Briefing for a Descent Into Hell. Doris Lessing
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Название: Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

Автор: Doris Lessing

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Классическая проза

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isbn: 9780007378678

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СКАЧАТЬ again moved forward and was shining into my face and eyes. I did walk on, but now it was slow going, for the track was a path, sometimes not much more than footholds in rocks feet apart, and often slippery from the spray of the river.

      I went on up and up, half stunned by the crashing of the waters, and by nasty tearing winds that seemed to blow from all sides, buffeting the breath half out of me. Yet I was exhilarated by the liveliness of that air and the fighting to keep my lungs filled, so that everything about me was made distinct twice over—by my clear-minded condition, and by the fresh shadowless light of dawn. The edge of the plateau and its clustering rocks now seemed so close above me that the winds might roll down rocks to crush me, or as if the whole mass might slide in, as lower down the mountainside the weight of earth had already slid away. But I still went on, pulling myself by branches, and bushes, and even clumps of tall reed, which cut my hands and arms. If the wind had not beaten all clear thought out of my head I might by then have become too discouraged to go on, but, although what my eyes saw filled me with foreboding, I continued like a robot. For it was now evident that ahead of me was a narrow cleft, possibly too dangerous to use in my ascent, that above that—should I reach that height—a perpendicular rock rose smooth as glass to the edge of the escarpment. There seemed no way around the cleft. On one side of the sharp rock which it split the waters were thundering down, more through the air than over a rocky bed. All I could see on that side of me were masses of water, mostly spray. On the other side was a very steep shaly slope beneath which was a precipice. It could not be possible to make my way to the right across this slope, for even a small pebble thrown on to it started an avalanche which I could hear crashing into the forest far below. Yet the track had followed the river all the way up here, somebody or something had used that track—and its destination seemed in fact to be this cleft in the rock ahead. So I went on up into it. The morning sunlight was a glitter in the blue sky far above my head, for I was enclosed in a half-dark, smelling of bats. Now I had to squirm my way up, my feet on one wall, my back and shoulders against the other. It was a slow, painful process, but at last I scrambled up on to a narrow ledge against the final glassy wall. Looking down, it was a scene of magnificent forests through which the river went in a shining green streak, and beyond the forests, the circling white rim of sand, and beyond that, a horizon of sea. Up here all the air was filled with the sharp smell of river spray and the flowering scents from the forests below. The evil-smelling cleft I had come through now seemed to have had no real part in my journey, for its dark and constriction seemed foreign to the vast clear space of the way I had been—but that had not been so, and I made myself remember it. Without the painful climb through the cleft I would not be standing where I was—and where I was had no way on and up, or so it seemed. I had to go up, since there was nothing else to do, but I could not go up. The ledge I stood on, about a yard wide, dwindled away into air very soon, as I saw, when I explored it to its ends on either side. In front of my face was this smooth dark rock like glass into which I peered as I had into the sides of glossy waves in the sea. Only here there were no fish staring out at me, only the faint reflection of a face shaggy with many weeks’ growth of beard. And now I did not know what to do. It was not possible to climb up that glassy rock. It was twenty, thirty feet high, and it had no crack or rough place in it. I sat down, looking East into the morning sun, back over the way I had come, and thought that I might as well die in this place as in any other. Then there was a movement in the cleft, and I saw the head of the yellow beast come cautiously up, for it was a tricky climb even for him—it must have been as much too narrow for him as it had been too wide for me. After him came his friend, or his mate. I moved well over to give the big animals room to stand on the ledge, but they did not remain beside me. First one and then the other turned to give me a long steady stare from its green eyes. Their great square tufted yellow heads were outlined against the deep blue of the sky beyond—and then first one and then the other went on up the precipitous glassy rock, in a couple of easy bounds. I saw the two heads, still outlined against the blue sky, peering down at me over the rocks thirty feet above. I got up and moved to the place on the ledge from where these two had just bounded, unable to believe what I had seen, and then I noticed that on the smooth glassy surface was a roughened streak, like a path, which was only visible when the light struck it at a certain angle. This was not as rough as the trunk of a thick-barked tree, but it was as rough as weatherworn granite. Without the example of the two beasts I would never have even thought of attempting to climb like a fly up this ribbon of rough across the smooth, but now I stood as high as I could, reaching up and up with my palms, and I found that by not thinking of how terrible and dangerous a thing it was I was doing, my hands and feet clung to this rough breathing rock face, and I found I had come to the top of the impassable mirror-like rock, and I fell forward among rocks on the edge of the plateau for which I had been aiming. It was at once evident that this height, the summit of my aims since I had landed on the beach far below the day before, was the lowland plain to mountains that rose far ahead, to the West, on a distant horizon, probably fifty miles away. Looking down over the frightful path I had ascended, it now seemed nothing very much, and the sharp glass summit that I had thought impossible to surmount was no more alarming than—anything that one has done, and apparently done easily. The broad river was a shining silver streak. The lower falls ten or twelve miles away where the whole land with its burden of forest slid sharply down was no more than a shadowy line across tree-tops, and a white cloud low over the forest was the miles-long cataract. The high falls, close under this escarpment, whose spray reached almost to the summit, were sound only, for that long tumbling descent was not visible at all.

