The Descent Part 10

Darkness vanished utterly.

No man was meant to survive such light.

It went on for eternity.

They found Branch still sitting against his shipwreck, holding his navigator across his lap. The metal skin was scorched black and hot to the touch. Like a shadow in reverse, the aluminum behind his back bore his pale outline. The metal was immaculate, protected by his flesh and spirit.

After that, Branch was never the same.

4 - PERINDE AC CADAVER.

It is therefore necessary for us to marke diligently, and to espie out this felowe... beware of him, that he begyle us not.

-RUDOLPH WALTHER, 'Antichrist, that is to saye: A true report...' (1576) Java 1998.

It was a lovers' meal, raspberries plucked from the summit slopes of Gunung Merapi, a lush volcano towering beneath the crescent moon. You would not know the old blind man was dying, his enthusiasm for the raspberries was so complete. No sugar, certainly not, or cream. De l'Orme's joy in the ripe berries was a thing to see. Berry by berry, Santos kept replenishing the old man's bowl from his own.

De l'Orme paused, turned his head. 'That would be him,' he said.

Santos had heard nothing, but cleaned his fingers with a napkin. 'Excuse me,' he said, and rose swiftly to open the door.

He peered into the night. The electricity was out, and he had ordered a brazier to be lit upon the path. Seeing no one, he thought de l'Orme's keen ears were wrong for a change. Then he saw the traveler.

The man was bent before him on one knee in the darkness, wiping mud from his black shoes with a fistful of leaves. He had the large hands of a stonemason. His hair was white.

'Please, come in,' Santos said. 'Let me help.' But he did not offer a hand to a.s.sist.

The old Jesuit noticed such things, the chasm between a word and a deed. He quit swabbing at the mud. 'Ah, well,' he said, 'I'm not done walking tonight anyway.'

'Leave your shoes outside,' Santos insisted, then tried to change his scold into a generosity. 'I will wake the boy to clean them.'

The Jesuit said nothing, judging him. It made the young man more awkward. 'He is a good boy.'

'As you wish,' the Jesuit said. He gave his shoelace a tug, and the knot let go with a pop. He undid the other and stood.

Santos stepped back, not expecting such height, or bones so raw and st.u.r.dy. With his rough angles and boxer's jaw, the Jesuit looked built by a shipwright to withstand long voyages.

'Thomas.' De l'Orme was standing in the penumbra of a whaler's lamp, eyes shrouded behind small blackened spectacles. 'You're late. I was beginning to think the leopards must have gotten you. And now look, we've finished dinner without you.'

Thomas advanced upon the spare banquet of fruits and vegetables and saw the tiny bones of a dove, the local delicacy. 'My taxi broke down,' he explained. 'The walk was longer than I expected.'

'You must be exhausted. I would have sent Santos to the city for you, but you told me you knew Java.'

Candles upon the sill backlit his bald skull with a b.u.t.tery halo. Thomas heard a small, rattling noise at the window, like rupiah coins being thrown against the gla.s.s. Closer, he saw giant moths and sticklike insects, working furiously to get at the light.

'It's been a long time,' Thomas said.

'A very long time.' De l'Orme smiled. 'How many years? But now we are reunited.'

Thomas looked about. It was a large room for a rural pastoran - the Dutch Catholic equivalent of a rectory - to offer a guest, even one as distinguished as de l'Orme. Thomas guessed one wall had been demolished to double de l'Orme's works.p.a.ce. Mildly surprised, he noted the charts and tools and books. Except for a well-polished colonial-era secretary desk bursting with papers, the room did not look like de l'Orme at all.

There was the usual aggregation of temple statuary, fossils, and artifacts that every field ethnologist decorates 'home' with. But beneath that, anchoring these bits and pieces of daily finds, was an organizing principle that displayed de l'Orme, the genius, as much as his subject matter. De l'Orme was not particularly self-effacing, but neither was he the sort to occupy one entire shelf with his published poems and two-volume memoir and another with his yardage of monographs on kinship, paleoteleology, ethnic medicine, botany, comparative religions, et cetera. Nor would he have arranged, shrinelike and alone upon the uppermost shelf, his infamous La Matiere du Coeur (The Matter of the Heart), his Marxist defense of Teilhard de Chardin's Socialist Le Coeur de la Matiere. At the Pope's express demand, de Chardin had recanted, thus destroying his reputation among fellow scientists. De l'Orme had not recanted, forcing the Pope to expel his prodigal son into darkness. There could be only one explanation for this prideful show of works, Thomas decided: the lover. De l'Orme possibly did not know the books were set out.

'Of course I would find you here, a heretic among priests,' Thomas chastised his old friend. He waved a hand toward Santos. 'And in a state of sin. Or, tell me, is he one of us?'

'You see?' de l'Orme addressed Santos with a laugh. 'Blunt as pig iron, didn't I say? But don't let that fool you.'

Santos was not mollified. 'One of whom, if you please? One of you? Certainly not. I am a scientist.'

So, thought Thomas, this proud fellow was not just another seeing-eye dog. De l'Orme had finally decided to take on a protege. He searched the young man for a second impression, and it was little better than the first. He wore long hair and a goatee and a fresh white peasant shirt. There was not even dirt beneath his nails.

De l'Orme went on chuckling. 'But Thomas is a scientist also,' he teased his young companion.

'So you say,' Santos retorted.

De l'Orme's grin vanished. 'I do say so,' he p.r.o.nounced. 'A fine scientist. Seasoned. Proven. The Vatican is lucky to have him. As their science liaison, he brings the only credibility they have in the modern age.'

Thomas was not flattered by the defense. De l'Orme took personally the prejudice that a priest could not be a thinker in the natural world, for in defying the Church and renouncing the cloth, he had, in a sense, borne his Church out. And so he was speaking to his own tragedy.

Santos turned his head aside. In profile, his fashionable goatee was a flourish upon his exquisite Michelangelo chin. Like all of de l'Orme's acquisitions, he was so physically perfect you wondered if the blind man was really blind. Perhaps, Thomas reflected, beauty had a spirit all its own.

From far away, Thomas recognized the unearthly Indonesian music called gamelan. They said it took a lifetime to develop an appreciation for the five-note chords. Gamelan had never been soothing to him. It only made him uncomfortable. Java was not an easy place to drop in on like this.

'Forgive me,' he said, 'but my itinerary is compressed this time. They have me scheduled to fly out of Jakarta at five tomorrow afternoon. That means I must return to Yogya by dawn. And I've already wasted enough of our time by being so late.'

'We'll be up all night,' de l'Orme grumbled. 'You'd think they would allow two old men a little time to socialize.'

'Then we should drink one of these.' Thomas opened his satchel. 'But quickly.'

De l'Orme actually clapped his hands. 'The Chardonnay? My '62?' But he knew it would be. It always was. 'The corkscrew, Santos. Just wait until you taste this. And somegudeg for our vagabond. A local specialty, Thomas, jackfruit and chicken and tofu simmered in coconut milk...'

With a long-suffering look, Santos went off to find the corkscrew and warm the food.

De l'Orme cradled two of three bottles Thomas carefully produced. 'Atlanta?'

'The Centers for Disease Control,' Thomas identified. 'There have been several new strains of virus reported in the Horn region...'

For the next hour, tended by Santos, the two men sat at the table and circled through their 'recent' adventures. In fact, they had not seen each other in seventeen years. Finally they came around to the work at hand.

'You're not supposed to be excavating down there,' Thomas said.

Santos was sitting to de l'Orme's right, and he leaned his elbows on the table. He had been waiting all evening for this. 'Surely you don't call this an excavation,' he said. 'Terrorists planted a bomb. We're merely pa.s.sersby looking into an open wound.'

Thomas dismissed the argument. 'Bordubur is off limits to all field archaeology now. These lower regions within the hillside were especially not to be disturbed. UNESCO mandated that none of the hidden footer wall was to be exposed or dismantled. The Indonesian government forbade any and all subsurface exploration. There were to be no trenches. No digging at all.'

'Pardon me, but again, we're not digging. A bomb went off. We're simply looking into the hole.'

De l'Orme attempted a distraction. 'Some people think the bomb was the work of Muslim fundamentalists. But I believe it's the old problem. Transmigrai. The government's population policy. It is very unpopular. They forcibly relocate people from overcrowded islands to less crowded ones. Tyranny at its worst.'

Thomas did not accept his detour. 'You're not supposed to be down there,' he repeated. 'You're trespa.s.sing. You'll make it impossible for any other investigation to occur here.'

Santos, too, was not distracted. 'Monsieur Thomas, is it not true that it was the Church that persuaded UNESCO and the Indonesians to forbid work at these depths? And that you personally were the agent in charge of halting the UNESCO restoration?'

De l'Orme smiled innocently, as if wondering how his henchman had learned such facts.

'Half of what you say is true,' Thomas said.

'The orders did come from you?'

'Through me. The restoration was complete.'

'The restoration, perhaps, but not the investigation, obviously. Scholars have counted eight great civilizations piled here. Now, in the s.p.a.ce of three weeks, we've found evidence of two more civilizations beneath those.'

'At any rate,' Thomas said, 'I'm here to seal the dig. As of tonight, it's finished.'

