Island (21 page)

“So where do the judges come in?”

“The judge listens to the evidence, decides whether the accused person is innocent or guilty, and if he’s guilty, remands him to his MAC and, where it seems advisable, to the local panel of medical and mycomystical experts. At stated intervals the experts and the MAC report back to the judge. When the reports are satisfactory, the case is closed.”

“And if they’re never satisfactory?”

“In the long run,” said Dr. Robert, “they always are.”

There was a silence.

“Did you ever do any rock climbing?” Vijaya suddenly asked.

Will laughed. “How do you think I came by my game leg?”

“That was forced climbing. Did you ever climb for fun?”

“Enough,” said Will, “to convince me that I wasn’t much good at it.”

Vijaya glanced at Murugan. “What about you, while you were in Switzerland?”

The boy blushed deeply and shook his head. “You can’t do any of those things,” he muttered, “if you have a tendency to TB.”

“What a pity!” said Vijaya. “It would have been so good for you.”

Will asked, “Do people do a lot of climbing in these mountains?”

“Climbing’s an integral part of the school curriculum.”

“For everybody?”

“A little for everybody. With more advanced rock work for the full-blown Muscle People—that’s about one in twelve of the boys and one in twenty-seven of the girls. We shall soon be seeing some youngsters tackling their first post-elementary climb.”

The green tunnel widened, brightened, and suddenly they were out of the dripping forest on a wide shelf of almost level ground, walled in on three sides by red rocks that towered up two thousand feet and more into a succession of jagged crests and isolated pinnacles. There was a freshness in the air and, as they passed from sunshine into the shadow of a floating island of cumulus, it was almost cool. Dr. Robert leaned forward and pointed, through the windshield, at a group of white buildings on a little knoll near the center of the plateau.

“That’s the High Altitude Station,” he said. “Seven thousand feet up, with more than five thousand acres of good flat land, where we can grow practically anything that grows in southern Europe. Wheat and barley; green peas and cabbages, lettuce and tomatoes (the fruit won’t set where night temperatures are over sixty-eight); gooseberries, strawberries, walnuts, greengages, peaches, apricots. Plus all the valuable plants that are native to high mountains at this latitude—including the mushrooms that our young friend here so violently disapproves of.”

“Is this the place we’re bound for?” Will asked.

“No, we’re going higher.” Dr. Robert pointed to the last outpost of the range, a ridge of dark-red rock from which the land sloped down on one side to the jungle and on the other mounted precipitously towards an unseen summit lost in the
clouds. “Up to the old Shiva temple where the pilgrims used to come every spring and autumn equinox. It’s one of my favorite places in the whole island. When the children were small, we used to go up there for picnics, Lakshmi and I, almost every week. How many years ago!” A note of sadness had come into his voice. He sighed and, leaning back in his seat, closed his eyes.

They turned off the road that led to the High Altitude Station and began to climb again.

“Entering the last, worst lap,” said Vijaya. “Seven hairpin turns and half a mile of unventilated tunnel.”

He shifted into first gear and conversation became impossible. Ten minutes later they had arrived.

C
AUTIOUSLY MANEUVERING HIS IMMOBILIZED LEG
, W
ILL CLIMBED
out of the car and looked about him. Between the red soaring crags to the south and the headlong descents in every other direction the crest of the ridge had been leveled, and at the midpoint of this long narrow terrace stood the temple—a great red tower of the same substance as the mountains, massive, four-sided, vertically ribbed. A thing of symmetry in contrast with the rocks, but regular not as Euclidean abstractions are regular; regular with the pragmatic geometry of a living thing. Yes, of a living thing; for all the temple’s richly textured surfaces, all its bounding contours against the sky curved organically inwards, narrowing as they mounted towards a ring of marble, above which the red stone swelled out again, like the seed capsule of a flowering plant, into a flattened, many-ribbed dome that crowned the whole.

“Built about fifty years before the Norman Conquest,” said Dr. Robert.

“And looks,” Will commented, “as though it hadn’t been built by anybody—as though it had grown out of the rock.
Grown like the bud of an agave, on the point of rocketing up into a twelve-foot stalk and an explosion of flowers.”

Vijaya touched his arm. “Look,” he said. “A party of Elementaries coming down.”

Will turned towards the mountain and saw a young man in nailed boots and climbing clothes working his way down a chimney in the face of the precipice. At a place where the chimney offered a convenient resting place he halted and, throwing back his head, gave utterance to a loud Alpine yodel. Fifty feet above him a boy came out from behind a buttress of rock, lowered himself from the ledge on which he was standing and started down the chimney.

“Does it tempt you?” Vijaya asked, turning to Murugan.

Heavily overacting the part of the bored, sophisticated adult who has something better to do than watch the children at play, Murugan shrugged his shoulders. “Not in the slightest.” He moved away and, sitting down on the weatherworn carving of a lion, pulled a gaudily bound American magazine out of his pocket and started to read.

