The Descent Page 10

  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 pronounced. “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 some gudeg 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 passersby 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 trespassing. 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 space 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 assure 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 assemble 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 embarrassed. 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.

  I
t 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, finger-painting 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 Homo 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.”

  “Perhaps,” said de l’Orme. “But then there is the face.”

  It was the face that had brought Thomas so far. “You said it’s horrible.”

  “Oh, the face is not horrible at all. That’s the problem. It’s a common face. A human face.”

  “Human?”

  “It could be your face.” Thomas looked sharply at the blind man. “Or mine,” de l’Orme added. “What’s horrible is its context. This ordinary face looks upon scenes of savagery and degradation and monstrosity.”

  “And?”

  “That’s all. He’s looking. And you can tell he will never look away. I don’t know, he seems content. I’ve felt the carving,” de l’Orme said. “Even its touch is unsavory. It’s most unusual, this juxtaposition of normalcy and chaos. And it’s so banal, so prosaic. That’s the most intriguing thing. It’s completely out of sync with its age, whatever age that may be.”

  Firecrackers and drums echoed from scattered villages. Ramadan, the month of Muslim fasting, had just ended yesterday. Thomas saw the crescent of the new moon threading between the mountains. Families would be feasting. Whole villages would stay up until dawn watching the shadow plays called wayang, with two-dimensional puppets making love and doing battle as shadows thrown upon a sheet. By dawn, good would triumph over evil, light over darkness: the usual fairy tale.

  One of the mountains beneath the moon separated in the middle distance, and became the ruins of Bordubur. The enormous stupa was supposed to be a depiction of Mount Meru, a cosmic Everest. Buried for over a thousand years by an eruption of Gunung Merapi, Bordubur was the greatest of the ruins. In that sense, it was death’s palace and cathedral all in one, a pyramid for Southeast Asia.

  The ticket for admission was death, at least symbolically. You entered through the jaws of a ferocious devouring beast garlanded with human skulls—the goddess Kali. Immediately you were in a mazelike after-world. Nearly ten thousand square meters—five square kilometers—of carved “story wall” accompanied each traveler. It told a tale almost identical to Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso. At the bottom the carved panels showed humanity trapped in sin, and depicted hideous punishment by hellish demons. By the time you “climbed” onto a plateau of rounded stupas, Buddha had guided humanity out of his state of samsara and into enlightenment. No time for that tonight. It was going on two-thirty.

  “Pram?” Santos called into the darkness ahead. “Asalamu alaikum.” Thomas knew the greeting. Peace unto you. But there was no reply.

  “Pram is an armed guard I hired to watch over the site,” de l’Orme explained. “He was a famous guerrilla once. As you might imagine, he’s rather old. And probably drunk.”

  “Odd,” Santos whispered. “Stay here.” He moved up the path and out of sight.

  “Why all the drama?” commented Thomas.

  “Santos? He means well. He wanted to make a good impression on you. But you make him nervous. He has nothing left tonight but his bravado, I’m sorry to say.”

  De l’Orme set one hand upon Thomas’s forearm. “Shall we?” They continued their promenade. There was no getting lost. The path lay before them like a ghost serpent. The festooned “mountain” of Bordubur towered to their north.

  “Where do you go from here?” Thomas asked.

  “Sumatra. I’ve found an island, Nias. They say it is the place Sinbad the Sailor met the Old Man of the Sea. I’m happy among the aborigines, and Santos stays occupied with some fourth-century ruins he located among the jungle.”

  “And the cancer?”

  De l’Orme didn’t even make one of his jokes.

  Santos came running down the trail with an old Japanese carbine in one hand. He was covered in mud and out of breath. “Gone,” he announced. “And he left our gun in a pile of dirt. But first he shot off all the bullets.”

  “Off to celebrate with his grandchildren would be my guess,” de l’Orme said.

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “Don’t tell me tigers got him?”

  Santos lowered the barrel. “Of course not.”

  “If it will make you feel more secure, reload,” said de l’Orme.

  “We have no more bullets.”

  “Then we’re that much safer. Now let’s continue.”

  Near the Kali mouth at the base of the monument, they veered right off the path, passing a small lean- to made of banana leaves, where old Pram must have taken his naps.

  “You see?” Santos said. The mud was torn as if in a struggle.

  Thomas spied the dig site. It looked more like a mud fight. There was a hole sunk into the jungle floor, and a big pile of dirt and roots. To one side lay the stone plates, as large as manhole covers, that de l’Orme had referred to.

  “What a mess,” said Thomas. “You’ve been fighting the jungle itself here.”

  “In fact I’ll be glad to be done with it,” Santos said.

  “Is the frieze down there?”

  “Ten meters deep.”

  “May I?”

  “Certainly.”

  Thomas gripped the bamboo ladder and carefully let himself down. The rungs were slick and his soles were made for streets, not climbing. “Be careful,” de l’Orme called down to him.

  “There, I’m down.”

  Thomas looked up. It was like peering out of a deep grave. Mud was oozing between the bamboo flooring, and the back wall—saturated with rainwater—bulged against its bamboo shoring. The place looked ready to collapse upon itself.

  De l’Orme was next. Years spent clambering around dig scaffolding made this second nature. His slight bulk scarcely jostled the handmade ladder.

  “You still move like a monkey,” Thomas complained.

  “Gravity.” De l’Orme grinned. “Wait until you see me struggle to get back up.” He cocked his head back. “All right, then,” he called to Santos. “All clear on the ladder. You may join us.”

  “In a moment. I want to look around.”

  “So what do you think?” de l’Orme asked Thomas, unaware that Thomas was standing in darkne
ss. Thomas had been waiting for the more powerful torch that Santos had. Now he took out his pocket light and turned it on.

  The column was of thick igneous rock, and extraordinarily free of the usual jungle ravaging. “Clean, very clean,” he said. “The preservation reminds me of a desert environment.”

  “Sans peur et sans reproche,” de l’Orme said. Without fear and without reproach. “It’s perfect.”

  Thomas appraised it professionally, the material before the subject. He moved the light to the edge of a carving: the detailing was fresh and uncorroded. This original architecture must have been buried deep, and within a century of its creation.

  De l’Orme reached out one hand and laid his fingertips upon the carving to orient himself. He had memorized the entire surface by touch, and now began searching for something. Thomas walked his light behind the thin fingers.

  “Excuse me, Richard,” de l’Orme spoke to the stone, and now Thomas saw a monstrosity, perhaps four inches high, holding up its own bowels in offering. Blood was spilling upon the ground, and a flower sprang from the earth.

  “Richard?”

  “Oh, I have names for all my children,” de l’Orme said.

  Richard became one of many such creatures. The column was so densely crowded with deformity and torment that an unsophisticated eye would have had trouble separating one from the other.

  “Suzanne, here, she’s lost her children.” De l’Orme introduced a female dangling an infant in each hand. “And these three gentlemen, the Musketeers I call them.” He pointed at a gruesome trio cannibalizing one another. “All for one, one for all.”

  It went much deeper than perversion. Every manner of suffering showed here. The creatures were bipedal and had opposing thumbs and, here and there, wore animal skins or horns. Otherwise they could have been baboons.

  “Your hunch may be right,” de l’Orme said. “At first I thought these creatures were either depictions of mutation or birth defects. But now I wonder if they are not a window upon hominids now extinct.”

  “Could it be a display of psychosexual imagination?” Thomas asked. “Perhaps the nightmare of that face you mentioned?”