“Atile’i, you don’t understand. The map is this earth of ours shrunk down and drawn on a piece of paper. See, the whole world has been shrunk down and shone onto this piece of paper.” Alice felt there was something wrong with her explanation, but that was no big deal as Atile’i could not fully understand what she was saying in any case.
“The sea can also become a map?”
“I guess so. There are nautical maps.” Alice pointed at a spot in the South Pacific and said, “I guess that Wayo Wayo is somewhere around here.”
Alice shone the next map, this one a large-scale map of Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range, showing contour lines and tortuous climbing routes. On it was a red route, which she had drawn from memory. It was the route on the ceiling, the path through the mountains that Thom and Toto had actually taken.
“We are here, and I want to go here. Do you understand? I want to go here.” Alice kept tracing the route with the laser pointer until Atile’i nodded to show he understood.
“Are you,” Alice pointed at Atile’i, “willing to go there with me? Come with me.”
“Is it far?”
“It’s not close, I don’t think.” Suddenly a giant silkworm moth flew over and stopped on the map, like a mark, or like a symbol, like an interjection. It opened the eyes on its wings and stared at her.
“Her?” Atile’i pointed at Ohiyo.
“Ohiyo will wait for me to come back, won’t you, Ohiyo? You’ll be here, waiting for us to return, right around here? Or you want to go stay with Dahu?” Ohiyo purred sweetly several times, to voice her protest. Obviously she wanted to be free to hang out in the mountains all by herself.
Alice had spent quite some time at the library going through all the climbing records for this route. She bought all the gear she thought she’d need, and got a pack for Atile’i and another tent. It wasn’t like the one Atile’i had been sleeping in; it was a new design, superlight and ultradry. With its streamlined shape and airflow system, an invisible air current would form over the tent, reducing the impact of rain on the roof and keeping the inside dry. She wanted Atile’i to go with her partly because she didn’t know who to send him to, but also because she knew she would have to rely on this kid to survive in the mountains. She selfishly assumed that since he’d evaded all the deathtraps on the ocean, he could probably help her get to the place marked in red on the map.
The red dot marked a lofty precipice. The folks at the professional alpine association said it was a route few people would take, because the only interesting thing on it was a huge cliff that appeared after the big quake. Newly formed, it was none too stable and might be dangerous. It wasn’t like this was a traverse you’d have to take through the area; there wasn’t even a trig point on the summit.
“Ma’am, if you’re not going rock climbing, you’d have no reason to go there,” a coach at the climbing club said.
Alice chose a day in the midst of about the only sunny spell they would likely enjoy in the next three months to set out. The weather forecast was for five or six days of fair skies, if they were lucky.
Alice set out toward the trail with Atile’i in tow. She deliberately took a detour that was not drawn on the map. She’d heard it would allow them to bypass the backcountry checkpoint. It went by an aboriginal village and a power plant along the left-hand side of the riverbed. It was a Sakizaya community that had been in the news quite often in the past few years. The Sakizaya villagers had been working on an eco-cultural tourism project, and everything was on the right track until a series of landslides forced them to suspend operations. But solo climbers still preferred this route up the river valley, which led into the Central Mountain Range.
The next day they were already deep in the mountains. The path traversed gorges and sheer drops, typically precipitous terrain for the island’s canyon-cut eastern flank. Though Atile’i had been living with Alice all that time in the hunting hut, this was the first time he had really witnessed the mountains in this way. Several times, while observing the changing alpine mistscapes, he knelt down and placed his head on the ground and made the special Wayo Wayoan hand gesture that symbolized the adoration of the earth.
The pair kept walking at dawn of the third day when clouds blew in and it started raining in the shadow of the mountain. Soon the rain obscured the lie of the mountain, giving them the momentary impression they were on a modest suburban hill. As the sun’s rays grew stronger in the afternoon, the peaks in the distance became hazily visible again, until the light penetrated the clouds and revealed the ridges between the peaks. Yet at lower altitudes fog and mist still concealed the valley, giving the set of summits in the distance the guise of an island floating in an ethereal sea of clouds. At the sight of this vista, Atile’i suddenly fell in love with the island, just like he had always loved Wayo Wayo.
“Mountains?” he asked, pointing in the distance.
“Yes.”
“So many?”
“Yes.”
“God is there?”
“What?”
“God is there?”
Is God there? Some Taiwan aboriginal myths involving mountains came to Alice’s mind. The first Atayal ancestor was supposedly born on Mount Dabajian. The Tsou had fled to Jade Mountain after the Deluge. And the Bunun, too, had their own Holy Mountain. Almost all the tribes did. But was a holy mountain a god? Alice would rather describe it as a source of sustenance and as a refuge. The mountains had no particular place in the folk religion of her ancestors, the Han people of Taiwan, but belief in the communal Earth God was ubiquitous. So in a certain sense, at a certain point of time, the mountains had, loosely speaking, been “gods.” Alice was reminded of slogans people had made up in response to the rash of landslides that had been striking whenever a typhoon hit, sometimes burying whole aboriginal villages, sometimes swallowing vehicles, sometimes merely knocking roads out and leaving entire villages isolated. There’d been calls for a return to nature and a renewed respect for nature and even an appeal to “worship the mountain god again.” But maybe it was already too late. Even if once the mountains had been divine, all the gods would have departed by now, Alice thought.
“God was there, but not anymore.”
“God is there, in Wayo Wayo’s sea. The mountain is small, but God is also there,” Atile’i solemnly declared.
Unlike Kabang, Yayaku, the Wayo Wayoan mountain god, was a chastised deity. Wayo Wayoans believed that there were many other gods who were not quite as mighty as Kabang but who were in charge of fate and destiny, each in His own domain. The reason Yayaku had been punished was that one day when Kabang resolved to wipe out a certain kind of whale that had given offense, Yayaku astonishingly extended the hand of mercy. He created a kind of kelp that grew as high as a mountain, let those peerless whales hide inside, and exhorted them not to come out until after Kabang had calmed down. But Kabang finally found them when a playful whale calf snuck out of the seaweed grove. Kabang quaked with anger and unleashed His vengeance upon Yayaku. Yet at the same time, Kabang had realized it would be rash and improper to exterminate a kind of living creature, and thereupon He rescinded His fatal decree.
But Kabang was still contemplating how He should punish Yayaku, at once to put the minor god in his place and boost His own prestige. Kabang had given Wayo Wayo to the people, but over time the rocks on the island would become sand, and the sand would be blown away by the wind and carried away by the sea and the island would get smaller and smaller. Thus, Kabang resolved to oblige Yayaku to take on the form of a little bird and the quotidian task of collecting the grains of sand that blew away in the wind or floated away in the sea and replenishing the island with them. Because the waves never rested and the wind never tired, Yayaku never enjoyed a moment of respite. But Yayaku was industrious and managed, when the gods of sea and wind were not exerting themselves quite so much, to pile up a mountain. In possession of this mountain, the islanders could cut down a certain number of trees without fearing that Wayo Wayo might someday disappear. This was why the islanders worshiped Yayaku as the Mountain God.