“What’s the literature?” Vijaya asked.

“
Science Fiction
.” There was a ring of defiance in Murugan’s voice.

Dr. Robert laughed. “Anything to escape from Fact.”

Pretending not to have heard him, Murugan turned a page and went on reading.

“He’s pretty good,” said Vijaya, who had been watching the young climber’s progress. “They have an experienced man at each end of the rope,” he added. “You can’t see the number-one man. He’s behind that buttress in a parallel chimney thirty or forty feet higher up. There’s a permanent iron spike up there, where you can belay the rope. The whole party could fall, and they’d be perfectly safe.”

Spread-eagled between footholds in either wall of the narrow chimney, the leader kept shouting up instructions and encour
agement. Then, as the boy approached, he yielded his place, climbed down another twenty feet and, halting, yodeled again. Booted and trousered, a tall girl with her hair in pigtails appeared from behind the buttress and lowered herself into the chimney.

“Excellent!” said Vijaya approvingly as he watched her.

Meanwhile, from a low building at the foot of the cliff—the tropical version, evidently, of an Alpine hut—a group of young people had come out to see what was happening. They belonged, Will was told, to three other parties of climbers who had taken their Postelementary Test earlier in the day.

“Does the best team win a prize?” Will asked.

“Nobody wins anything,” Vijaya answered. “This isn’t a competition. It’s more like an ordeal.”

“An ordeal,” Dr. Robert explained, “which is the first stage of their initiation out of childhood into adolescence. An ordeal that helps them to understand the world they’ll have to live in, helps them to realize the omnipresence of death, the essential precariousness of all existence. But after the ordeal comes the revelation. In a few minutes these boys and girls will be given their first experience of the
moksha
-medicine. They’ll all take it together, and there’ll be a religious ceremony in the temple.”

“Something like the Confirmation Service?”

“Except that this is more than just a piece of theological rigmarole. Thanks to the
moksha
-medicine, it includes an actual experience of the real thing.”

“The real thing?” Will shook his head. “Is there such a thing? I wish I could believe it.”

“You’re not being asked to believe it,” said Dr. Robert. “The real thing isn’t a proposition; it’s a state of being. We don’t teach our children creeds or get them worked up over emotionally charged symbols. When it’s time for them to learn the deepest truths of religion, we set them to climb a precipice and then give them four hundred milligrams of revelation. Two firsthand expe
riences of reality, from which any reasonably intelligent boy or girl can derive a very good idea of what’s what.”

“And don’t forget the dear old power problem,” said Vijaya. “Rock climbing’s a branch of applied ethics; it’s another preventive substitute for bullying.”

“So my father ought to have been an Alpinist as well as a woodchopper.”

“One may laugh,” said Vijaya, duly laughing. “But the fact remains that it works. It works. First and last I’ve climbed my way out of literally scores of the ugliest temptations to throw my weight around—and my weight being considerable,” he added, “incitements were correspondingly strong.”

“There seems to be only one catch,” said Will. “In the process of climbing your way out of temptation, you might fall and…” Suddenly remembering what had happened to Dugald MacPhail, he broke off.

It was Dr. Robert who finished the sentence. “Might fall,” he said slowly, “and kill yourself. Dugald was climbing alone,” he went on after a little pause. “Nobody knows what happened. The body wasn’t found till the next day.” There was a long silence.

“Do you still think this is a good idea?” Will asked, pointing with his bamboo staff at the tiny figures crawling so laboriously on the face of that headlong wilderness of naked rock.

“I still think it’s a good idea,” said Dr. Robert.

“But poor Susila….”

“Yes, poor Susila,” Dr. Robert repeated. “And poor children, poor Lakshmi, poor me. But if Dugald hadn’t made a habit of risking his life, it might have been poor everybody for other reasons. Better court the danger of killing yourself than court the danger of killing other people, or at the very least making them miserable. Hurting them because you’re naturally aggressive and too prudent, or too ignorant, to work off your aggression on a
precipice. And now,” he continued in another tone, “I want to show you the view.”

“And I’ll go and talk to those boys and girls.” Vijaya walked away towards the group at the foot of the red crags.

Leaving Murugan to his
Science Fiction
, Will followed Dr. Robert through a pillared gateway and across the wide stone platform that surrounded the temple. At one corner of this platform stood a small domed pavilion. They entered and, crossing to the wide unglazed window, looked out. Rising to the line of the horizon, like a solid wall of jade and lapis, was the sea. Below them, after a sheer fall of a thousand feet, lay the green of the jungle. Beyond the jungle, folded vertically into combe and buttress, terraced horizontally into a huge man-made staircase of innumerable fields, the lower slopes went steeply down into a wide plain, at whose furthest verge, between the market gardens and the palm-fringed beach, stretched a considerable city. Seen from this high vantage point in its shining completeness, it looked like the tiny, meticulous painting of a city in a medieval book of hours.

