Words by Tamsin Cunningham

Photographs by Eoin Carey

On the last night of our time in Tayos we filled the cathedral cavern we had called home with candlelight and flooded it with sound. The cave answered back, returning the tones that were played to it with its own language of reverberation. It was a time in which the grace and sanctity of the cave felt at its most present. It was one of the most beautiful moments I have experienced. We sat quietly and listened to the music and the song of rock and still air that the cave offered up as a duet.

But in the early hours of the next morning that song had been replaced by another more alien sound. As we awoke in our tents there was a roaring confusion of white noise. A downpour had arrived in Tayos, the heavy rain outside forming a torrent that flooded its way through the passages and chambers of the cave. Our planned departure for later that day became a matter of urgency, as the spaces we would pass through on our journey to the mouth of the cave became rivers and lakes, rising all the time.

And so we took our leave, unceremoniously and with haste. We waded through the damp to the base of the towering entrance chasm and one by one made the slow and exhausting journey to the top. And perhaps this was the best way we could have left. No time for thought of what awaited above. No space for definition of how our time in the underworld had shaped us. Just a goodbye that felt incomplete and partial in its nature.

I’m glad that I was denied a solemn farewell to the cave. Because I’ve found over the past few years that the transformative sense of emergence that it gave me has been the work of far longer than a single moment of journeying from cave to forest. The ways in which the experience of Tayos has changed me have been as slow and incremental as the sculpting of new fissures in the cave itself. Halting, full of twists and turns, surprises and slow rooting. But no less of a transformation for that.