Isolated, Kubu wandered for many days and weeks with a furrowed brow and a piercing look. He went to the banks of the river at full moon, something that nobody had ever dared to do. There he looked long and bravely, first at the moon’s reflection and then at the full moon itself and all the stars, right in their eyes, and nothing happened to him. He sat on the riverbank for entire moonlit nights, reveling in the forbidden delirium of light, and nursed his thoughts. Many bold and terrible plans arose in his mind. The moon is my friend, he thought, and the star is my friend, but the blind old man is my enemy. Therefore, the “outside” is perhaps better than our inside, and perhaps the entire holiness of the forest is also just talk! And one night, generations before any other human being, Kubu conceived the daring and fabulous plan of binding some branches together with fiber, placing himself on the branches, and floating down the river. His eyes glistened, and his heart pounded with all its might. But this plan came to naught, for the river was full of crocodiles.
Consequently, there was no way into the future but to leave the forest by way of its edge — if there even was an edge to the forest at all — and to entrust himself to the glowing emptiness, the evil “outsider.” That monster, the sun, had to be sought out and endured, for — who knew? — in the end maybe even the ancient lore about the terror of the sun was just a lie!
This thought, the last in a bold, feverishly wild chain of reflections, made Kubu tremble. Never in the whole of history had a forest dweller dared to leave the forest of his own free will and expose himself to the horrible sun. And once more he walked around for days carrying these thoughts with him until he finally summoned his courage. Trembling, on a bright day at noon, he crept toward the river, cautiously approached the glittering bank, and anxiously looked for the image of the sun in the water. The glare was extremely painful to his dazzled eyes, and he quickly shut them. But after a while he dared to open them once more and then again and again, until he succeeded in keeping them open. It was possible. It was endurable. And it even made him happy and courageous. Kubu had learned to trust the sun. He loved it, even if it was supposed to kill him, and he hated the old, dark, lazy forest, where the priest croaked and where the young courageous man had been outlawed and expelled.
Now he made his decision, and he picked his deed like a piece of ripe sweet fruit. He made a full hammer out of ironwood and gave it a very thin and light handle. Then, early the next morning, he went looking for Mata Dalam. After discovering his footprints, he found him, hit him on the head with the hammer, and watched the old man’s soul depart through his crooked mouth. Kubu placed his weapon on the priest’s chest so that the people would know who had killed him, and using a mussel shell, he carved a sign on the flat surface of the hammer. It was a circle with many straight rays — the image of the sun.
Bravely he now began his trip to the distant “outside.” He walked straight ahead from morning till night. He slept nights in the branches of trees and continued his wandering early each morning over brooks and black swamps and eventually over hills and moss-covered banks of stone that he had never seen before. As they became steeper, he was slowed down because of the gorges, but he managed to climb the mountains on his way through the infinite forest, so that he ultimately became doubtful and sad and worried that perhaps some god had prohibited the creatures of the forest from leaving their homeland.
And then one evening, after he had been climbing for a long time and had reached some higher altitude where the air was much drier and lighter, he came to the edge without realizing it. The forest stopped — but with it the ground stopped, too. The forest plunged down into the emptiness of the air as if the world had broken in two at this spot. There was nothing to see but a distant, faint red glow and above, some stars, for the night had already commenced.
Kubu sat down at the edge of the world and tied himself tightly to some climbing plants so that he would not fall over. He spent the night cowering in dread and was so wildly aroused that he could not shut his eyes. At the first hint of dawn, he jumped impatiently to his feet, bent over the emptiness, and waited for the day to appear.
Yellow stripes of beautiful light glimmered in the distance, and the sky seemed to tremble in anticipation, just as Kubu trembled, for he had never seen the beginning of the day in the wide space of air. Yellow bundles of light flamed up, and suddenly the sun emerged in the sky beyond the immense cleft of the world, large and red. It sprang up from an endless gray nothingness that soon became blue and black — the sea.
And the “outside” appeared before the trembling forest dweller. Before his feet the mountain plunged down into the indiscernible smoking depths, and across from him some rose-tinted cliffs glistened like jewels. To the side lay the dark sea, immense and vast, and around it the coast ran white and foamy, with small nodding trees. And above all of this, above these thousand new, strange mighty forms, the sun was rising, casting a glowing stream of light over the world that burst into flames of laughing colors.
Kubu was unable to look the sun in its face. But he saw its light stream in colorful floods over the mountains and rocks and coasts and distant blue islands, and he sank to the ground and bent his face to the earth before the gods of this radiant world. Ah, who was he, Kubu? He was a small dirty animal who had spent his entire dull life in the misty swamp hole of the dense forest, fearful, morose, and submitting to the rule of the vile, crooked gods. But here was the world, and its highest god was the sun, and the long, disgraceful dream of his forest life lay behind him and was already being extinguished in his soul, just as the image of the dead priest was fading. Kubu climbed down the steep abyss on his hands and feet and moved toward the light and the sea. And over his soul in fleeting waves of happiness, the dreamlike presentiment of a bright earth ruled by the sun began to flicker, an earth on which bright, liberated creatures lived in lightness and were subservient to no one except the sun.
The Difficult Path (1917)
When I reached the rocky entrance to the gorge, I stood still and hesitated, and then I turned to look back.
The sun was shining in that pleasant green world. The blossoms of cattails flickered and waved above the meadows. It was good there. Everything was warm and comfortable. You could hear the soul humming deeply and contentedly like a woolly bumblebee enjoying the full fragrance of the air and the sunlight. Perhaps I was a fool to want to leave all this and climb up into the mountains.
The guide touched me gently on my arm, and I tore my eyes away from the beloved landscape, as though forcing myself to spring out of a warm bath. Now I saw the gorge in darkness without the light of the day. A little black brook crept out of the crevice. Pale grass grew in small tufts on its banks. At the bottom of the brook lay stones that had been deposited there over time. They were of different colors, dead and pale like the bones of creatures that had once been alive.
“Let’s rest,” I said to the guide.
He smiled patiently, and we sat down. It was cool, and a mild stream of dark stone-cold air flowed from the rocky entrance.