(Later)
Camp three. Well into the weird now. I should do that doo-de-doo-doo, doo-de-doo-doo from the Twilight Zone, except everything up here does it naturally.
Up here.
Ha ha.
We’re on the far side of the Discontinuity, in the land of the Crystal Monoliths. The Land of the Wa-chagga. We hope it was their turds Dog found close by the landing where we stashed the boats. Fresh turds. About an hour or two old. Nothing lasts too long here. If they aren’t Wa-chagga, they mean that the ones who were following us are no longer following us. They’re in front of us.
Beyond the Discontinuity the terrain changes as abruptly as those old Tarzan movies where Johnny Weissmuller runs from Sahara sand straight into tropical jungle. The Crystal Monolith zone isn’t just one Chaga. It’s a whole department store of them, stacked on top of each other. Each level is a separate biosphere, with its own unique flora and fauna. The way forward is up.
Dog’s unfailing nose leads us right to the climb, a hundred or so steel pitons hammered into the main column of what looks like a Fassbinderesque Fitzcarraldo-fantasy of an oil refinery lost in Amazonia. Sugardaddy unpacks a couple of hundred yards of old-fashioned hemp mountaineering rope and body harness and goes up the pitch. It’s beautiful. Rock dancing. He hauls up Dog, who swings slowly in his harness, like a canine Foucault pendulum.
The only thing holding me to these steel pitons is the determination that I am not going to be hauled up like a side of meat. Don’t look down, they say. I have no problem with that. Rose comes up after me with almost as much style as Sugardaddy, Uzi dangling under her ass.
There’s an old American slave expression I can’t get out of my head: the Way in the Air. We are pilgrims on that Way, toward holy Zion; Ngaje N’gai, the House of God in Masai. Up here, you see that it is not so much a level as a web of spans, buttresses and branches. Imagine the organic equivalent of an LA freeway interchange and you’ve something of it. The branches are as wide as freeways. Where the spans join, you could host a full-size Cup Final with all the supporters and car parking. It’s easy to be blasé: most of what surrounds you is empty space. Get careless, and it’s four hundred feet straight down. Dog goes snuffling along the thinnest tendrils with heart-stopping nonchalance.
Only a little light filters down through the higher levels. I stop a moment to savour a rare beam of sunlight on my face. Looking up it, I see a handful of blue sky scratched by a jet contrail. This level is Monkeyland, with a few tribes of chimps (is that the proper collective noun?) thrown in. The chimps seem to rule the roost and have absolutely no fear of humans. They hoot at us from their enclaves high on the trunks, throw shit at us. Some of the bigger chimps carry the thigh-bones of large animals.
Are chimps supposed to do that?
M’zee smelled the storm coming before the first gusts drew spooky sobbings and moanings from the tier forest. We make it to a flange and set up Camp Three as the gale hits us. A big wind in the Chaga is a mighty scary thing. Everything moves. Everything tosses and sways and creaks and groans and every moment you think, Oh Jesus, it’s all going to fall apart, we are all going to die. You look for something strong and secure to hold on to, but everything is moving with you. And the wind really howls, like it is after your soul, and if it can’t get that, your body will do. It would have blown us, in our little thermal quilts, clean off the level and into four hundred feet of screaming death, were we not buttoned up. Bushbaby, Rose, me and Dog, who is lying proudly licking his erection, are bundled up in something like a cross between a secret cave and a sleeping bag that opened in a tree trunk when Moran licked it. Inside, it’s a spongy tube lit by bioluminescent patches that stretches as you push at it until there’s enough room for three women (in somewhat close proximity) and a dog. Bushbaby showed me the teat in the floor you can suck for a supply of nutrient sap. Tastes like piña colada, she says. I’m not that desperate. Yet. Above the slit door through which we squeezed, like birth in reverse, is a tennis-ball sized bud that Rose stroked to seal the membrane against the rising storm. The same trick will open it. All a tad parturitional for my liking. Peter Werther, the Chaga Adam, spoke of being sheltered in things like these. Who then was the Eve from which the Chaga learned womb magic?
Some unseen mechanism keeps us supplied with fresh air, otherwise we should all smother from a combination of sweaty, unwashed woman and dog dick. Enough for today. Bushbaby says Rose is wondering what I’m always writing writing writing at. I’m wondering too.
She woke and remembered how she knew this moment. It was the memory of winter storm nights in the Watchhouse, when the rain rattled the bedroom windows and the wind gibbered under the eaves and you curled up in your duvet, cuddled by cats, enjoying being so warm and safe and enclosed. You would wake in the hourless hours the clock did not measure to find the storm passed and, in the huge silence behind it, you would creep downstairs and into the porch to stand and lose yourself in the tremendous stillness lying across the land.
Not even Dog twitched as Gaby slipped through the door lips into the cool, clean air from the high country. The only sound in the tier forest was the patter of raindrops dripping from level to level to level, running down to earth. The slow rain glittered as it fell; the night forest shone with ten thousand bioluminescent lights. Gaby felt she had been set to walk among the stars. Exalted. Chosen. Invulnerable. She walked out along a high-arching bridge, drawn irresistibly into the mystic. At its far end, the arch joined with others in a tangled boss of cords, tubes and organ pipes. In a covert between two human-sized racks of panpipes, Gaby did a thing she had not since was ten years old, in the secret places of the Point known only to herself. She took off her clothes. She laid them in a neatly folded stack, found footholds in the pipes and climbed until she came to another arch. She found a safe roost at the edge and sat with her feet hanging over the star-filled abyss. She listened to the drip of water through the tier forest. She felt the Chaga on her skin.
She could disappear here. This arch would lead to another, and that to yet another, and take her far beyond any hope of return to the human world. Eden again. Return to animal awareness; the eternal Now, before the Fall armed humanity with consciousness and care. She did not wonder the Western industrials wanted it ring-fenced. The Chaga’s Grace Abounding was the denial of consumer capitalism. But it is an insidious Eden where everything may be had by reaching out to take. It is the determination to push your hopes and dreams through the relentless material world that makes you human. If you were to get up from this place and walk in there and never come back, the Gaby McAslan that you have made yourself become would evaporate.
She shivered, suddenly cold and naked. She got up from her pitch, climbed down through the vox humana and vox angelica and put on her clothes. As she crossed back to Camp Three, she saw a figure seated on the edge of the drop, in the same position, legs over abyss, that she had sat.
She froze.
‘You too?’ Jake Aarons’ voice said. ‘It is sacred, isn’t it?’
‘And scary,’ Gaby said. She sat cross-legged beside him, a little back from the brink. ‘It’s beautiful, it’s awe-inspiring, it’s the closest I’ve come to a religious experience, and it’s the end of everything it means to be human.’
‘Or a gate into new ways of being human,’ Jake said. ‘What the Chaga says to me is, now you don’t need to compete for resources, now all the rules of supply and demand are torn up: there is enough here for everyone so now you can experiment with new ways of living, new ways of interacting, new societies and structures and sociologies, knowing that you have permission to fail. Screw it up and it won’t cost you and your children your lives. Like America was, back in the pioneer days when all the religious communities came over from Europe because there was space for them to follow their beliefs without interference. Continual experiment.’