The Cave

SIRHAN, COME DOWN! Come down! Sirhan!

He thought he heard his mother in the wind, his real mother. Impossible.

It was noon and he was free; orphans were never missed at noon, a time for meals and rest. He struggled over the base of the mountain, where crested stories of divinity were wrapped along sandstone slabs unending. Grand demarcations of struggle and achievement worn down by persistent desert sands. The sacred mountain rose above them to the topmost strata, the Great Beholder. From there bony landscapes ran down across her surface like glacial scars. These were the parts to climb—the rest of her was smooth and unbroken as the surface of a bottomless lake. It seemed to matter little whether man had formed her, or she him. 

The sky whipped at him for disturbing its peace. Brittle bundles of thorn and nettle stung him and came loose as they did, tumbling down and down the white ravine, ousted for their impertinence. That was the fate of most who dared dwell among giants. But Sirhan had all the courage in the world, for he knew the cave to be near the tip—one among many mouths, portals done before his time—and he felt with growing vigour that the goal of his hardship, the man of the mountain, hid within.

At last, he reached for that final handhold and swung nimbly over the ledge. 

He was mortified to find himself surrounded by bland formations of rock. The entrance was a simple gash in the grey-white vein of the mountain. Alone but for the whistling wind, he entered. Inside, he made out the raw semblance of a furnished home, a desperate recreation of settlement—so much for the splendour of the mountain. 

How disappointing …

“Sirhan, the industrious orphan! Oh, what a pleasure. It has been a while since my last visitor. Come in, come in.”

An old, bent man had appeared in the opening behind him. The hermit had a twinkle in his eye, a hand on his belly, and his mane and beard flit about his face as though it were enchanted.

“Sorry, I didn’t know where to knock.”

“Oh, that’s a good one. Yes, yes,” he muttered, “good sense of humour.”

The cave, to Sirhan’s surprise, was rather small—and desolate despite it. The hermit had a quick skirmish with his beard, which had infiltrated the system of belts and ropes that kept in place the ragged layers he bore. Too many to count, they were the bellies and backs of curious species the boy did not know. There was a drawn-out silence.

“You sleep on the stone?” Sirhan asked half-heartedly.

“Prophets, no!” the hermit said with mock disdain. “No, I have furs to cushion the blow.”

“It would be cold too,” the boy said.

“On that we can agree. Although this cave can get quite stuffy in the warmer months, like with a dozen people sharing a room.”

“I know what that’s like,” Sirhan said. 

They wore long shirts of linen then, or nothing at all, in the heat and toil.

“Yes, but then, my boy, in spring and early summer, when the weather is just right, the air is fresh with an emptiness that will invigorate your spirits! It puts to shame any sort of abode a man could build, when you feel that pleasant chill come over you, and the air is ripe with the scent of the mountain’s thyme and sweet, earthy fennel and the unmistakeable aroma of—of—”

“Lavender.”

“Yes, lavender, and wild basil, sweet honeysuckle and jasmine all perforating your senses. I know the names, boy. Even the roots and leaves of the village come to share the breeze. It is like a cool, shaded garden then, made for me and me alone.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“Soon enough,” the hermit smiled.

That time would indeed soon be upon them, for already the mountain peaks were rejuvenating, their streaks of white being carefully replaced with dashes of umber and coal, and with sprinklings of verdant life. So too, the clamour at the base of the Lithians was gaining as the weeks went by, with winter abdicating its throne. The vociferous side of the villagers seemed oftener to win them over. Short-sighted arguments and struggles abounded with the valley’s bloom, mingled with the constant rumble of heavy labour.

“Open to the clean winds, and happy to ignore the lesser smells suspended over the foothills and their crowds. Those are my favourite months.” 

He gave a sort of self-satisfied grunt, and the corners of his bushy moustache, little white clouds, danced up and down over the rest of his voluminous beard. Indeed, Sirhan seldom saw the mouth that spoke from underneath that great billow of hair.

“And what of the past months, when the works stalled, and you cease to come down by the vale?”

“Well, I was asleep of course!” 

He was an odd man, the hermit was. 

A recluse, the boy was taught, could only look a certain way. But the man whom he had come to visit now that the snows had thawed, the man he had been told repeatedly not to visit, was anything but a certain way. To Sirhan, he was like numerous ropes pulling in all directions. There was a hidden strength in his arched back—from working the sacred mountain, yes, but equally the sort of daily strength needed to make do with the rugged surroundings he’d adopted. Like a broken knife with still-sharp edges. His hands were worker’s hands, and his motions surer than his age allowed. There was a harshness in his expressions, in his laughs, in his sometimes-uneasy stomach, but there was the tenderness too of a man who spent much time in silence. Above all, there was freedom in him, an ease that spoke of all the things he no longer bothered with. It was almost boastful.

