The Forsaken Wilderness, page 19
It took us about half an hour but we managed to cover it with enough rock and slabs of stone unpeeled from the wall of the mineshelf. There was sufficient weight on it to hold it. We even placed our heavy rucksacks on the covering just to be sure it granted us enough support till we reached another thirty-odd feet below the shelf, testing the stability of the rope. It nearly crackled a few times as we lowered ourselves down another thirty feet onto an eroded protrusion from amid the grizzled contours of the mineshaft.
Balance was of the essence here. A stance, or single toe in the wrong direction and the precarious platform we found ourselves on would stand us no longer.
It took multiple tugs with both of us pulling with all our might—our feet firmly planted on the jutting rock—to even begin to displace the anchorage we had moulded from the previous shelf. We had to yank at it incrementally, it being elastic, over the course of about fifteen minutes to forcefully loosen it from its curiously conceived holdings. There was one pull where I felt my feet slipping over the narrow edge of the eroded platform. I stumbled over a few loose rock fragments before Pratyusha grabbed me by the wrist and held me back as I watched the stones slowly tumble into the depths of the pit. The sound of their landing did not occur, or at least was not heard by us.
Having safely unfastened the rope after another ten minutes of vigorous pulling, we saw one of the rucksacks slide down the wall of the mineshaft, nearly knocking us down with it. It fell violently from the edge of the shelf, taking down with it a large globular rock, having probably unsettled the ground beside it. Some of the stony dust hit our faces as it powdered down into the drop, swimming languidly in the air as it receded—its particles illuminated vaguely by the all-encompassing glow of the mineshaft.
Pratyusha bound one end of the rope across the bulging rock formation beneath our feet, then stringing it up to our carabiners, began to proceed down an entirely vertical and featureless stretch of the wall. In the last instance of the climb down we had had to proceed one at a time, as the sturdiness of the anchorage was not sufficient enough to hold for the passage of two persons, even without the rucksack.
‘Nails!’ I shouted out, in a sudden burst of recollection.
There are moments when the speech uttered by one’s tongue does not necessarily correspond with the contents of one’s thoughts.
‘What?’ Pratyusha’s head spun up at me from down below, her body still balanced tightly on the rope. She slid down another twelve feet, systematically loosening the grasp of her gloves.
‘Nailssss!’ I almost began to weep.
The mind was swirling with unthinkable details of the drop that awaited us.
‘Naaaaaa…’ I growled.
Pratyusha suddenly froze on the rope. ‘There’s nothing down here!’ she called out, in a ringing echo. ‘I think I better come back up!’
‘Naaaaaaaaaahhh!!!!’ I began to produce a sound, unidentifiable even to me. ‘Wuuuuaaaaaahhhhh!!!’
‘What the hell is wrong with you!’ Pratyusha’s head bobbed sideways as she tried to look up, swinging back and forth on the elastic rope.
‘Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!’ I began to pound the edge of the eroded rock in protest.
‘Nooooo!’ Pratyusha wailed. ‘Don’t! You’ll break it! Barkat Singh! What are you doing? Are you crazy! Have you gone mad?’
She climbed back up a few feet with a grimace of almost paralytic exertion.
Her teeth clenched, she pressed the soles of her boots against the wall and began to ascend up almost horizontally. Her forearms bulged as she tried to reach for the projected edge of the rock I was trying to dismantle. We were a good eighty to eighty-two feet below the mineshelf from which our joint wiring still hung, its tip lying from us now at a height of approximately thirty-odd feet. How we would attempt to cover it I could not even begin to think. We were stranded on a lone protrusion from the eroded minewall, like a mountain goat who unknowingly ventures onto a step in the rockface from which there is no return. I tried calling out to the sadhu, who had by now perhaps abandoned us.
Pratyusha heaved herself onto the edge of the rocky parapet around which the rope was tied, and produced a pick-axe from the inside of her jacket which she swung wildly at me, three or four times before I stopped trying to sabotage our spot. The point from which there was no return, only a passage to the infinite depths of the journey. The journey that knew no end!
