks of the Himalayas? You must be aware, of course.’
‘Ma’am, this is getting beyond me…’ I confessed. ‘I am sorry to say I find most of what I have witnessed and heard here to be quite incredible and certainly outside the scope of what anyone down there in the real world would believe.’
‘So they choose to believe Swaami Atal-Anivaarya instead.’
‘Not all of them…’ I shook my head. ‘Take Pratyusha Negi for instance. She refused outright to come along on this expedition, a decision I now wish I had myself only half-considered. On account of a worthy disavowal of any variety of superstitious faith. In short, she didn’t think that climbing up a mountain to a perform a pilgrimage could cure anything that ailed her in the real world of day-to-day maintenance and functionality. I suppose it’s only those that have the time to sit in stupor like the party outside that manage to approach God with their miserable woes, or at least approach what they think is God.’
‘What do you think God is?’ she now asked with a teasing sense of wonder.
‘I don’t know at present Ma’am,’ I said. ‘I only wish I knew what the contents of that cave outside thought on the subject. To them, God seems to be some sort of Shambhaala out here, up away from civilization, approaching a newer one…’ I looked down into the wide drop.
‘An older one,’ she corrected me.
‘Older?’ I almost laughed. That was one sentiment with which I wouldn’t argue, especially when coming from a person of her years.
We heard the wailings of death pass over the gathered company uninterrupted by any incense or instrument or even enchantment. It was a pure, human outpouring of sorrow. Miserable sobs and the most pitiful sounds escaped all outside in fitful bursts of manic cries, almost out to the heavens above.
‘Ohh…’ her mouth trembled vigorously on registering the extent of the tragedy. ‘The hour of his deliverance,’ she unearthed a steel-chained pocket-watch from within the folds of her jacket and squinted into its dial.
‘Is that what it said on his janam-kundli?’ I mocked the very notion that he could have intuited his own death by natural scientific means, stranded on this mountaintop.
‘We believe in no such thing,’ she dug her hands into the wind-cheater, stuffing the pocket-watch back inside its holdings. ‘We believe only in reality out here!’
‘Reality?’ I laughed.
‘What we can see and touch, and feel! And sense. As per which the vultures will be plucking out his eyeballs any minute now.’
‘Vultures?’ I nearly shrieked out in disgust. ‘You call those monstrosities vultures? They’re closer to bats!’ I pointed up at the wilderness of nests scattered about in clusters on the ceiling of the mineshaft. ‘Or birds of a certain sort. Probably prehistoric. Reptilian and amphibian all at once.’
Her eyes gloated in their sockets as the howling ceased, and the delirious flapping proceeded to awaken in her a long-stilled fury, pent up with the sands of uncounted ages.
‘They come from down below,’ she spoke after much thought and exhalation to soothe her subterranean rumblings. ‘As do the insects.’
‘Insects?’
‘They put together the temple, brick-by-brick. You can’t see them. But at night once they’re out, you will be able to feel them! That I can assure you. You will feel them in your bones, in the joints and muscles, in the windpipe, in the eyes, ears and nose.’
I was at once set off onto a somewhat tangential search within the cobwebbed recesses of my memory bank, of an article published in the Science Reporter, by a Dr T. Balasubhramaniyam Aditya of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), who had only hinted in his thesis that the prospect of extra-terrestrial intervention in the micro-bacterial form was not as far-fetched as had been supposed by some learned scientists and astronomers within our ISRO Space Programme. That alien life could be no larger than a single-celled organism and no more detectable than amoebae was the thrust of his conclusion. Hence, the proposed space expulsion of bio-warfare waste was not a recommended alternative to the imminent termination of all on-ground radioactive experiments that were being carried out in furtherance of our chemical capabilities.
I envisioned the prospect of capturing one of those winged creatures and taking it down with me, captive, to show the townsfolk—even the skull, or a branch of the tree, or a chip off the underwater monument. It was all well beyond comprehension.
‘Since when has this intelligence existed here?’ I asked.
‘Since the formation of this mountain. It lies deep down inside the very foundation of this structure, probably thrived on some intangible substance of life. No mining team or excavation machinery would have been able to reach it. It thrived and teemed under the earth’s surface, and gradually, inch-by-inch made its way up towards the volcanic light.’
‘Have you yourself beheld any of these life forms, what they look like?’ I asked. ‘Apart of course, from the birds and insects.’
‘The ones we’ve beheld are merely their infants. The adults are down below and have sense enough not to try and make contact until they are sure of our intentions. We have tried to reach them using every chanting device and horn at our disposal up here.’
‘You mean to tell me that this rubble quarry, this joke of a mine-shaft nests some kind of extra-terrestrial intelligence?’