Sirhan sometimes envied the hermit. Sometimes he pitied him.

“So, you sleep and nothing else? Like a bear?”

“I am no bear! No, I wake up occasionally to do some painting, here,” he pointed at an area of stone naturally smoother than the rest, slanted and covered entirely with undiscernible marks and smudges. “Or otherwise listen to the cave. Mostly I listen, but sometimes it is polite to give an answer. Sometimes I tell it one of my own tales. Mine are rather monotonous I’m afraid. My years I have given to the task of her. Naturally, my thoughts lie most days with Nuzob…”

Sirhan shivered slightly as a nasty gale buffeted the cave and howled in retreat. Before he had the chance to ask another question, the hermit was wrapping him in many layers of rags he procured from a pile in one of the many dark corners. The boy beneath the awkward pile of covers thanked him and wondered what else lay about. The recluse busied himself in another corner, seeking something. Then he spun around wildly, only to drift off again, as Sirhan had so often seen him do at work.

“Perhaps I should start a fire for you,” he muttered absent-mindedly. “This place takes time to get accustomed to.”

He gathered some twigs and small scrapings from an elevated, dry slab of rock that served as somewhat of a table. There were sharp stones, coals and cloths with various pigments piled on them, his painting materials. It was not so different here from his own home, only fewer things lay about. There was an absence of plants, especially straw, and the heavy musk born of the mingling of animal and man; only the smells the hermit liked so much could reach up here. All in all, it was a petrified place and Sirhan knew he preferred his own bed, crowded as it was. But that thought he also knew to keep to himself.

“What stories do you tell the cave?” the boy said.

At that question the hermit made a poignant break in his activities. A moment later he resumed gathering his ingredients and was sat, flint and scraps in hand, before the pit in the centre of the room where cold ashes and bits of charcoal lay. The scraps he placed like it was an art of its own. Then he arched his eyebrows in a wordless message, the kind only Sirhan could interpret.

“Very well,” the orphan said with all the dignified restraint he could muster. 

This was momentous.

Always, a needling curiosity had plagued him. For all the men who hauled heavy things in place and struck ungiving anvils, and the women who elaborated on that raw act and refined it, and the children whose nimble dexterity reached those unreachable places that nonetheless require it, Sirhan knew each of them well enough. He had been with them almost from birth. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, the most fascinating person Sirhan had ever met was not among the villagers of the valley, nor the nomadic folk of the desert, nor even the boisterous seafaring folk. 

He sat down cross-legged opposite him.

In all honesty, what he had ventured up these staggering heights for, climbing steep rockfaces and scraping up his legs on persistent thorns, thirsty and hungry, was neither the dank cave nor the scent of thyme. If it turned out the man of the mountain was merely an odd recluse, the boy had, begrudgingly, decided he could return to his life with little disappointment, knowing nothing was amiss. His parents, rather his caretakers, would be none the wiser. Young boys run off all the time, orphans no less. So long as they return in time to lend a hand, and Sirhan was never tardy. He rose earliest to till the soils with his father and help his mother with the animals and was the last of his family to lay his tools down by the sacred mountain which the elders of the village called Nuzob. 

But if it happened that there was more to him than met the eye, something perhaps only Sirhan felt as a clandestine tingle in the gut … 

The hermit smiled pleasantly. 

“A runaway,” he said. “I was just like you before all these years happened to me.” 

He gestured at his beard with hands that were veined and blotted, bony fingers spread wide. Then he began to twirl the end of it. “Maybe not as smart, but at least twice as curious.” He looked about calmly. “I can’t say I’ve been all pleased with the result, but then I never did see the point in a half-brewed life.”

His light demeanour turned for a moment, and Sirhan thought his bushy eyebrows resembled storm clouds over a shaken sea. He struck the flint and sparks flew across the pit, where they sent the scraps into a fiery frenzy. The fire belched as it grew, and that seemed to amuse him. Smoke banded together in strings and a procession began to curve like a river towards the darkest corner of the cave. Sirhan noticed it was no corner, but a man-sized tunnel. But then he looked twice. It was not merely man-sized, but man-shaped. 

He shivered once more, this time not for lack of warmth.

“Now then.”

The hermit hummed a brief melody. From a crevasse deep within his own tumble of ragtag coverings he drew three small pouches of leather. Sirhan could hear his mother—this time the mother who had raised him—give a chiding speech, one with a dash of fear in it, but mostly admonishment: 

Listen well to me! That is no man to make friends with, Sirhan. His true allegiance lies elsewhere than our kind. And that lair has seen many children that were never seen again. 