She unhooked the rope and tied it around her waist, after which he hurriedly began to fashion a wedge in the ascending wall that would allow her easy access to a fissure which lay some eight feet ahead. She clung onto the rocks with her left hand and with her right dug the pick-axe into a more porous portion of the plateau, where she placed her foot to lift herself up another three feet. The next step was to be found in the form of a narrow indentation along the wall, where only the side of a foot could fit. Gripping the rock forms now with her right hand, she buried the pick-axe another two feet above her, deep enough into the wall to provide support for another lift up to a bend in the fissure.
My mind was still reeling with sheer vertigo, and as I watched her attempt that impossible climb, drew nearer to total madness! Each step she took caused in me a flurry of terrifying palpitations. She was now about twelve feet above me, and clinging to the wall with all the life in her.
‘Back!’ I screamed, in a state approaching utter lunacy. ‘Nooo!’
‘Shut up!’ she echoed back.
There was place scarcely for her toes in the next step she was attempting. One arm locked on the pick-axe, she scanned every inch of the rocks to which she was clasped—glued motionless for an instant, which seemed to last an eternity—before leaping up to a wild grab she had planned which, thank but for the heavens, turned out to be an actuality. Her left hand slipped from this curvature on the rocks, though. It was too risky a proposition in the first place: being suspended solely from the support of a mere pick-axe. She should have never have attempted it! Were it not but for the grace of God, she would have surely lost grasp of that proposed hinge, whose unsteadiness summoned in her, a strength which at that point was her only saviour. One could sense her entire body tightening up and discreetly trembling before she finally struck her pick-axe into another corner of the wall, and hoisted herself up onto what appeared to be a depression in the ascending contours, which provided her with a further step up to what she managed to chisel into a thin parapet, where she could place some of her weight in order to relieve her limbs of the vigorous efforts they had expelled.
She rested for a moment, catching her breath, still as a stone statue, loosening her muscles, yet still rigidly stuck to her corner of the wall. Hacking away at the contours to fashion a full-fledged foothold, she managed to cover the last few feet up to the shelf where one of our rucksacks lay with much ease and dexterity; an acrobatic proficiency that came as no surprise given her illustrious achievements in the field of adventure sports.
She swung one of her legs onto the edge and dragged the rest of her body up with half her torso hanging from the shelf. Having heaved herself up, she arose from the ground in an instant, and before I could even applaud in weary sarcasm, began to arrange an anchorage for my secure passage up the same portion of the wall. The conjoined rope was now within reach, and hung just a few feet above her head.
She tied the elastic wire around her waist to the remaining rucksack, and even chained it to the roping above her, improvising a sort of elaborate pulley system by which I would have enough weight on the anchorage to climb up to the shelf.
‘Come on!’ she flicked her fingers at me from up above, and then tossed down the rope.
Her neck craned up to navigate the last stretch of fifty feet we would have to ascend before returning to safety. I still hesitated to reach for the rope she had flung down to me, it caressed the jagged wall she had traversed, and lay still along the shadowy rock forms I was supposed to press my feet against. Rappelling down was certainly easier than having to climb up a rope with nothing but the use of one’s own innate strength, a reserve of mine that I could only now sense the depletion of. I staggered about the narrow ledge, looking up at Pratyusha who was busily preparing another weighty anchor, a pursuit from which I soon discouraged her by yanking at the rope with half my will and all my might, thereby stealing possession of the rope in its entirely. It escaped nimbly from each of its slips in the pulley that hadn’t as yet been tightened and fell cleanly right by my feet.
‘Don’t be silly!’ she shouted, her hands placed firmly on her hips, and her expression baring not the slightest hint of patience. ‘Throw it back up here,’ she offered out her hands. ‘Come on!’ she blew a fuse, awaiting a reply. ‘BARKAT!’ she screamed.
