The Underworld: Wall of Faces
A descent, part 3 of 3
Carlos and David were careful, marking in the mud as they went and where there was no mud scratching arrows in the rock with one of the spare batteries. The tunnel didn’t fork often and when it did, one direction invariably funnelled into a dead end. They felt confident easing through holes tight and caked with moist pink clay.
“Sorry to see the girls go,” David said, feeling sober now. The long passage of grunts and groans had gone wordless long enough. “Kriang the opportunist bastard will take advantage of the mood we worked so hard to generate.”
“Maybe they were lesbians anyway,” Carlos consoled from behind – a grasp at humour that missed.
The tunnel angled more steeply. For added traction, they clung to the sides with battered fingernails. Tying the rope around a finger of rock, they held on as they slid down the ribbed throat of Hell Hole. Wet walls made a sucking sound as they went. When their toes found solidity beneath them, they left the rope as a marker.
“We won’t need it again,” David said. “If we do, we’ll just head back.”
On hands and knees they crawled, bruises spreading over joints from pulling and pushing their bodies through spaces that didn’t want them. Rock-edged friction had frayed the seams of David’s jeans and shredded Carlos’s cotton trousers. Legs bled lengthwise. Neither complained, the twists of the tunnel demanding too much concentration. Carlos wondered if the Wall of Faces existed or was mere subterranean myth. David with mental fingertips retraced the brown silken curves of his Chiang Rai girl’s body, dimly aware that the longer they now descended the longer would be the return climb. But they had all night. Hell, he had the rest of the year, and didn’t feel tired even after the bottles of Sangsom and hours of predatory forethought. Recalling the conversation over their game of hearts he felt vaguely satisfied at having loved a girl for a night without pretence or subterfuge. He remembered her clearly now. Tian, she had said her name was as she dressed, exposing her body and her smile to him one last time. Brown smooth thighs – the memory caught hold in his throat for an instant. If not for the physical effort of hoisting himself over stretches of rock falling away into nothingness, he might have felt the warming in his abdomen turn to arousal.
Hearing something in its flight drop against distant walls, he felt at his pockets now shorn through. His spare batteries were gone. He stood almost upright for the first time in Hell Hole. Reading a ledge with his toes, he leaned against the rock face trying to flatten his palms against the rock.
Carlos inching along behind tried to remember mythology he had been taught not so long ago in high school. It had fascinated him for a term, then quickly been forgotten. Journeys by heroes into Hades, which seemed to resemble the current underworld. Orpheus had journeyed down to retrieve Euridice. Odysseus, for directions to Ithaca, hoping to find the prophet Teiresias. Psyche seeking beauty in a box. And Aeneas, and all the others who had descended in search of something transformational and sometimes risen again.
If he and Dave were already in the Underworld, he realised, it meant not that death was a danger but that they were already stepping through a sphere of the no longer living. Beyond Erebus, now into Tartarus, beneath the secret passages of the earth. He was Theseus, Dave was Pirithoüs, on a mission to abduct Persephone. They would instead be led to the Chair of Forgetfulness where, minds blank, they would sit for the rest of eternity. Unless Hercules, on the last of his twelve labours, rescued them. But that was another story.
David ahead suddenly stepped into nothingness. He vanished, grunts heard banging down below. For Carlos the dream effect dispersed. Focusing, squinting, he shone the light down a narrow hole that twisted but revealed no sign of his friend of two days.
“Where the hell are you?”
The wheezing reply like a faint echo curled up to him deep out of darkness: “No worries … I’m alive.”
“Well, get up here again!”
Holding himself in place with fingertips and feet clawing at the sides, David had never heard anything as annoying. Below him nothing he could see; torch beam angled down uncovered only more dark. He clung harder and when his breathing slowed enough, inch by inch crawled up again. Until Carlos saw his light, could reach down and when he had squirmed close enough, give him a hand.
Back on the ledge, David gave a deep sigh and a shudder. “Mind the gap.”
“Don’t disappear like that!”
The other edge of the cavern offered a choice of three tunnels, with little distinguishing one from another. This time Carlos picked one and slithered in first. David paused to urinate into the pit they had crossed, distressed not to hear an echo. Only the sounds of Carlos grunting in the tunnel ahead and the drip and sucking sounds the walls seemed to shimmer with.
Exhaling, writhing through tight spots as Kriangsak had taught, they slid farther into long craggy tubes like through the bowels of a petrified giant. David worried they had ventured far enough, but the terror of his fall had given him a second wind and Carlos betrayed no hint of second thoughts.
Carlos at the front grew into his authority, resolved to find the Wall of Faces if it existed. Even the realisation they had been forgetting to leave markers didn’t dampen his mood, nor that his torch had gradually but surely grown dimmer. He tried to remember some of the people he had met while travelling through the continent during the past few months. All those who had done their part to ease him out of the bruising loneliness he had confided to none of them.
Through Sumatra he had paired with Pavel, a lanky Czech on an ambiguous business trip. On Palawan he had fallen in love with Andrea, a Swede with sun-bleached hair, a heroin addiction and perfect symmetry. She had made him the envy of solo travelling men battling romantic vertigo. There was that Dutchman in Kathmandu who had seen his daughter stillborn in Rotterdam and the next day decided to go find some mountains to climb. The Welsh girl whose parents had died in a car crash and who on the inheritance had tried to bury the past by crossing China by train. The American journalist he had had a beer with in Karachi who three weeks later, as he read in the Daily Times, was killed in Kabul not by a Taliban incursion but a wayward supply truck.
