“So your mountain god is a bird?”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t it just be too cute to have a little bird as the mountain god,” Alice thought aloud, gazing at the youth standing before her. She couldn’t fully understand him, but there was more to what he was saying than just the words. His expressions, gestures, tones and dynamics made him a natural storyteller. His body had been milled, polished, scarfed and forged, as if by magic, a magic that would make people believe that any story he might tell, no matter how absurd, bizarre and unbelievable it might seem, must have actually happened in real life.
“Adorable? No, Yayaku has no feeling. He is cold.”
They kept finding their way, and at dawn on the fourth day, they could see some peaks in the distance that Alice recognized from the map. She knew they were approaching the “forest” on the map. But by this time Alice was starting to show fatigue, so they took even more frequent breaks. Alice taught Atile’i how to read a map while they were resting. The key concept, which Atile’i soon grasped, was the use of a sign to stand for some natural feature. The next step was determining orientation, allowing the mind to match the observed landscape and its corresponding representation on the map. Atile’i’s ability in this respect greatly exceeded Alice’s. The only thing he could not get was proportion. The ocean was clearly vast. How could such a small image serve as a surrogate?
They made a fire to cook a meal. Alice had brought many vacuum food packs, which you could just heat up and eat. This evening they had spaghetti with pesto sauce and hot coffee. Atile’i had gradually gotten used to the food the Taiwanese islanders ate.
“So, what did you eat most often at sea?” Alice asked.
“Fish.”
“How’d you catch them?”
“I used things on Gesi Gesi to make a spear gun, and oyster shells as hooks.”
“You ate them raw?”
“What?”
“You didn’t use fire?”
“Fire? No.”
“No fire. Oh, right, it would be too difficult to make a fire on the ocean. What about writing? Do the people of Wayo Wayo have writing?”
“Writing? Like this?”
“Yeah.”
“Writing, we have not. The Earth Sage says, speech is everything.”
“Too bad you don’t have writing. There are many things that can only be expressed using the written word.”
“No need. Wayo Wayo has no writing, but we can express things all the same.”
“But how can you compose poems without writing?” Atile’i didn’t answer, having failed to understand.
“What do you call the moon again?”
“Nalusa.”
“Oh, kaga mi yiwa Nalusa,” Alice said in Wayo Wayoan.
“Tonight there is a moon,” Atile’i translated into Mandarin.
“Ah, indeed, your Mandarin is much improved, tonight there is a moon. And what’s the sun again?”
“Yigasa.”
“Yigasa,” Alice repeated.
“Yigasa shines with its own light, which Nalusa borrows to be bright,” said Atile’i, reciting the lyrics of a Wayo Wayoan nursery rhyme.
“Yigasa shines with its own light, which Nalusa borrows to be bright,” Alice said. “Aiya, that’s poetry.” But Atile’i still didn’t understand what poetry meant.
That evening, shortly after the two of them had gone to sleep, Atile’i woke up, immediately pulled Alice over, covered her mouth to signal silence, and motioned for her to leave via the rear opening. Atile’i sensed that something was out there, but Alice saw nothing except an expanse of silent gloom. Alice’s blood and heartbeat were still sluggish, and because she had not slept enough her legs were still in a dreamland. Atile’i on the other hand was preternaturally alert. He gazed intently into the darkness.
Soon, in the shadows of the trees, he made out a looming form. It seemed to hesitate but was actually resolute. When it moved close to the tent, Alice felt as if a bucket of water had been dumped on her head. Now she was completely awake.
“Bear!”
The bear looked over toward the voice. It stood up on its hind legs like a man and craned its neck to catch the scent, revealing the pattern on its chest, like a crescent moon in the vast night sky of its body. Attracted by the smells, it hesitated before roughly “opening” the tent, spilling their food out on the ground. Then it tasted every item on the menu.
Alice and Atile’i tried to hold their breath. Alice wanted to leave while she still had the chance, but Atile’i felt they should stay put and kept a tight hold on Alice. Though it made Atile’i nervous, this bear before him was a magnificent, alert and tenacious animal, as beautiful as all the animals he had ever seen. Wayo Wayo did not have such animals, not even close. Atile’i was spellbound.
With dawn approaching, the bear stood up again, stomped on the tent, crushing it, and extended its snout and sniffed, looking much taller than a grown man. Alice was clasping Atile’i’s hand, her hands cold as dew. The bear slowly retreated into the forest, and the forest opened up again, readmitting the shadow into its fold.
The bear hadn’t made a sound, had given neither provocation nor pursuit. It had just rummaged around for things it wanted and returned to the forest. But Alice and Atile’i both seemed to have died and come back to life. They had scented something ancient, like the mountain itself but somehow not quite the same. Something divine. If it had wanted to, it could have taken their lives away.
Only now did Atile’i slowly turn to Alice and say, with the utmost care: “Clearly, God is there!”
26. The Man with the Compound Eyes II
When the man wakes up he doesn’t feel the pain he would have expected. He’s just had a dream in which he tried on a night of absolute night to “blind climb” his way down the mountain wall. Because all was darkness he had to use every cell in his skin to feel the texture of the cliff. It felt just like the first time he entered his wife’s body. Both of them had experienced a subtle trembling, as if they were replenishing something in one another’s souls.
Two-thirds of the way down, as a result of overexertion, his nails felt sore, his toes numb, and his eyes were stinging with sweat because he was not wearing a headband. But the more physically ill, the more intense the mental thrill — a paradox those who have never engaged in this kind of activity cannot understand. The man breathed deeply until little by little confidence returned to his fingertips.
But in the moment it did, his fingers parted from the face of the cliff. It was as if he suddenly switched perspectives and saw himself falling, getting smaller and smaller. The clouds and constellations dispersed, everything around him dissolved into darkness, and all that remained was void.
It was a dream, after all. Careful not to make a sound, the man walks out of the tent to the edge of the cliff. The cliff is not as absolutely dark as it was in the dream. But leaves, backs of tree frogs, bent stems and droplets of water in leafy hollows … are all gleaming in the moonlight, making the cliff appear darker than it actually is.