‘This knowledge is vouchsafed only to the few who have, over the years, had occasion to chance upon its precincts. Saadhus, tantrics, lost expeditioners, trail-guides, even some foreigners…’
‘How would the knowledge of this have passed on to Shree Gurudev Atal-Anivaarya?’
‘The same way the knowledge of you was passed on to us.’
‘What you’re talking about here is nothing short of telepathy, Ma’am.’ I stumbled.
‘Indeed,’ she bowed her head.
‘And who do you worship, may I ask? What Godhead, deity, totem? Don’t tell me those monstrous engravings on the temple walls are any representative of your lord and master.’
‘There is no idol worship, you see. No Lord and Master, no invisible force to which you supplicate your soul. Only existence…life—everlasting!’ The sunken recesses under her eyes shivered, some substance of liquidity was noticeable within the retinas. ‘No Death!’ she mourned.
From the dawn of humanity, the founding and practice of esoteric faiths and occult beliefs that deviate from established religious order have always posed an irresoluble interlocking of interest. If left alone to propagate, they co-exist harmoniously, if stifled they retaliate, when viewed as something utterly alien or aberrant the harm of the evaluation is visited only upon the oppressor, in strictly psychological terms. He retreats into falsities, into superstition as a safety blanket, and lives in perpetual terror of what his belief system has prevented him from understanding. That the heathen spring birth but wisdom be a thought inconceivable, a shred of demoniacal imagery a thing of beauty, impossible! Any sensation that rattles the closely embraced shackles of divine thought, is a thing ultimately to be wary of. An object of apprehension. The subject of a wild array of supposition, conclusions that touch the darkest frontiers of human possibility. Evil, monstrous, satanic, blasphemous!
‘There are many more of us here my boy, more than you could imagine. We have found a way to preserve life. The containing fluid. The old man who just recently died will be immersed shortly, given a new set of organs, eyes, teeth, lungs—re-animated. In human terms he is dead, but to retain consciousness beyond the gulf is to attain the divine, the everlasting. A second chance at life. Something the creatures down there must have survived on through all those centuries of confinement in the earth’s core. One of our congregation seems to feel this might have been a comet which struck many eons ago, blasting all vegetable and mineral organic life, and building its own everlasting dominion. A new order, and a new faith. Some of this crept into various other religious doctrines over the years by means of those who had witnessed it, and been altered forever by its unknowable power. What we have up here is neither a religion nor a following, but merely an ancient laboratory. Some of the learned men outside are doctors and experts, surgeons even.’
‘And pandits I imagine?’
‘Oh no…’ she shrugged. ‘Swaami Atal-Anivaarya is merely an impostor. He is no more a pandit or jyothish than I am a Carmelite nun. He has sent you here as emissaries to gather firsthand knowledge of the peak and all it contains. Priests of other religious disciplines have tried to infiltrate us since the dawn of all doctrine. Before there was even the written word.’
‘What does this order call itself?’ I asked.
‘There is no name,’ she said, reproachfully. ‘Merely a sensation that it arouses. One that forever alters and seeks to determine the true nature of reality. We have as you can see been working on it.’ Here, she loosened the scarf around her head to reveal not a strand of hair set upon her scalp. She was completely bald. The bun which I assumed to take up the greater portion of the back of her head was simply an elongation of her skull.
I now beheld in full frightful vividness, the grafts and stitches which spread down the back of her spine, their numerous attempts to expand the lobes of the brain if it were possible. To rid humanity of God, faith and divine worship, so that only reason and logic may prevail. Our next link, the evolutionary leap, ahead of the missing link. Closer to the realm of artificial intelligence. Perhaps they had been conducting various operations on the human brain, enlarging the spatial composition in adjustment of more intricate valves and arteries that could master matter, just like the telephonic device or satellite or the microscopic wiring of nanotechnology, to enable telepathy, communication across galaxies. When the earth was at its infancy this dimension of progress had probably already been attained by these beings. They might have watched over us in careful meditation at all our endeavours and attempts to plumb the human realm, and developed a mastery over normal forms of existence that would render all natural sciences obsolete.
At this contradiction, I recoiled from the mine-shaft and headed hurriedly back into the cave complex where I had expected to witness the gathered ceremony. It was empty. Shera was nowhere to be found, as was the Professor who had disappeared wholly from comprehension, both physical and spiritual. With some recollection of the route that permitted my easy egress from this forbidden chamber, I was able to trace my path back to the top of Ranibaug, where again I was to be graced with the sight of not a single living being. Even the sounding call of the horn was gone. This time, however, I noticed above the arched entranceway to the temple—the skull of a chiltan markhor, its long and sinuous horns stretching up three-and-a-half feet into the air, as though Pan himself had aimed to partake of these festivities.
