by Tamsin Cunningham
The clock of the cave measures in years, centuries and millennia. Its seconds are formed in the billions of silicate drops it takes for the stalagmite to rise another centimetre. Its minutes are counted out in hundreds of years of cavern-forming strides along the footpath of the Andes. Its hours are the millennia between one reverberating volcanic beat and the next.
When we clattered in to Tayos with our twenty-four hour clocks illuminated on phones and laptops, our ‘long’ exposures lasting seconds, our barrage of batteries for torches that limped on just enough to illuminate four days in the dark, we grafted a mouse’s heartbeat over the whale rhythm of the cave. Four days of intense activity against the backdrop of Tayos’s leviathan longevity. This layering of fast and slow set a syncopated rhythm; the beat of the cave together with the mouse-like fluttering of our own movements and thoughts. But it was a rhythm set by the slower pulse; the unhurried drum of the cave playing out a melody that would last countless lifetimes.
A year later, I sat watching lightning strike over hills of amethyst, heather, violet and slate, echoing memories of ripples of rainforest stretching off into the rapid Ecuadorian sunset. As I sat watching, a friend described to me the route she took in her mind’s eye when she needed to shift from frenzy to calm. She described a journey; peeling away from the shoal movement of a crowded city street, leaving the city behind for a path through the delicate new green of pine forests, a bed of needles underfoot, the slow ascent of an alpine mountain to find: a plateau, a bear, a deer and finally, a cleft high in the mountainside, somewhere known only to her. As she described the meditation; always the same route, always the same landmarks and encounters; her own personal inner pilgrims walk, I felt my heartbeat slow.
She asked me: “Where do you go? What is your place?” and I felt a moment’s pang for the lack of my own story to spin and re-spin.
Because I don’t have a route. I haven’t a mind’s-eye mountain path to climb. But I realised as I sat counting the seconds between lightning flash and the roll of thunder, that since I emerged from the cave I have been carrying a timepiece next to my pulse; a cave pacemaker of sorts. An echo of the slow heartbeat of Tayos that conjures up not a mountain path but memories. Three little snow globe facsimiles to shake myself into whenever I feel my heart race too fast.
The first is a sound. We woke for the first time in the cave to unhurried notes, sounded one after the other; a long pause, a repetition. Over and over. The sound was somewhere between mournful and seeking, like the low tones of a wooden flute. I felt disorientated on that first unlit morning. The sound seemed unlocatable and uncatagorizable; a noise that somehow signalled the suspension of normal rules and logic. At times it sounded just like a bird and at others like a human imitation; a man’s mimicry. The cry did not correspond to any of the species that typically called the cave their home. Everyone heard it, and all were confused by it. It is testimony to the power of suggestibility of the cave that it was only two days into our time in Tayos that we reached what should have been the most obvious explanation: that this bird was not a ghost or spirit but a daily visitor from the forest outside, drawn in the early morning hours to search for food deep down in the cavern that formed our temporary home. I listen sometimes to the recordings we have of that bird’s call. More often I just play its song in my mind, and like a metronome tied to the pace of my breath it slows me down.
The second snow globe is a moment. A synching of the cogs of the cave’s clock with the tiny teeth of our own gears. Down in the swooping, interconnected chambers, after the stalagmites, before the route became vertical, we stopped on a soft slope of deep soil. Our boots sank into the ground as we gathered together and turned off every light. The sound of our breath was the only reminder left that we were not alone in the dark, that we were not lost forever. The presence of the cave, held at arms length by the beam of our torches, pressed suddenly close, snuffing out the tinny tune of our movements and swelling the vastness, the silence, the alien, unending labyrinth of Tayos. The air was warm and humid in that spot and the moment was thick with the fleetingness of our occupation and our paper-thin reliance on light to find our way. When I think of that moment now it is with a complicated mingling of emotions. A sublime cocktail of awe, of reverence, of terror, of gratefulness, of reassurance. I think of Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, who must have stood in this same soft place of boundless black. Did it feel like space to him? Is this what he meant when he said that Tayos was up there with the moon? Standing full of wonder at the beauty of an environment, that with just the slightest shift in situation, could spell either death or discovery. I shake this snow globe moment and feel afresh the presence of a place so much more powerful than I; a place that makes me feel humbled and held.
The third still, slow memory is like a fragment of silent film, played over and over. Droplets of water, falling in from the rainforest above into the Altar of Light. When I first heard its name I found the term hyperbolic. Until that is, I stood at its base, staring up at the path the water took along the dense shafts of morning light that illuminated the wide bowl of the Altar’s base. Carpeted in a rich covering of lush green. Surrounded by rock faces it was impossible not to see faces in. From where we stood, the precipice moment when the droplets broke free of the forest undergrowth and launched into the void was obscured. And into the dark of the loamy ground and fallen rocks, into the hiding place of the snakes tumbled unwittingly from the forest above, the sight and the sound of the water was silently swallowed. The droplets were suspended: never seen to begin their fall and never to meet their destination but instead, caught in the void, perpetually falling as if in slow motion, defying the laws of gravity and time.
Sometimes the whole world seems to beat with a panicked fluttering palpitation. As our mouse’s hearts beat faster and faster, against a backdrop of flickering lights, 24-hour news cycles, throwaway clothes, we burn the places where a slower pulse is found. Those pacemaker places that tie the rhythm of our lives to something older and more vast; the places that keep time with a slower clock. I find that now I am always looking for those snow globe moments and mountain paths. And that sometimes they are to be found in the most unexpected of places. But wherever they are found their invitation is the same. To slow down. To crane our necks back, to slow our breath and watch the water fall. To synch our pulse with the sound of a ghost. To look blindly out into the dark and listen for a sigh as we turn out the lights.
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