The Forsaken Wilderness, page 6
No bodies were to be found or recovered anywhere around the campsite. Displaced belongings hinted at neither paths taken nor direction of flight, they had about them an indeterminate aspect of the arbitrary or indiscriminate, as if it were all in jest—a breeze of madness or gaiety; some unearthly revel.
We proceeded on up the rocky stairway, all eyes still hazily attached to the mess of campsite that retreated from view as we shambled on through another hundred metres of hummock. Neither of us had had the courage to open the sole rucksack that stood upright away from the tent. What it contained was a matter only for the most heinous speculation that none dared approach; that whatever it was that bulged out of its synthetic flesh might have caused the catastrophe that claimed the entire team of campers.
chapter eight
At the summit of Ranibaug, that no human presence had ever laid claim on, sprawled a disconcerting stretch of arid terrain. Decaying and crumbling rocks covered every tract of walkable land, some piled and scattered together in baroque formation: there seemed to exist no trace of vegetable or plant life. Beyond a terrace-stepped ascension of blasted land, stood a forlorn temple at the peak, almost camouflaged in part by the rocky protrusions; looking down into the tumultuous drop, its slouching finials twisted like horns upon a Minotaur.
The temple was carved out of a convergence of earth and stone unlike anything either of us had ever encountered, not too dissimilar from the monstrous tree we had earlier witnessed. Even the vague relics furnishing the interior in puzzling ornamentation disobeyed the evidence of idol worship. There appeared no sounding bells or gongs or horns to ring the bugle cry across the valleys. A lone spear, unlike the prong of a trishul, closer in shape to the writhing of a claw, stood upright from the tip of its pointed roof, acting in part as antenna to the twilight. The indecipherable designs chiselled into the pillars of its arched-entrance were deeply unfamiliar. The altars seemed composed of a substance not identifiable to the mineral kind. No civilization could have conceived the hideous murals that adorned the temple walls. Seals, intricate and ornate, horrendously put together in an asymmetry composed of symbols and inscriptions bordering almost on the microscopic—possessing an ingenuity of workmanship that suggested evidence of disturbingly pre-Harappan origins. Deities and sculptures, all grotesque and leering in formation, exhibiting a malice that seemed borne of the seclusion of their dwelling.
Prof. Chaturvedi recollected tales told by the swaamis and soothsayers from his childhood of a civilization that predated even the earliest scriptures of all established religion. Customs created long before the dawn of mankind, relics that had witnessed the gradual establishment of the landmasses, and vistas inconceivable to ordinary human comprehension.
‘All life sprang from the sea!’ he declaimed, half to himself and half into the wind, scattering each word. ‘Like a newborn babe that swims in the sanctity of its mother’s womb before pouring forth into the open air. We were all amphibian once, and so we shall remain!’
Purporting to not have fully comprehended the thrust of his delivery, I beckoned—‘Come again Professor? I CAN’T HEAR YOU!’
He was now floating in mid-air, partly levitated by the fury of the wind which sent him circling his steps in all directions till a dizzying whirl brought him to a fall.
‘When the vast mountains were formed…’ he continued, regaining himself unsteadily, ‘…from tectonic collision; the ocean—the collective womb for all of mother earth, was forced to expel her half-formed contents to live among the great heights, dispossessed and deformed.’
Shera tried reaching for him lest he should fall another time, this time injuring one of his limbs severely, thereby casting him debilitated for the remainder of the descent; a fiendish proposition! The Professor serenely shrugged off his grasp, proceeding on into the mouth of the tornado. The temple billowed with the mingling gusts hissing against the stone, and ricocheting back out from every possible opening. It was only partially roofed, that too with broken edges around the pillars, the rest of the surface area laid out in a courtyard formation. It resembled from one dimension the outward thrust of a lower jaw, and as the body of the enclosure swelled upward at an incline, if one blurred one’s sight into double vision, I could have sworn it assumed the aspect of the skull we carried with us in a bundle of jacket and cloth.
Perhaps the skull we had found was a remnant of such a creature that had dwelled before the earth had evolved into the formations we now know. Hidden from the path of mankind and all that has been witnessed by eternities of speculation, travel and adventure, made for no human to see or touch, and no mind to ponder upon. Cut away from the world and all its inhabitants from the very outset of its existence.
Fragmented memories flashed before my eyes, of caverns and protrusions on the earth’s surface, sheltering secrets too remote for calculation, vistas too divine for speculation, and the all-encompassing horror of the geological anomaly that was Ranibaug, that no man should ever know and no man had ever dared to know.
I was arrested by the spectacle of its isolation and refused to retreat from its rapture. The wind was steadily escalating and developing into an unmitigated storm. Disobeying Shera’s warnings, I walked towards the temple, cutting through the ravenous wind and undoing my shoes—entered in.
chapter nine
Inside I saw things beyond the wildest description. Things no language could communicate or articulate, and things not perceivable to the normal spectrum of the five senses. Colours which transcended all known frequency, invisible to the naked eye. Sounds which dropped below the infra-sonic radar. Hideous distortions of the human form, satirically rendered as if in jest, etched and sculpted in calculated disarray. Animal and marine frescoes emblazoned in an overflowing anatomical extravagance for which mutation seemed too timid a term. Insects which squirmed in between crevices and joints of the stone slabs and time-worn masonry.