“There’s Shivapuram,” said Dr. Robert. “And that complex of buildings on the hill beyond the river—that’s the great Buddhist temple. A little earlier than Borobudur, and the sculpture is as fine as anything in Further India.” There was a silence. “This little summerhouse,” he resumed, “is where we used to eat our picnics when it was raining. I shall never forget the time when Dugald (he must have been about ten) amused himself by climbing up here on the window ledge and standing on one leg in the attitude of the dancing Shiva. Poor Lakshmi, she was scared out of her wits. But Dugald was a born steeplejack. Which only makes the accident even more incomprehensible.” He shook his head; then, after another silence, “The last time we all came up here,” he said, “was eight or nine months ago. Dugald was still alive and Lakshmi wasn’t yet too weak for a
day’s outing with her grandchildren. He did that Shiva stunt again for the benefit of Tom Krishna and Mary Sarojini. On one leg; and he kept his arms moving so fast that one could have sworn there were four of them.” Dr. Robert broke off. Picking up a flake of mortar from the floor, he tossed it out of the window. “Down, down, down…Empty space.
Pascal avait son gouffre
. How strange that this should be at once the most powerful symbol of death and the most powerful symbol of the fullest, intensest life.” Suddenly his face lighted up. “Do you see that hawk?”

“A hawk?”

Dr. Robert pointed to where, halfway between their eyrie and the dark roof of the forest, a small brown incarnation of speed and rapine lazily wheeled on unmoving wings. “It reminds me of a poem that the Old Raja once wrote about this place.” Dr. Robert was silent for a moment, then started to recite:

“And the secret, I take it, is this empty space.”

“Or rather what this empty space is the symbol of—the Buddha Nature in all our perpetual perishing. Which reminds me…” He looked at his watch.

“What’s next on the program?” Will asked as they stepped out into the glare.

“The service in the temple,” Dr. Robert answered. “The young climbers will offer their accomplishment to Shiva—in other words, to their own Suchness visualized as God. After which they’ll go on to the second part of their initiation—the experience of being liberated from themselves.”

“By means of the
moksha
-medicine?”

Dr. Robert nodded. “Their leaders give it them before they leave the Climbing Association’s hut. Then they come over to the temple. The stuff starts working during the service. Incidentally,” he added, “the service is in Sanskrit, so you won’t understand a word of it. Vijaya’s address will be in English—he speaks in his capacity as president of the Climbing Association. So will mine. And of course the young people will mostly talk in English.”

Inside the temple there was a cool, cavernous darkness, tempered only by the faint daylight filtering in through a pair of small latticed windows and by the seven lamps that hung, like a halo of yellow, quivering stars, above the head of the image on the altar. It was a copper statue, no taller than a child, of Shiva. Surrounded by a flame-fringed glory, his four arms gesturing, his braided hair wildly flying, his right foot treading down a dwarfish figure of the most hideous malignity, his left foot gracefully lifted, the god stood there, frozen in mid-ecstasy. No longer in their climbing dress, but sandaled, bare-breasted and in shorts or brightly colored skirts, a score of boys and girls, together with the six young men who had acted as their leaders and instructors, were sitting cross-legged on the floor. Above them, on the highest of the altar steps, an old priest, shaven and yellow-robed,
was intoning something sonorous and incomprehensible. Leaving Will installed on a convenient ledge, Dr. Robert tiptoed over to where Vijaya and Murugan were sitting and squatted down beside them.

The splendid rumble of Sanskrit gave place to a high nasal chant, and the chanting in due course was succeeded by a litany, priestly utterance alternating with congregational response.

And now incense was burned in a bass thurible. The old priest held up his two hands for silence, and through a long pregnant time of the most perfect stillness the thread of gray incense smoke rose straight and unwavering before the god, then as it met the draft from the windows broke and was lost to view in an invisible cloud that filled the whole dim space with the mysterious fragrance of another world. Will opened his eyes and saw that, alone of all the congregation, Murugan was restlessly fidgeting. And not merely fidgeting—making faces of impatient disapproval. He himself had never climbed; therefore climbing was merely silly. He himself had always refused to try the
moksha
-medicine; therefore those who used it were beyond the pale. His mother believed in the Ascended Masters and chatted regularly with Koot Hoomi; therefore the image of Shiva was a vulgar idol. What an eloquent pantomime, Will thought as he watched the boy. But alas for poor little Murugan, nobody was paying the slightest attention to his antics.

“Shivayanama,” said the old priest, breaking the long silence, and again, “Shivayanama.” He made a beckoning gesture.

Rising from her place, the tall girl whom Will had seen working her way down the precipice mounted the altar steps. Standing on tiptoe, her oiled body gleaming like a second copper statue in the light of the lamps, she hung a garland of pale-yellow flowers on the uppermost of Shiva’s two left arms. Then, laying palm to palm, she looked up into the god’s serenely smiling face and, in a voice that faltered at first, but gradually grew steadier, began to speak: