For thousands and thousands of years, there had been life in the hollow cylinder of the tepui, but until that moment, music had never been heard, not even the tam-tam of a drum. The two times the People of the Mist had taken shelter in the legendary city, they had done so in a way not to irritate the Beasts; in silence, and making use of their talent to become invisible. The Beasts had no sense of a human’s ability to create music; they had never seen a body move with the airiness, the passion, the speed, and grace of Nadia’s dance. In truth, these heavy creatures had never received such a grand offering. Their sluggish brains absorbed each note and each movement and stored them for future centuries. The gift of these two young people would stay with them as part of their legend.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Crystal Eggs
IN EXCHANGE FOR the gifts of music and dance they had received, the Beasts granted Alex and Nadia what they had asked for. They told them that Nadia must climb to the highest part of the tepui, to the very top, where she would find the nest of the three magnificent eggs of her vision. As for Alex, he was to descend into the depths of the earth, where he would find the water of health.
“Can we go together, first to the top of the tepui and then to the depths of the crater?” Alex asked, thinking that their tasks would be easier if they shared them.
Lethargically, the sloths shook their heads no, and Walimai explained that every journey to the realm of the spirits is made alone. He added that they had only the next day to complete their missions, because by nightfall—without fail—they must return to the outside world; that was their agreement with the gods. If they were not back, they would be trapped in the sacred tepui; they would never find the way out of the labyrinth by themselves.
The pair spent the rest of the day wandering around El Dorado and telling each other about their brief lives; each wanted to know as much as possible about the other before they went their separate ways. It was difficult for Nadia to imagine her friend’s life in California with his family. She had never seen a computer or gone to school or known what winter was. For his part, the American envied the girl’s free and quiet life in such close contact with nature. Nadia possessed a common sense and a wisdom that to him seemed beyond reach.
Both were enchanted by the city’s magnificent formations of mica and other minerals, and with the unreal flowers blooming everywhere and the unique animals and insects. They found out that the dragons they saw swooping through the air, the creatures like the one in the cavern, were as tame as pet parrots. They called to one and it landed gracefully at their feet; they could touch it. Its skin was smooth and cold, like that of a fish; it had the gaze of a falcon and the perfumed breath of flowers. The friends swam in the warm lake waters and stuffed themselves with fruit—but only what Walimai approved. Certain fruits and mushrooms were deadly, the shaman explained. Others induced nightmarish visions or sapped the will, and some erased memory forever.
From time to time during their wanderings, they came across the Beasts, which spent the greatest part of their lives in a stupor. Once they had eaten enough leaves and fruit to be nourished, they spent the rest of the day sitting and gazing at the lush landscape around them and the cover of clouds that closed the mouth of the tepui. “They believe that sky is white and the size of that circle,” Nadia commented, and Alex replied that they themselves had only a partial vision of the sky, which astronauts knew was not blue, but black, and infinite. They were weary that night when they went to bed. They slept side by side, not touching since it was so hot, but sharing the same dream, as they had learned to do with Walimai’s magical fruit.
At dawn the next day, the ancient shaman handed Alexander a hollow gourd and gave Nadia a gourd filled with water and a basket that she strapped to her back. He warned them that once the journey was begun, either toward the heights or toward the depths, there was no turning back. They must conquer every obstacle or perish in the undertaking, because it was not possible to return with empty hands.
“Are you sure this is what you want to do?” asked the shaman.
“I am,” Nadia declared.
She had no idea what she would do with the eggs or why she was the one to look for them, but she did not doubt her vision. They had to be very valuable, or very magical. To get them, she was ready to conquer her most deeply rooted fear: heights.
“I am sure, too,” Alex added, thinking that he would go to hell itself if it would save his mother.
“You may return and you may not,” said the witch man as he bid them good-bye; he was unmoved, because to him the boundary between life and death was no more than a film of smoke that the slightest breeze could disperse.
Nadia unclasped Borobá from her waist and explained to him that she could not take him where she was going. The monkey clung to Walimai’s leg, moaning and pounding his little fists, but he did not try to disobey. Alex and Nadia gave each other a strong hug, frightened and excited. Then each set off in the direction Walimai indicated.
Nadia climbed up the same stairway carved from rock that she had come down with Walimai and Alex when they had emerged from the labyrinth and descended to the valley of the tepui. Getting up to that balcony was not difficult, even though the way was very steep, there was no handrail to hold on to, and the steps themselves were irregular, worn, and not very deep. Fighting against dizziness, she took one quick glance down and saw the extraordinary blue-green valley floor wreathed in a light mist, with the magnificent city of gold in the center. Then she looked up and her gaze was lost in the clouds. The mouth of the tepui seemed narrower than the base. How would she climb those inward-tilting walls? She would have to have little feet, like a beetle. How high was the tepui, really, and how much was covered in clouds? Where exactly was the nest? She decided to think about solutions, not problems. She would confront the obstacles one by one, as she came to them. If she had managed to climb the waterfall, she could do this, she thought—even if she wasn’t tied to Jaguar by a rope, and even if she was all by herself.