Prof. Chaturvedi and Shera still hesitated from entering. They gaped on at me from the entrance, eyes alight with diseased wonder. At length, I became aware of a low rumbling sound much like the roar of thunder that seemed to be shaking the very foundations of the temple. I attributed this to the crashing of the wind and at once felt the need to escape the sight of the temple for a short while, at least till I restored my bearings.
The peak was doing terrifying things to the mind. I scampered through the storm, away from the pinnacle of Ranibaug and headed down the conical slope of the peak. The two dazed apparitions in the dust scarcely took note of me tumbling down the mountain side in flight of the remaining daylight to trek downwards to the spot below the rock face where we had dug our rations. As the altitude dropped, I felt the air pressure exit my ears. I ran past the decades old campsite, not wishing to pay its ruins anymore heed. A few more kilometres on, and somewhat recovered by the downhill stride, I felt certain I would make my way back up to Ranibaug at daybreak after having recovered the rations and also some strength. Although I had abandoned my two companions temporarily, one could permit that it was for hazard of losing consciousness that I executed that decision: it would scarcely do much good if all three of us were to faint due to weakness. One of us had to be awake and alert at all times; that was one of the deals we had made with each other when embarking on this hazardous expedition.
I managed to reach the rock face before the sun could set entirely. It took a good deal of vertical sliding and two hours’ worth of trotting down the rocky descent, only to arrive to the undesirable discovery that the belay device required for rappelling down the mountain-side was not at hand. The carabiner though was attached to my belt, and the rope was still fastened around the tree. I tried to wrap my palms around the rope, pondering the friction involved if one were to use simply the grasp of its support while descending. Just then, I caught the faint rustle of someone trampling through the shrubbery.
Shera peeped out from amid a herd of bushes.
‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded, somewhat flustered at his sneaking up on me.
‘I followed you down…’ he spat, taking a seat daintily on his haunches.
‘On what cause?’
‘Ahh…’ he looked around, crumpled his lips in and out his mouth, and whistled out a dissonant reply—‘Safety…’ he declared before nodding his head in evasion.
‘Yours or mine?’ I wondered.
‘The Professor’s,’ he hopped up.
‘Is the rifle with him?’ I backed away, sensing his minutest movements.
‘It’s with him…’ he took one step towards me, I backed off into the tree, and held its cartilage as a shield. I reminded him of our rations that lay buried beneath the rock face and asserted the vitality of their recovery if we were to make it anywhere near a reasonable campsite by midnight, when the owls would be out, and open space would envelop all—and then there was truly no accounting for anything. Shera said not one word in response.
‘What’s with the Professor?’ I felt myself trembling into a quake, clutching tightly at the tree, its bark disintegrating on my fingernails.
‘Nothing’s wrong with him!’ Shera softly insisted. ‘He’s just having one of his spells.’
‘What spells?’ I asked.
‘Didn’t you hear about what happened to him last week at the temple near Sahastradhara?’
‘What about it?’
‘Well, some say he was…’ he searched in the air for a word. ‘How shall one say…’
‘Demented?’ I grew still without even noticing it.
‘In a manner of speaking,’ he paused, somewhat deliberately. ‘Or one could say that what was witnessed there was his true state, the actual self.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well you see,’ he began, crouching down again on all fours, this time holding onto a root submerged in the soil for support. ‘By now, I’ve more or less come to know his ways as if they were my own. I know when he’s sad, when he’s happy, when he’s hungry, when he’s tired. You might not know it but, he had at one point entrusted me with all his confidences. He had only briefly spoken about his kin, when I once asked while dusting the framed-portraits of his uncles at the institute. I remember when he was ill, and I had nursed him through the ninety-eight-kilometre walk to Ronsara Taal. I remember the long hours spent by his sleeping bag. When he was infirm and in need of a helping hand. And I provided that hand, the hand that carried him through that torturous expedition.’ Here he spread out his calloused palm and gazed at it in the rapidly diminishing daylight. ‘And here I am, called upon to perform that task again.’ The wind swooped over his shoulder as he stood. ‘The hand that’s listened to all his outbursts, and borne witness to all his lesser sides.’
‘You see, Shera…’ I spoke. ‘If you intend to imply that we leave him here…’
‘I didn’t mean anything of the kind…’
‘Then?’
‘Only that he himself might not desire to return from where he is just now.’
‘And just where is he?’
‘At peace.’
