The path I followed wound to and from the water, just as Mother had told it. The rocks were tall and the spray from the falls fell on me. Some distance up and on a bend away from the river, I saw the shape of a huge bird, its wings spread in shadow before my head. I stopped and I looked up and I saw it was an eagle, and it flew to a ledge on the rock face above. The rocks lined up in steps and it was not hard to ascend to where it had landed. There, the eagle ate lizards and snakes; parts of these animals were coiled in various stages of dryness and decay, half consumed and released in flight, a snake’s tail shaken loose from a beak, a lizard’s foot. The smell of them was salty and musky, like the blood of the womb when it is broken in its natural way.
Not far from the eagle’s nest, a stream came in a trickle from inside the mountain. I walked through the shallow water to the soil on the other side of it. It was mouldy and stagnant near the rock face, and the soil was dark and moist, where the sun had not passed.
I found the cave entrance between two straight rocks. I slipped through it. I walked, my shoulders touching the walls on each side. There were parts where the rocks bent in so close I had to turn sideways, and when this happened, the rock closed in on me and the darkness fell thick and wet and it shut out the outside sounds.
I walked on. It got darker when I thought it couldn’t possibly still. It was hard to breathe. But then my feet found water, and the passage bent suddenly to the right. I had to lean backwards over the one side of the passage to get through it. I saw, far ahead along the floor, the water – and it held a strange light. The light was dim and bronze, like a dirty sunset.
At the end of the passage there was a chamber, and in the middle a pool the shape and colour of a ripe pear. Sunlight poured in from a second entrance in the mountain, higher up, on the other side. Its bright shaft invited a line of plants over the rocks and through the water, painting a path in green. The chamber was still and warm.
There was a narrow beach around the pool. On the far side, a cluster of boulders led up to the hole in the ceiling, and their tops formed a slippery path. I thought of the guard, and where he had come. I thought of the girls, swimming in the pool. I shivered.
I stepped in. The water was cool. In the deeper parts where the sun shone, the lime green plants made way for tiny fish, flakes of silver that swam and bred and died there, and left bones like feathers between the stones.
I took off my clothes and I walked in on a path of soft velvet sand. As I walked deeper, the ground became harder and the water got colder. I swam to the middle, to the place where the light fell in from outside. My toes tapped against strange outcrops beneath, and when I lost my footing because it was too deep, I dived deep down and I stood on a rock with one hand.
Under the water, I could only see nearness: this and that, and now. Down there, the water made vague shapes from solid forms. But there were also tiny dust particles that turned and caught the sun, and they travelled through the water like tiny universes of light.
When I came up, I was deep in the pool. The sun had moved out of the entrance above and the water looked still and dull, as if in a moment it had closed its eyes. I swam back to the side. I climbed out and as I did so, I slipped on the rock in front of me. I put my hands on it to steady myself. Because of the sudden darkness in the cave and the water in my eyes, I could not see at first why I had slipped.
I walked on and I turned around. I saw the rock I had slipped on was dark brown. The blood was old but still wet, and it covered the rock with the shape of the first continent. It was on me, on my hands and on my feet, and I sat down in it, and through my tears the whole cave went red.
Everybody had left the town. The sand betrayed the marks of the tents that would soon be brushed away by the wind. I looked at the classroom and I saw the pale blue tape still flapping, and I thought that soon that tape would be torn, and pieces of it flown away by the wind. I looked at the old hall, on its dark hollows filled with ghosts and beneath it the cellar that held the last memories of the girls.
I rode the bicycle to the airfield, to the old tower. Behind me, I knew the town would soon be covered in its shroud of heat and dust. I thought of the journalist and what he had said about God, and I fought the desire to look back. I felt the sun and the wind on my back and the sky’s blank stare, and in all of it a hard and wordless glancing.
When I crossed the airstrip the birds began to fly at me, but I was steady in their bombing turns. At the watchtower, I put the bike up against the wall. I walked through the door. They were sitting near the bottom of the stairs. When I walked in, they looked at me and the young woman smiled.
Nobody said anything.
I had cleaned my hands in the river, and I said nothing of the cave.
We heard the plane, the slow steady thrum descending, and we left the watchtower and stepped out into the bright light of the airstrip. We walked to the plane inside the peals of screaming birds. The wind took our hair and threw it over our eyes.
The older aid worker opened the door of the plane and pulled down the stairs. The doctor put her hand on my arm. When the pilot saw me he raised his eyebrows and looked at the doctor, and the doctor mouthed something I couldn’t hear.
I sat at the back with my bag with the strange hair in it between my feet. I smelt the diesel and the old leather seats. I watched through the small round window how the dry land fell away under the plane, and the mountains rose up ahead of us. The shadows of rocks stained the land so that in parts it appeared pocked with holes, and the wind passed over the sand in pathways that turned half circles and lifted faint columns of dust.
Below us the new river coiled away to the south, its corners already green with young reeds. Where the water widened, the sun cut it into millions of silver splinters, as if slicing the fabric of a painting to reveal a glimpse of a hidden country behind it, lit by thousands of sunken lights. The earth around it was so dry, and yet the water flowed on, resolutely, silently, steady like the blood of a new vein cut into the flesh. It moved with a knowing that was independent of human need or endeavour, for it only wanted rain, and after that, the pull of the earth. And in this, in its curving body, in its wet flanks, I saw life: water and light, the flush of green stubble after the burning.
But as the plane rose and the town got lost and the land sank away from me, I knew that more company guards would descend the mountains into the valley to secure the new water. I thought of them picking their way through the young plants beside the river, their boots leaving marks in the mud, their long shadows falling firm and cold in the ubiquitous pardon that is offered by the desert sun. But I chose not to think of this. Rather, I thought of what the journalist had told me. I thought of the earth and the water and the light and the hope in the desolation, and I closed my eyes.
I was not in that plane. I was walking down there in the valley.
I was still with Mother. We were making our way across the desert, the river opening up before us, the water blinking with a thousand fallen lamps, and the girl we were searching for, the one we had lost, was just ahead of us, around this bush, behind that rock – just there, crouching still, waiting to be found.