When she reached the balcony, she realized that the stairs ended there; from then on she would have to climb by holding on to anything she could find. She settled the basket on her back, closed her eyes, and searched for internal calm. Jaguar had explained that vital energy and courage were concentrated in the center of her being. She breathed in with all her strength so clean air would fill her lungs and travel through her body to the tips of her fingers and toes. She repeated that breath three times without opening her eyes, visualizing the eagle, her totemic animal. She imagined her arms stretching out, growing longer, turning into feathered wings; she pictured her legs, and her feet ending in talons like grappling hooks; her nose hardening into a ferocious beak; and her eyes growing wider apart until they were at the sides of her head. She felt her soft and curly hair changing into strong feathers that lay flat against her skull but that bristled when she willed, feathers that contained everything eagles know, antennae that perceived anything in the air, even the invisible. Her body lost its muscled flexibility and in exchange acquired an airiness so absolute that she could lift up from the earth and float with the stars. She experienced a tremendous sense of power, with all the eagle’s strength flowing in her blood. She felt that strength penetrating her cells, her whole awareness. “I am Eagle!” she cried aloud, and opened her eyes.
Nadia placed her fingers in a small crack in the rock above her head and her foot in another at the level of her waist. She pulled her body up and paused until she was sure of her balance. She felt with the other hand until she found a root, and with the opposite foot, until she could ease her toes into a crack. She followed with the other hand, looking for something she could grasp, and when she found it, she raised her body a little farther. The vegetation growing on the sides of the tepui helped: roots, shrubs, lianas. She saw deep scratches on the rocks and on some trunks; they looked like the marks of claws. The Beasts must have climbed this way searching for food, or maybe they didn’t know the route through the labyrint
h and every time they went in or out they climbed up one side of the tepui and down the other. She calculated that would take days, maybe weeks, considering the ponderous progress of those gigantic sloths.
Some conscious part of her mind registered that the hollow of the tepui was not cone-shaped, as the optical illusion of looking at it from below had made her believe, but, in fact, opened slightly outward. The mouth of the crater was actually wider than the base. She would not need beetle claws, after all, just concentration and courage. So, foot by foot, she made her way upward, for hours, with admirable determination and newly acquired skill. That ability came from a hidden and mysterious place, a place of calm inside her heart, where she found the noble qualities of her totemic animal. She was an eagle, the highest-flying bird, the queen of the sky, the bird that builds a nest only angels can reach.
The eagle-girl continued upward, little by little. The warm, humid air of the lower valley turned into a cool breeze, which pushed her higher. She paused often, exhausted, fighting the temptation to look down or calculate the distance to the top, concentrating only on the next move. She was burning with thirst; her mouth felt as if it were coated with sand and had a bitter taste, but she could not let go to drink from the water gourd Walimai had given her. “I’ll drink when I get to the top,” she muttered, thinking about cool, clean water bathing the lining of her parched throat. If only it would rain, she thought, but not a drop fell from the clouds. When she thought she could not climb a step farther, she felt Walimai’s magic talisman around her neck and that gave her courage. It was her protection. It had helped her climb the smooth black rocks of the waterfall, it had made her a friend to the Indians, it had saved her from the Beasts; as long as she had that, she was safe.
Much later, the first clouds, as thick as meringue, brushed her head, and then she was enveloped in milky white. She climbed by feeling her way, clinging to rock and to the vegetation that was growing sparser the farther she climbed. She was not aware that her hands and knees and feet were bleeding; she was focused on the magic power sustaining her . . . and then one hand was exploring a very wide opening. She was able to pull her whole body into it; though the tepui was still hidden in the piled-up clouds, she was at the top! A loud cry of triumph, a savage, ancestral screech like a hundred eagles in unison, burst from the breast of Nadia and crashed against the rocks of other peaks, echoing and spreading until it passed over the horizon.
The girl waited, motionless, on that summit until her cry was lost in the farthest chasms of the large mesa. Then her heart stopped its drumming and she could breathe deeply. As soon as she felt solid rock beneath her feet, she took the water gourd and drank all it held. She had never wanted anything so much. The cool liquid ran down her throat, cleaning away the sand and bitter taste in her mouth, moistening her tongue and cracked lips, spreading through her body like a miraculous balm capable of curing anxiety and erasing pain. She understood that happiness consists of achieving something we have wanted for a long time.
The height, and the brutal effort of getting there and of conquering her fears, acted like a drug more powerful than any given to her by the Indians in Tapirawa-teri or Walimai’s potion for collective dreams. Again she felt she was flying, but now she was not even an eagle, she was detached from everything physical, she had become pure spirit. She was suspended in glorious space. The world was far away, below her on the plane of illusions. She floated there for a time that could not be measured, until she noticed an opening in the radiant sky. Without hesitation, she sped like an arrow through that hole into dark, empty space that reminded her of the infinite firmament of a moonless night. This was the absolute space of the divine and of death, the space where even spirit is dissolved. She was the void, empty of desire, of memory. There was nothing to fear. She was outside time.