      All the coast lay open to me now, and the blue ocean beyond. And it was as if there was nobody in the world but myself. There was not a ship on the sea, or so much as a canoe on the river, and the long forests lay quiet beneath, and in those miles of trees there was not even a single column of smoke that might show a homestead or a traveller making himself a meal.

      On the plateau where I stood, the vegetation was different. Here were the lighter, gayer, layered trees of the savannah, with its long green grasses that would soon turn gold. As I looked West to the mountains that in winter must have snow massed on their peaks which were now summer-blue, the sound of water came from my left. About half a mile South, over a fairly level ground, I found the source of this noise. The river whose course I had traced up from the sea here ran fast along a shallower rockier bed. It was a stream, a wide bird-shrill splashy stream with gentle inlets and beaches a child could play safely on. But this river did not fall with a roar over the edge of the escarpment, and down those glassy sides which indeed looked as if they had at one time been smoothed by water. No, at about half a mile from the cliff’s edge there was a chasm in the riverbed a couple of hundred yards wide. The great mass of water simply slid into it, almost without noise, and vanished into the earth. But it was possible to see where the riverbed had run, thousands or millions of years ago. For on the other side of the hole where the water rushed into the earth, the river’s old bed still existed, a shallow enough channel, but wide, and widening towards the cliff where it had once fallen, and overgrown with shrubs and grass, and very rocky. The channel was worn down more deeply on one side, where the water had believed that it must make a loop in the riverbed, as is the way of rivers which cannot by nature run straight, and whose bodies spiral around and around exerting a pressure on one bank and then on the other. But the water had not known about the plunge over the cliff which lay just ahead and which would make its preparations for a bend useless: the water had crashed straight over the edge, and when I stood there to look down, I saw that the worn smoothed path of the stream when it had been a waterfall still showed among the littered rocks below the glassy coping over which I had believed it impossible to climb. The river emerged suddenly, a hundred feet below, after its long dark passage through the rock. Out it came, as sparkling, clear and noisy as it had been above, before it had ever tasted the air of the under-earth. After its emergence it crashed and plunged and roared and dashed itself to pieces as I had seen that morning while I climbed up beside it.

      I returned to look down into the hole in the plain where the river fell as neatly as bathwater into a plughole, and saw that above the great chasm the air swirled with iridescent spray. I was now again looking westwards into the setting sun, and I had to find a place to sleep that night. I was not able, looking back along my days and nights, to remember when I had slept well and calmly. Not since I landed on this friendly shore—for by sleep I did not СКАЧАТЬ