I reconfigured the same attachment she had tied up to the rock below my feet, my motor skills not having thus abandoned me—but found myself unable to answer to her shrieks which grew in urgency as my task was fulfilled. When I realised I was lowering myself down the featureless rappel of about thirty feet to which the rope extended, I caught sight of her from down below waving her arms wildly about in the air, all sounds escaping her diminishing gradually as I went deeper and deeper into the pit. Grey concrete walls as if constructed for a vertical tunnel abounded below me, I could have even sworn I caught the MDDA (Mussoorie-Dehradun Development Association) emblem stamped on some remote square of the near-cylindrical shaft. From what I calculated we were crossing the hundred-foot mark, or at least I was. Pratyusha’s harrowed face still shone above me, her contorted features devoid of sound, distorting at me in senseless silence.
PART SIX
Rainfall of Horrors
chapter one
I was about as close to a dead-end as I had ever been through my numerous voyages up this mountain. This was it! The last step to be taken, the final drop! All reason abolished, only the sensory apparatus in command, and in determined pursuit of the wonders it had long-waited to behold in the flesh, in their very physical form. Not as thoughts or images, but living, throbbing things that startled the eyes and invigorated the spirit.
I went! Down in the forsaken drop through whose vast expanse I flew at the speed of sound, which was incidentally also the first sense to desert me. The sight held, the speech could not be heard, the sense of smell and touch embraced the air into which it was plunged. Just when I let go of the rope I cannot accurately say, but it happened as if in a flash, wholly devoid of impulse like an involuntary response—the shutting of one’s eyes at sunlight, or the closing of one’s ears at a noise. To my muscle memory it seemed the logical thing to do, to unmoor myself from all the earthly apparatus that shackled my every heavenward movement; to let go… and just fall, freely…
Down I went, turning over backwards, sometimes somersaulting, often head-first, eventually straight as an arrow as the trajectory of gravity spun me around. I was now in stable motion, and looked about me to see the endless outlines of the walls of the mineshaft. The rocky features only grew more ornate and vivid as I descended deeper, and deeper, and then deeper still…till I again felt myself tumbling forward with a sudden jolt of air which threw me aside numerous times causing me to sway towards the rock-wall. I even feared that I might crash into its hideous dimensions and die before my time had come to approach the light, which only grew more distant the further I fell, as if in a mirage. The depth of this cavity in the mountain however seemed infinite, and as the mountainous moulds which contained it distorted into distressing patterns and designs hewn out of the rock bed—I felt certain at length when my heart had ceased to pound at my brain, and my nerves were significantly steadied, that the ray of light was appearing to dawn closer, and closer still as I fell another hundred feet. I was diving headfirst into its blinding flare, and only excited my prospects of finally coming face to face with the enigma, when the illumination around me split into crepuscular fragments of dazzling colours that propelled me faster and faster, as if exerting the influence of a turbo boost, or some vast centrifugal force. The light drew closer, and expanded into all that was around, filling up every stark feature of the mineshaft with the deadliest meaning, enshrouding all available matter in a spectral luminosity. The orb-like source of all this emanation grew faintly perceptible beyond the glowing cataract I was soon able to penetrate. When I fell into the epicentre of all this unendurable light, I broke through a threaded layer of unknown material, and then passed into a dark well of the most frightening malevolence. It was here that sound was somewhat restored when deprived of sight. The human body has provisions that exceed our own understanding. I could discern the gush of a waterfall, and then the howl of a furious wind which toppled me again in the air, whirling me around and this time sending me almost up to the solid stone wall that was now smooth as marble, immaculate beyond belief—and grey as an obelisk, with myriad etchings inscribed with characters unrecognizable that were detectable to the touch, almost framed in braille.
