“Hector? Hector, is that you?”
A hand grabbed my shirt and got me off my tail to a hunched standing position. It was indeed Hector. He was blind—but, down here, so much less blind than I, or anyone else, that his clairvoyance made him king. I feared that if I stood, I’d bump my head.
“That’s not the way to do it,” RuthClaire called from above. “You’re supposed to slide down.” Her words echoed through the catacombs.
Caroline shouted, “Paul, are you okay?”
“I think I’ve loosened the bolt that holds my ass on, kid. Otherwise, yeah, I’m all right.” It gratified me to note that my ex had scolded me, while Caroline had asked after my health. Maybe at some level of its operation, the world was running smoothly.
Then Brian Nollinger cried, “Hang on, Mr. Loyd, we’re coming!” Adam came first, then RuthClaire, Caroline, and Brian. They slid down a natural ramp two feet over from where I’d been sitting, and this body-worn slide deposited them next to Hector and me without fracturing either their feet or their tailbones.
“I am very sorry you hurt your butt,” Adam said, touching my arm. “On this walk-through, we will avoid the most treacherous galleries, the coves and crawlways that speleologists call horrors: no wriggle rooms, rock bridges, or chatières, Mister Paul.”
“Chatières?”
“Cat holes,” RuthClaire said. “You can guess what those are.”
“En avant,” Adam said. He shone his battery lamp into the depths of the tunnel. Its beam lit the glassy black walls of the cavern and a high rugged arch beyond which ran a wall gleaming as if basted with coal oil. We walked toward that wall.
In its center, maybe fifty feet away, writhed a statue—its writhing a trick of the light, the oily dampness, and the sinuous lines of the sculpture itself—of a hominid creature like a habiline. It was carven from a dark, banded rock. Its contorted face had smooth hollows for eyes but an angry mouth and a flat nose with flared wings and nostrils. Its face seemed at once that of both a protohuman and a rabid canine. Its hands were fists, and its arms were raised to embrace or assault whoever approached. It boasted an erection as big and shiny as a Coca-Cola bottle, and testicles as distended and uneven as parallel drippings of candle wax. An agony of love, hunger, and rage emanated from the figure, which RuthClaire said was supposed to represent Homo habilis primus: the primeval habiline, the father of its species.
“Who did it?” Caroline asked. “Hector?”
Adam said, “No, not Hector. Even he can’t remember who shaped it, or how our ancestors set it here, but for as long as any of us can recall, it has stood at the base of this wall, at the mouth of this gallery: a memorial and a numen.”
“A numen?” Caroline handed me a flash attachment. I plugged it into the Nikon and took a series of photographs of the statue.
“A presiding spirit,” Brian told Caroline. “The creative energy of the caves and of the habilines.”
“Abraxas, if you like,” RuthClaire said.
I looked at her in the wavering light of Adam’s lamp. “What?”
“Not the art gallery,” she said.
“Then what?”
“In Christian Gnosticism, Abraxas was the god of day and night. The long, bitter day of Adam’s people is nearly over. Down here, it’s already given way to night.”
“We must move,” Adam said. “To stay too long is to tire the eyes so they begin to play tricks. You’ll see statues where none exist, wall paintings where none have been painted. Huge figures at a distance will seem tiny figures in a nearby niche. Tiny statues nearby will seem colossi viewed from across a chamber of humbling bigness. Please, let’s move on.”
We obeyed, and what Adam predicted would happen, happened. The longer we stayed underground the less reliable our perceptions of what he was showing us. Today I have a photographic record of our trip through the Montaraz catacombs, but these photos cannot communicate the impact of beholding such powerful art in its hallucinatory natural setting. Even my panoramas of the largest subterranean vaults cannot evoke the feel—the claustrophobic awe—of standing in those places and drinking in the glory of what the habilines had done. Once sundered from the context of the caves, the art loses meaning as well as immediacy. Like the Upper Paleolithic artists who painted the deep galleries of Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain, Adam’s people had decorated their grottoes, corridors, and rotundas for complicated religio-historical purposes—rites of initiation and socialization—that would fail of fulfillment anywhere else. You had to be there for the art to have context, and the art had to have context for its beholders to internalize the sacredness and force of what they saw. That the caves eventually deceive the eye and disorient the body only adds to their importance in shaping the experience of the initiates. What, then, either “correctly” or “incorrectly,” did we see?
With Adam as guide, and with Brian and RuthClaire as additional torchbearers (they had flashlights), we saw all we could see without crawling, rappelling, or sprouting wings and flying. Here on Montaraz, a school of habiline Michelangelos had rendered the entire history of their species in red, black, yellow, and glowing-white symbols. This chronicle began with a parade of East African animals migrating in discrete herds along the wall leading away from the primeval habiline; it concluded with a procession of gunrunning boats, cruiseships, and propeller-driven pot planes along the way leading back to this anguished figure.
In between, deeper into the mountain, these same artists and their descendants had painted awesome murals synopsizing their people’s years on the savannah, their uneasy relationships with Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, their furtive exile in the foothills of Lolitabu, the dwindling of their numbers during this protracted time, the capture of their surviving remnant by Kikembu warriors, their humiliation and sale in the slave market of Zanzibar, their painful sea voyage from the Island of Cloves to the Isle of Coffee and Cacao, their years of labor on the Rutherfords’ plantations, and their near-extermination by the Tontons Macoutes of Papa Doc Duvalier in the early 1960s.
These sprawling, almost phosphorescent murals took our breath away. Moreover, in front of each one stood a rock carving that subtly glossed the mural’s principal theme. Among these statues were a droll granite hippopotamus, a dying australopithecine, and a family of cave bats hanging upside down. I thought Brian would squeeze his eyeballs out of his sockets examining these works. Adam kept reminding him to stop touching the statuary and the paintings, particularly the murals, for too much touching would alter or deface them. Although the habilines’ pigments had strong color fastness, and although their artists had applied them only to the most absorbent rock faces, the preservation of this subterranean wonder still depended on its visitors’ respectful manners.
“You can’t continue to keep this secret!” Brian’s words bounced off a stagger of receding walls.
“We have to,” RuthClaire said. “To save it.”
“But Mr. Loyd’s taking pictures. Do you believe that after they’re published, another plague of professional schemers won’t swoop down on Montaraz?”
Adam said, “But these pictures, he won’t be publishing.”
“Then why am I taking them?”
“As a record,” Adam said. “If anything should destroy this magnificence, whether vandals, war, or volcanic eruption.”
Caroline asked what photos, of what art, I would be allowed to publish or to carry to gallery owners in my agent’s portfolio. Adam replied that he was not asking me to represent the dead habiline cave artists, but instead Erzulie, Hector, Toussaint, Dégrasse, and Alberoi. It was their work that I’d come to photograph for business purposes, not the paintings and statuary now surrounding and thoroughly overawing us. I would also be given the chance to take some of their work back to Atlanta with us. Granted, I was presently taking celluloid inventory of these refrigerated basilica naves, but that was only a sidelight—an important one—of Caroline’s and my voyage to Montaraz. We had come to help the living rather than the dead. The dead were beyond our help, if not our memory and our gratitude.