“You won’t see the demon. I heard there was a rockslide years ago. The cave is blocked. And besides, it would anger the mountain spirit. It might dry up the river again.”
Asha nodded. She reached into the small pouch on her belt and brought out a small sliver of ginger root, which she poked into the corner of her mouth. “Well, if I see any spirits, I’ll be sure to be very polite to them.” She winked at him, and he frowned at her.
3
For two days she hiked upstream following the winding river higher and higher into the forest hills. And for two days she only saw and heard more of the same forest all around her. The same fish and frogs in the water, the same birds and monkeys in the canopy. As the earth dried out, more subtle fragrances began to drift on the breeze. She could taste the sweet nectar of the flowers and the savory oils in the nuts as she walked beside the river.
On the third day she reached the foot of the mountain. Looking up, she could trace the path of the river tumbling down over the rocks from pool to pool, half-hidden by the trees.
The trees.
“Maybe there are spirits here after all.”
The trees were like none she had ever seen before. She guessed that most were as thick as she was tall. As she stood there in the early morning light marveling at the towering trunks, she saw that there were no seedlings, no saplings, no small trees of any kind. Only giants stood on the mountain, pillars fit to hold up the heavens themselves.
Rough brown bark covered the trunks, wrinkled and pitted and folded so deep that she could slip her entire hand into the grooves of it all the way to her wrist. But looking up, it was not the brown of the trunks that colored the mountain wood but the dark green of the vines. The vines wound around and over every branch and limb and hung in countless slack arcs between them overhead. She saw no beginnings or endings to them at all, just the curving loops and lines and bands everywhere she looked.
As she stared up at the silent giants, Asha gently petted the tiny mongoose on her shoulder. “Is this what it feels like to be as small as you, I wonder?”
She started up the mountain path and soon had to stop looking at the trees altogether to stop the bouts of vertigo. Chewing her ginger slivers and keeping her eyes on the ground, she climbed slowly up the mountain.
The stream gurgled and gushed from ledge to pool to ledge, splashing over the rocks and carrying the odd leaf or twig downstream. After a time, Asha noticed that there were no sticks or branches lying on the ground anywhere. Nothing larger than her finger could be seen on the ground and she chanced a quick look up again. It was the vines. The vines had so thoroughly covered the tree limbs that even if a branch died or broke free, it would only dangle from the endless net of vines wrapped about it.
At noon she stopped to rest and soak her feet in a pool. Broad green leaves floated on the surface of the water around the edges where the current was slowest, and here and there among them she saw delicate white lotus blossoms standing above the rippling surface.
As evening fell, she circled yet another massive tree at the water’s edge and climbed up a rocky path beside a small waterfall to find an earthen ledge blessed by a small patch of sunlight piercing the canopy. A small white-haired langur stood on the ledge, twitching his tail. He had a black face and red eyes.
Jagdish squeaked in Asha’s ear.
“I know. I see him.” She stroked the mongoose’s head beside her ear. “But I don’t think he’s here to eat you.”
She stepped away from the tree, holding out one empty palm toward the small monkey. He scampered away up the slope beside the mountain stream, and Asha followed. At the next pool she found the langur sitting on a boulder beside the water, flicking his white tail back and forth across the rock. The sky above the canopy had faded to dusky violet and a cool wind blew through the leaves. The mountain trees shivered and sighed.
Asha looked past the monkey to the face of the mountainside. The stream went no farther. What little water flowed here emerged from a few cracks between the tumbled stones on the far side of the pool. “Looks like there really was a rockslide.”
At the edge of the stream seeping under the fallen stones, she knelt and stuck one of her ginger slivers in the muddy soil. “If there are any mountain spirits here, I hope they like ginger.”
She found a patch of soft grass in the lee of a stone to spread her wool blanket and she lay down in the deepening shadows with Jagdish murmuring in her ear.
The langur stretched out on top of his rock to sleep, and Asha closed her eyes.
4
When Asha woke in the morning, the langur was gone and a pile of stones had been pushed away from the mountainside toward the pool. The opening in the rock wall was just wide enough for her to enter if she ducked her head a bit. Inside she could see nothing, but she heard the trickling of the water echoing over and over again in the darkness.
“Are you coming?” Asha looked back at the langur, now sitting on a stone a few paces away that had been bare a moment earlier. The monkey blinked. Asha nodded. “Yeah, I don’t blame you.”
There was nothing lying close at hand to make a torch, so she squinted as she ducked inside the cave. The floor was carpeted in soft, bare earth and the stone walls on either side were lined and grooved with narrow ledges in which she could feel more warm soil with tiny, fragile sprigs growing in them. Mushrooms, she guessed.
The tunnel ran straight back into the mountain and every few seconds she stepped in the muddy edges of the stream that wound its way across the floor in deep channels of clay and sand. The water tinkled softly as it rolled over on itself in the corners of the channel, running swiftly through the dark. Behind her, the entrance to the cave was a bright blue disc in the blackness that shrank bit by bit with each step she took.
Her eyes adjusted and then adjusted again, picking out fainter and fainter lines and shapes in the deep shadows. But then her eyes failed her altogether and Asha was forced to slow her progress, tracing the tunnel wall with her hand and probing the floor ahead with her foot. The sounds of running and falling water echoed higher and deeper and longer here in the tunnel, hiding the source of the noises.
After half an hour, her outstretched foot felt smooth, cold stone. Two more steps carried her out of the tunnel and the wall at her side abruptly curved away. Her instinct was to follow the wall, but she could see something now, a faint glowing shape far ahead. Moving even slower than before, she continued toward the light.
Five more paces brought her to the edge of a cold pool. The stone and sand at the water’s edge sloped down gradually, so she lifted the bottom of her sari and waded out into the pool. The cold water stung her bare skin, but the bottom underfoot was soft and rippled gently with the contours of the mountain stone beneath.
Up ahead, the illuminated object became clearer. It was a mound rising above the surface of the pool in a rough conical shape, though its outline seemed to ruffle and bulge irregularly.
Something brushed Asha’s leg and she looked down at the pale lotus blossom perched above the water by her knee. Looking up again, she realized that all of the faint glimmers in the dark were lotuses standing silent watch over the dark pool.
“Hello?” Her voice echoed softly again and again, far out into the distance and even farther up overhead.
When she reached the mound, she found it was actually a pillar rising sharply from the floor of the pool that allowed her to walk up to its edge while still standing waist deep in the cold water. The lotus leaves and blossoms clustered thickest here around the pillar and the jumbled mound on its top.
Asha explored the shape of the mound with her fingers, her eyes still struggling to see by the faint streaks of light falling from a narrow crack in the cavern’s roof. She felt the thick vines curling around the pillar and over the mound. Her fingers encountered huge leaves on stiff stalks every so often and they rustled softly as she brushed against them. Here and there among the leaves she found more lotus blossoms, all open wide to display their golden seed heads.