Another scrape along the ground with both knees, and Carlos had arrived. In the haze of his torch with a sudden intake of breath, he caught sight of the Wall of Faces. His entire life was etched into it. Everyone he had ever known. The history of civilisation. He paused, blinking, and knew he had lost his soul.
A chasm separated him from the faces, but a ledge offered a rock on which to sit and dangle legs over nothingness. His very own Chair of Forgetfulness, perched opposite the unforgettable.
David was slow to emerge, Carlos wondering if he had lost him. Then Dave’s head appeared, also gripped and dazed by this visit to magnificence, groping with his eyes at the wall in silence then complaining about his nearly dead torch and asking Carlos for spare batteries.
The new light uncovered heads of humans and animals in bas-relief, such as Carlos had seen at Angkor Wat while the temple girls had played with his hair. Immediately the hemisphere he called home vanished. He followed lines of bulls marching towards victory over a brutal god-king.
He saw the locals of the countries he had passed through, ashamed for not having remembered them first. Like the Chinese Malaysians who had taught him proper street-fighting uppercuts and introduced him to a different underworld of gambling and moonshine. The entire village in Kerala that had descended into trance, penitents piercing cheeks and tongues, steel rods through their heads only for the wounds to go right through the body and come out in the morning without a scratch. Everywhere the smiles or glares of contempt. The mist surrounding girls working highland terraces in Banaue, who paused to smile just long enough for him to melt again into vertigo.
David also found those he knew and loved in the ambiguous designs and wondered how it had come to be, who had dared carve on unreachable walls all the myths and memories crowding his, David’s, own fantasies. The figures extended in all directions as far as the light; anything he had ever imagined seemed to exist here, rich in perfectly preserved detail. Although he knew none of it was real, it was. In fact it was reassuring. Tian whispering I want you. His father mouthing Come home son we miss you. Even Brigid and Anne-Marie were there grinning If you hadn’t wanted so hard to be he-boys floundering in tunnels you could have got laid tonight. Which made him laugh. Then the number of characters in a Russian novel he was reading with their patronymics, diminutives, maiden names he had dutifully kept track of on pages of notes before giving up – now all came alive and continued dialogues that chapter breaks had brought to a close, and the dead were resurrected so their love affairs could continue in their turbulence.
Carlos’s light flickered just enough to make both retreat to practical problems.
“Think we have enough light left to make it back out?” David asked.
“Maybe if we only use one flashlight at a time. We’ve been in here a few hours too many.” Carlos as he said this realised it hardly mattered now. They were spirits wandering the underworld, already accepted by the landscape. Vertical campaigns were no longer possible. In the wall he saw Cerberus, dragon tail whipping up the dust and triple head panting triple forked tongues, and the three judges who would condemn them to eternal torture or to the Elysian Fields. Chasms below and around were the rivers they had crossed – the Phlegethon, Styx and Lethe. On their thrones immortal in the rock sat Hades and Persephone themselves, greeting his soul into the afterworld.
But with a shrug, he followed David. The air seemed thinner now as he wondered how much oxygen existed deep beneath the earth. Once back in the tunnel, they crawled the way they had come, behind the line where knowledge would again be useful, where they could depend on habit for substance in a life of drifting through.
In the chamber where David had fallen, they found many passages all looking like the one that had brought them here. Sleepily they argued over it and Carlos let David win, extinguishing his own light as he followed Dave’s. The tunnel wasn’t one they recognised, and at the end of it rose a sheer wall. Sliding backwards, they returned to the cavern.
Carlos picked a new direction, after a tortuous hour it ending much the same, their heads poked over nothingness.
They looked everywhere, one by one over the hours trying every passage leading out of the one cavern they were positive they recognized. In the end, with dimmer light and thinner patience, they only reached the Wall of Faces once again. They sat silently pondering options.
“What time do you think it is?”
“Daytime. I don’t know, maybe noon.”
High noon. On his travels it had always been his meeting time. Meet you at noon at the Acropolis. At noon at the National Museum. At noon at the Winter Palace. Now Carlos could add one more appointment: at noon we’ll have lost our way in an underground cave to sit and watch the lights go dim and feel the oxygen contract.
“Think they’ll realize we’re not back yet?”
“Maybe, but there’s not much they can do about it.”
David pondered the fact of this. Even a hastily assembled search party might never find them, hours deep in an underground labyrinth made almost impassable by the seasonal rains. Or the girls would leave without realizing they were missing. Kriangsak to defend himself from his father would claim ignorance. And no one would notice their absence, until whoever came to clean the bungalows found their rucksacks, but what could they do?
He watched the wall go blank and remembered a report of a woman in Italy spending six months underground sealed away for the sake of science, watching her body slow to forty-hour days in a permanence of dark and silence. And here he was, about to do the same but not by choice. It had been a choice yesterday or this morning but no longer.
Their one functioning torch had little power left. They turned it off to sit in darkness so complete it took their breath away.
Carlos thought David not a bad person to sit here with. A new friend with whom to vacillate towards that other darkness. The biggest regret was how their one-way journey into earth would appear to those who eventually came to think about and look for them and found nothing. No, his biggest regret was not kissing Anne-Marie.
“Remember the hearts game we never finished?” David asked in the dark.
Carlos nodded and then, realizing his invisibility, said yes.
“Do you remember what your hand was?”
And so with the girls as ghost hands, they sat pondering strategy, speaking out loud the cards they played in order to endure and to forget, through a dream as infallible as opium’s, their fall from responsibility, their failure, the nullity hanging over them like disgrace. And at the end of each round they tallied the total.