Peace. The word itself reverberated like a sounding bell, alien to everything within likelihood. I started for the rope, incapable of listening any more to his suppositions. He intervened shortly to string up the rope, and inserted it through his belay device. After rappelling half-way down the rock face and adjusting the wire’s firmness, he waved at me to follow suit. Once we were down we swiftly unhooked our carabiners, disconnected our respective harnesses, left the rope hanging from the tree, and proceeded hurriedly to locate the spot at which our belongings were buried. It was surrounded by a tulsi tree of medium height and adorned with bichhoobooti on all corners to act as guardian. As I began determinedly to unearth the ground, from beneath my fingers I could sense something scuttling under the soil. For a moment, my grasp recoiled from the earth. I looked to Shera, who looked back at me perplexed as if he had heard nothing. I scanned the entire area from my haunches—my neck peering around—but came across nothing immediately. Even the faint sound had vanished before I could get any deeper into the ground. Whatever it was, it had chewed open both the rucksacks and gotten into the food supply. As we salvaged whatever we could, cheering ourselves up with the possibility of the culprit being a rodent and nothing else, we soon became aware of a faint breeze falling our way. It grew when announced upon our quivering jackets and in a matter of seconds, blew into a gust before we had even settled our belongings from the mud. We both clutched firmly at the rations as it swept over us, preventing them from being blown away, and once it passed and the air subsided, we both simultaneously loosened our embrace over the belongings. I slung on my rucksack, and handed him the tent-kit once he had buckled on his. I fastened the lower belt strap of my rucksack to my harness, clipped open my carabiner and as I turned around towards the rock face to climb back up, saw that the rope was missing.
chapter ten
It had vanished from around the circumference of the tree trunk, the rock which stood by its side bore no trace of it. Presuming it had slithered off into the recesses of the vegetation, we searched all along the descending ditch joining hands with the drop, from the edge of the plane we were on: saw it nowhere amid the endless plant life, vainly sought to climb up the cliff with the use of our bare hands and feet (a proposition nearly unthinkable by this point) and were ultimately arrested by what we had all this while failed to take notice of: the tree had grown to another quarter of its height in the intervening day-and-a-half since the burial of our goods.
It stood out against the shrinking foliage like a freak of nature, its lulling boughs stretching forth, and stroking sparsely the bearded ground in the definite shape and grasp of a tentacle. The tubular base of the trunk had grown broader in diameter and was approaching the breadth of an enormous well. An irregular posture distorted its mid-section to an inordinate degree. Branches crawled out its flesh in the manner of a Gorgon, extending in length and crookedness, the writhing nature of its aspect. Shera too thought it looked larger than when he had last seen it; he was equally baffled at such significant growth in so short a span of time. He could not take his eyes off the grotesque structure, almost hypnotised by its outré dimensions that struck one as perfectly natural from a distance when blending in with the primeval backdrop, but on closer scrutiny acquired a pronounced change of air.
‘You see this plant?’ Shera looked up at it with a sense of longing. ‘The only living remnant of the vast botanical potential of this soil….’
‘It probably stood the test of time.’ I suggested.
‘Our ancestors cultivated this soil…leaving all kinds of survivors. Pine, chestnut, cedar, elm, poplar, birch, but this plant is the only living symbol of those days.’
‘What days?’ I requested to know.
‘The days of old…the time before the human encroachment on a land that did not belong to the humans.’
We walked on a little further in solemnity.
‘You can almost smell the degeneration,’ he sighed. ‘The degeneration of a landscape that was once fertile and prosperous. Now it’s almost like a desert with worn out shrubs having taken the place of those glorious banyans. The temperate evergreen forests,’ he let out a snort in defiance. ‘The only thing that’s evergreen about it is the environment minister’s wallet.’
I bowed my head in acknowledgement of his offering with barely detectable movement, yet it communicated my alignment with his sentiments. The leaves and branches had grown disproportionate to the trunk communicating only entanglement through their intricate architecture, escalating into knots the sinuous branches formed, crossing each other in all directions, irregularly.
‘The old ladies in the village would tell the young ones stories of how when the Ramayana was written, there used be oaks that blossomed on the tallest peaks, amid glacial desolation. Giant ferns taller than any seen at the Forest Research Institute (FRI). Temperate deciduous forests, green like the meadows of heaven. Coniferous castles and beautiful tropical palms that spread out like dinosaurs over this blessed land.’
The tree was too compact in its form, there was not a trace of fragility, hence it could not have possibly rotted away as per my initial suppositions to account for its peculiar shape. Carbon dating seemed impossible considering the complex web-like circular formations around the torso that probably converged at the vascular cambium. It had neither the girth nor the bearing of the contemporary gymnosperm, its malleable manner dismissed any notion of decay, yet its vivid composition appeared nothing less than a century old as the rusted bolt to a metallic grating of some ancient rampart. I thought it at first to be a pine of some considerably archaic origin, but its development and extraordinary outgrowth seemed to resemble botanical modifications dating back to the Paleogene or late Cretaceous Period, some sixty to seventy million years ago.
The two of us just glared at its gigantic stature and its oblique expression. Its characteristics were a subject of the most startling bewilderment and fascination, even from afar and especially from below the height of the rock-face into which it blended. The daylight had by now begun entirely to deceive us, and just as we sensed, through the spilling rock fragments, the motions of Prof. Chaturvedi kicking his way down the hillside, from a near unnoticeable corner of the ledge, I saw a blurry figure emerge from the hazy outline of the grass.