When propelled back into sight after tumbling along the grey wall, and falling through a water body through which gravity seemed to operate—conducting us keenly through the liquid barrier—I looked up to see, the water suspended in the air. I was now closing in on an even deeper section of the illuminated portal. For a moment, all went golden, then purple, and yellow and then a faintly perceptible white intruded on by scattered starbursts such as one sees in the invisible black of the eye sockets when one’s lids are closed. Polygonal petals of colours forming and reconstituting, then dispersing with the flash of a blink. Time itself had ceased, space had been blotted out, I sank into a vacuum of endless luminosity, such as could not be conceived, as might be emitted from the sun, or a nuclear reactor—a singularity, conjuring with all its might, a black hole: the dark matter that exists outside of the knowable universe. Was all existence derived from a dot, as the Hindus say with the must-contested Bindu theory? Did we arise from nothingness? And if so, are we headed in the same direction as we speak? Some say that there exist mirror universes, where times spreads backwards in an inversion of our natural temporal laws. In our path to obliteration lies their passage to the beginning. Death and birth exchanged in some cosmic folly.
It were as though landscapes were capable of motion, trees were capable of travel, settlements capable of existing intact in inertia with the gift of mobility; objects alongside floating freely in a sort of indifferent serenity presented themselves intermittently, depending on the nature of the tonnage—adobe hutments with thatched roofs, vast corrugated aluminum warehouses, cement blocks and quarters of construction mass, even some obsolete machinery was seen to trickle by in this primeval rainfall of objects. I saw men, and women, and children scattered in the wind; cattle, and goats, and chickens, horses even, great stags, herds of wild dogs, and birds myriad and multi-coloured with wings deformed. Insects, invertebrates, plankton, microscopic marine ooze from which we all formed and reconstituted and evolved. The collective unconscious of nature. It all stared before me from the abyss that awaited my presence as I dropped lower into its incalculable depths, perhaps beyond the depths of the very Earth’s core itself, into some place deeper and darker still than all that inhabited its natural laws; deep into the heart of the dark matter that envelopes and threatens to close up on all existence.
Was it there that I spotted the anthropoids? The half-conscious remnants of that black pool, the neither human nor animal products of the vast wastelands of the universe. I couldn’t quite say whether they were the products of the imagination made fruit, or whether they were merely a manifestation of the psychic state, or whether they were indeed the constituents of a separate reality! Neither science nor faith could say. There were all kinds of creatures beckoning for existence, begging to be made a part of the natural order, or of even the human kingdom. The tentacular mass of crawling vegetation—insectile and insensate, broadening into the mineral realm—writhing and squirming to and fro from their incomprehensible flesh and phlegm. The primordial ooze might itself have been but a marginal spectacle in the vistas that proceeded with deranged promise into another land, a lineless plane, a circularity which folded and unfolded into prisms unendurable. I imagined perhaps, even in the nethermost regions of the mind, a kind of vast orbital spaceship, an all-encompassing craft that could account for all that I had witnessed and felt. Images of extra-terrestrial entities rather confounded than liberated my brain, all that the earth had fed us in its illimitable search for the unknown. Tentacles, antennae, orb-like skulls, ovoid eye sockets, sheer-skeletal anatomies, all the imagery invoked by the myriad associations implanted in the receptacle that is our consciousness. I could have died in a second and not known the difference.
But, the terrifying velocity lasted; preyed upon all my instincts, derided my intuitions. I was conscious of life, but could grasp not what living entailed. I felt as if I spun, or more appropriately swooned through a loop of the same unending extensity; blasting all notions of time and space held dear—it were as if I was back in that godforsaken water body, down in the slumbering depths of slimy opacity. I strolled into the dark, as if by means of a magnetic pull: The true primordial blackness that begat all! From which we extracted the light, from which we grew, from which we became…
The primeval night. The essential darkness that enshrouds all. Where does it exist? Would we exist without it, if existence be merely a process, like death, that the mind, body and soul wanders through, unwittingly? Bereft of choice, and the divine doctrine of free will…
But hark! something calls in this wilderness of propelled flight…a voice, a hearing, a sharp being of conscious intent—something that endeavours in all its entirety to reach, or approach…to speak and touch…I paid nary a glance at my fellow passengers that were lowered with me into the bottom of this mount! It was as if a vision spoke to me: a voice from the depths that announced what I was experiencing, a tumultuous descent into the inferno of existence, the swirling magma of neither solid nor liquid mass in which we found ourselves; inhabitants of some nether lair, truly uncharted and untenable.