But on the heights of the tepui, the body of Nadia began to call her back, reclaiming her. Oxygen flowing to her brain carried with it a sensation of physical reality. The water she’d drunk furnished the energy she needed to move. So finally Nadia’s spirit made the reverse journey: again it flew like an arrow through the opening in the void back into the glorious dome where it floated a few instants in limitless white, then passed into the form of the eagle. It fought to resist the temptation to glide forever on the wind and with a last effort returned to the body of the girl. Once again, Nadia was sitting on top of the world, looking all around.
Nadia was at the highest point on a large mesa, encircled by the silence of the clouds. Although she could not see the true height or expanse of where she was, it was her impression that the hollow center of the tepui was small in comparison with the size of the mountain that contained it. The terrain she could see, partly smooth rock and in other places covered with thick growth, was rough, with deep crevices. She felt sure that it would be a long time before the steel birds of the nahab explored this place, because landing here would be unthinkable even for a helicopter, as was the near impossibility of walking across that irregular surface. She felt her confidence weaken. She could look for the nest the rest of her days without finding it among all these fissures, but then she remembered that Walimai had pointed out exactly where to climb. She rested a moment, then started off, up and down, from rock to rock, driven by some unknown force, with a kind of instinctive certainty.
She did not have to go far. Fairly near, in a cleft among large rocks, she found the nest, and in it the three crystal eggs. They were smaller, with more sparkle, than the ones in her vision. Wondrous.
Taking a thousand precautions to keep from slipping into one of the deep fissures where she would have broken every bone in her body, Nadia crawled to the nest. Her fingers closed over the gleaming perfection of one crystal egg, but she could not pick it up. Surprised, she tried a different one. She could not move it, either, nor the third. How was it possible that objects the size of a toucan’s egg should weigh so much? What was happening? She examined them closely, turning them over and over. She could see that they were not glued or screwed down; just the opposite, they seemed almost to be floating on their cushion of twigs and feathers. Nadia sat down on a nearby rock, confused by why that was, unable to believe that this whole adventure, all the effort it had taken to get here, was for nothing. She had found the superhuman strength to climb like a lizard up the internal walls of the tepui, but now that she was finally at the top, she didn’t have the strength to budge the treasure she had come to find.
Nadia hesitated quite some time, upset and with no idea of how to solve this puzzle. Suddenly it came to her that the eggs belonged to someone. Maybe the Beasts had put them there, but they might also belong to some fabled creature, a bird, or a reptile like the dragons. If that were the case, the mother could appear at any moment, and when she found an intruder near her nest she would launch an attack with justifiable fury. She couldn’t stay there, she decided, but neither did she intend to give up the eggs. Walimai had said that she could not return with empty hands. What else had the shaman told her? That she had to be back before nightfall. And then she remembered what the witch man had taught her the day before: the law of giving and receiving. For everything you take, you have to give something in return.
She looked herself over. She didn’t have anything to give. All she had was her T-shirt, her shorts, and the basket strapped to her back. As she checked her body, she saw for the first time the scratches, bruises, and cuts inflicted by the rocks as she had climbed the mountain. Her blood, in which the vital energy that had allowed her to reach this goal was concentrated, was probably the only valuable she possessed. She stepped closer, holding her injured body so her blood would drip onto the nest. A few red drops splashed on the soft feathers. As she bent over, she felt the talisman on her chest and realized in a flash that this was the price she would have to pay for the eggs. No, she thought. To sacrifice it meant giving up the prodigious powers of protection she attributed to the carved bone, the shaman’s gift. She had never had anything as magical as that amulet. It was muc
h more important to her than the eggs, whose purpose she could not even guess. No, she couldn’t give up her talisman, she decided.
Nadia closed her eyes, completely spent, as the sun filtering through the clouds began to change color. For an instant, the hallucination of the ayahuasca dream she had experienced during Mokarita’s funeral returned, and she was once again the eagle soaring through a white sky, gliding on the wind, light and powerful. From above, she saw the eggs glittering in the nest, just as in the vision, and she experienced the same conviction she had then: Those eggs would save the People of the Mist. At last she sighed and opened her eyes. She removed the talisman from her neck and placed it in the nest. Then she reached out and touched one of them; this time she lifted it with no effort at all. The other two were equally easy to take. She placed all three carefully in her basket and was ready to climb down the way she had come up. There was still sunlight in the clouds; she realized that the descent would have to be very quick if she was to be back before nightfall, as Walimai had warned her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Water of Health
As NADIA WAS climbing to the top of the tepui, Alexander was wiggling down a narrow passage into the womb of the earth, a closed, hot, dark, throbbing world like his worst nightmares. If he at least had a flashlight! He had to grope his way, sometimes on hands and knees, sometimes scooting forward on his belly in total shadow. His eyes could not adjust because the darkness was absolute. He held out a hand, felt along the rock to estimate the direction and width of the tunnel, then moved forward inch by inch, slithering like a snake. The farther he went, the narrower the tunnel seemed to grow, and he feared he would not be able to turn around to go back. The supply of air was choking and foul; it was like being buried. His jaguar attributes would not be any help; here he needed a different totemic animal, maybe a mole or a mouse or a worm.