The orphan thought this fear was based on the hermit’s strangeness, on his existence on the periphery, not near enough to be known, not far enough to be ignored. His gaze darted back and forth between the tunnel and the old man’s face, increasingly enveloped by the haze. His beard took on the orange glean of the fire, and lo! it curled and twisted of its own volition, almost malevolently. 

No man … 

Don’t be silly!

“The first thing you must know, Sirhan,” he said and fed the contents of the first pouch, what appeared to be an assortment of dried herbs, to the lapping red tongues, “is that I am Amal. That is my name. I am a Collector of Things, and Nuzob is She who offers them to me.”

The flames heaved a great depressing sigh. They turned from bright vermillion to a shade of purpure deeper than lilac, the colour of dreams.

“The second is that I am old. Not so old as the mountains, but not so young as the rivers.”

The next pouch, a pale sulphurous powder, devoured, and the fire moaned as a slave left to lie in the sun with a festering wound. It gnashed its teeth and grew a cold, angry obsidian. Sirhan could only watch in horror. His mind was forcefully blank, like a sky from which the tapestry was torn.

“The third is that I will not harm you, boy. It has been centuries since I left a mark and I regret it still. By Nuzob, I will be your shield even. All I ask from you is to remember why you are here. Remember, Sirhan, what carried you so far and may carry you farther still.”

The fire, now inferno, cackled gleefully as it ingested the contents of his final bag. 

Dark red liquid poured from it at a sickeningly slow pace into the roar. From anger it leapt to joy then, burning ever brighter, absurdly bright. A crescent of gold and amber, like a towering horse on its hindlegs brayed ecstatically and charged at the vault of the cave, lashing out to all sides. The ceiling was bathed in liquid light, and it burst out of the cave’s entrance and plunged forth into the dark tunnel. A wordless scream left the boy’s trembling lips.

For the briefest of moments, every alcove, recess, every grain of dust was illuminated.

All that he had not seen.

Unspeakable treasures winked at the orphan from all around him, vying for his attention. They grabbed. They laughed. They gloated at his ignorance. There were the eyes of creatures he could not name, nor ever see again, eyes in utter shock that they found someone looking back at them. Evil things and heavenly things and things innocent of both good and bad. Horrid, formless faces averted themselves, to prevent him going mad. Others wished for just that. The cave, which had felt manageably small when he first stepped foot in it, now wished frantically for the limits of his imagination to be restored. A cacophony of appetites was illuminated, from ravenous spindly forms to gluttonous childlike ones and the insatiable one looming over them with a chain in hand for every one of their swollen necks. Each made a sound never heard, and when the orphan heard he forgot. A symphony of pleas, of dogmatic demands, of eternity, wanting nothing more than to be shared with some unfortunate soul. Their shadows cast out to dance beside the others, moving and still alike bowed and joined in. Fervent arms were locked, legs aflutter in a tumbling muddle of winding limbs, a serpentine mess. A thousand questions about nothing were drawn like fledgling sabres and a canon of answers roaring clashed against them with equal brutality. An endless back and forth of magnetic forces, like two great oceans in a violent wedlock of sanity and madness, both willing to submit to the other in playful glee, neither willing to secede outright. 

The eye of the world was on Sirhan. Its lashes brushed the mountainpeaks.

Oh, to indulge. 

Why had the old hermit not shown him the secrets of the cave sooner? Why had he kept the delights of this old world all to himself? What a selfish man, to lock these treasures away! To guard these vast fantasies so fiendishly, to damn them into the isolation he chose for himself. He beheld Amal now, scratching his nails bloody, stooped by the fire, the earth around him ripening with a demonic glint. He revelled in the light of it and vainly tried to pry it open, his back swelled with boils and trickling streams of pus.

What a miserable, greedy man. A loathsome, greedy …

He felt his arms lifting, reaching out. His fingers stretched until the skin was taught. A broad grin covered his face like a warm wet cloth. He wanted to join in this delicious affair. To float into their midst and see them flock to him. He wanted to be entangled with them, and ever keep on winding. And he wanted nothing more, for he was sure it would be awful fun.

And it was gone again. 

All in a single beat of the heart. Sirhan jumped to his feet and, instantly loosing balance, fell back. He was nauseous, his head burning feverishly, and his hands and feet were cold and clammy. 

There was a deafening silence.

From that yawning hole, slowly, tentatively he was returned to the quiet bristle of branches in the wind, and the soft crackle of a dying fire—and the one who remained, sat beside him, now poking away at those half-glowing embers, was a hermit again.