Santos slapped his palm on the wood. 'Disgraceful. Say something,' he appealed to de l'Orme.

The response was practically a whisper. 'Perinde ac cadaver.'

'What?'

'Like a corpse,' said de l'Orme. 'The perinde is the first rule of Jesuit obedience. "I belong not to myself but to Him who made me and to His representative. I must behave like a corpse possessing neither will nor understanding."'

The young man paled. 'Is this true?' he asked.

'Oh yes,' said de l'Orme.

The perinde seemed to explain much. Thomas watched Santos turn pitying eyes upon de l'Orme, clearly shaken by the terrible ethic that had once bound his frail mentor. 'Well,' Santos finally said to Thomas, 'it's not for us.'

'No?' said Thomas.

'We require the freedom of our views. Absolutely. Your obedience is not for us.'

Us, not me. Thomas was starting to warm to this young man.

'But someone invited me here to see an image carved in stone,' said Thomas. 'Is that not obedience?'

'That was not Santos, I a.s.sure you.' De l'Orme smiled. 'No, he argued for hours against telling you. He even threatened me when I sent you the fax.'

'And why is that?' asked Thomas.

'Because the image is natural,' Santos replied. 'And now you'll try to make it supernatural.'

'The face of pure evil?' said Thomas. 'That is how de l'Orme described it to me. I don't know if it's natural or not.'

'It's not the true face. Only a representation. A sculptor's nightmare.'

'But what if it does represent a real face? A face familiar to us from other artifacts and sites? How is that anything other than natural?'

'There,' complained Santos. 'Inverting my words doesn't change what you're after. A look into the devil's own eyes. Even if they're the eyes of a man.'

'Man or demon, that's for me to decide. It is part of my job. To a.s.semble what has been recorded throughout human time and to make it into a coherent picture. To verify the evidence of souls. Have you taken any photos?'

Santos had fallen silent.

'Twice,' de l'Orme answered. 'But the first set of pictures was ruined by water. And Santos tells me the second set is too dark to see. And the video camera's battery is dead. Our electricity has been out for days.'

'A plaster casting, then? The carving is in high relief, isn't it?'

'There's been no time. The dirt keeps collapsing, or the hole fills with water. It's not a proper trench, and this monsoon is a plague.'

'You mean to say there's no record whatsoever? Even after three weeks?'

Santos looked embarra.s.sed. De l'Orme came to the rescue. 'After tomorrow there will be abundant record. Santos has vowed not to return from the depths until he has recorded the image altogether. After which the pit may be sealed, of course.'

Thomas shrugged in the face of the inevitable. It was not his place to physically stop de l'Orme and Santos. The archaeologists didn't know it yet, but they were in a race against more than time. Tomorrow, Indonesian army soldiers were arriving to close the dig down and bury the mysterious stone columns beneath tons of volcanic soil. Thomas was glad he would be gone by then. He did not relish the sight of a blind man arguing with bayonets.

It was nearly one in the morning. In the far distance, the gamelan drifted between volcanoes, married the moon, seduced the sea. 'I'd like to see the fresco itself, then,' said Thomas.

'Now?' barked Santos.

'I expected as much,' de l'Orme said. 'He's come nine thousand miles for his peek. Let us go.'

'Very well,' Santos said. 'But I will take him. You need to get your rest, Bernard.'

Thomas saw the tenderness. For an instant he was almost envious.

'Nonsense,' de l'Orme said. 'I'm going also.'

They walked up the path by flashlight, carrying musty umbrellas wrapped against their bamboo handles. The air was so heavy with water it was almost not air. Any instant now, it seemed, the sky must open up and turn to flood. You could not call these Javanese monsoons rain. They were a phenomenon more like the eruption of volcanoes, as regular as clockwork, as humbling as Jehovah.

'Thomas,' said de l'Orme, 'this pre-dates everything. It's so very old. Man was still foraging in the trees at this time. Inventing fire, fingerpainting on cave walls. That is what frightens me. These people, whoever they were, should not have had the tools to knap flint, much less carve stone. Or do portraiture or erect columns. This should not exist.'

Thomas considered. Few places on earth had more human antiquity than Java. Java Man -Pithecanthropus erectus, better known as h.o.m.o erectus - had been found only a few kilometers from here, at Trinil and Sangiran on the Solo River. For a quarter-million years, man's ancestors had been sampling fruit from these trees. And killing and eating one another, too. The fossil evidence was clear about that as well.

'You mentioned a frieze with grotesques.'

'Monstrous beings,' de l'Orme said. 'That is where I'm taking you now. To the base of Column C.'

'Could it be self-portraiture? Perhaps these were hominids. Perhaps they had talents far beyond what we've given them credit for.'