Forest of the Pygmies(41)
"Nadia, Borobá, and I will go, but we need someone to wait for us here and take us on to Ngoubé before daylight," said Alexander.
For the Pygmies, the fact that the two young foreigners were going to spend the night in the cemetery was absolute proof that they were not right in the head, but since they couldn't dissuade them, they accepted their decision. Beyé-Dokou pointed out the direction they should take, told them good-bye with great outpourings of affection and sadness—because he was sure he would never see them again—but out of courtesy agreed to wait for them at the voodoo altar till sunup. The other Pygmies also bid them farewell, awed by the bravery of their young friends.
?
Nadia and Alexander were interested to find that in this voracious jungle, where only elephants left visible tracks, there was a path leading to the cemetery. That meant that someone was using it frequently.
"The ancestors pass this way," murmured Nadia.
"If they did exist, Eagle, they wouldn't leave footprints and they wouldn't need a path," Alexander replied.
"How do you know that?"
"It's a question of logic."
"There is nothing in this world that would get either the Pygmies or the Bantus near this place, and Mbembelé's soldiers are even more superstitious; they won't come into the forest at all. So tell me, who made this path?" she demanded.
"I don't know, but we're going to find out."
After a half hour of walking, they suddenly emerged into a clearing among the trees. Before them was a high, thick circular wall constructed of stones, logs, straw, and clay. Hanging on the wall were skulls and bones, the dried heads of animals, masks, carved wood figures, clay pots, and amulets. There was no visible door, but they discovered a round opening almost three feet wide located some distance above the ground.
"I'll bet the old women who bring the corpses here push them through that hole. There must be piles of bones on the other side," said Alexander.
Nadia wasn't tall enough to see, but Alex looked inside.
"What's in there?" she asked.
"I can't see very well. Let's send Borobá in to check it out."
"Not on your life! Borobá's not going in there alone. We all go or no one goes," Nadia said decisively.
"Wait here; I'll be right back," Alexander answered.
"I'd rather go with you."
Alexander speculated that if he crawled through the hole, he would fall on his head. He didn't know what to expect on the other side; it made more sense to go over the wall—child's play for him given his experience in mountain climbing. The irregular surface made the climb easy, and in less than two minutes he was straddling the wall, while Nadia and Borobá waited nervously below.
"It's like an abandoned village. It looks very old. I've never seen anything like it," said Alexander.
"Do you see skeletons?" Nadia asked.
"No. Everything is clean and bare. Maybe they don't put the bodies through that hole, as we thought…"
With her friend's help, Nadia also climbed over the wall. Borobá hesitated, but the fear of being left alone galvanized him, so he followed; he was never far from his mistress.
At first inspection the village of the ancestors seemed to be a collection of clay and stone ovens arranged in concentric circles, in perfect symmetry. In each of those round constructions was a hole that served as a door of sorts, covered with lengths of cloth or tree bark. There were no statues, dolls, or amulets. All life seemed to have stopped in the area inside the high wall. There was no hint of jungle growth, and even the temperature was different. An inexplicable silence reigned; the hubbub of monkeys and birds was absent, as was the drumming of rain or murmur of the breeze in the leaves. The silence was total.
"These are tombs; they must bury the dead in them. Let's look inside," Alexander proposed.
When they lifted some of the curtains veiling the openings, they saw pyramidal piles of human remains. The skeletons were dry and brittle, and perhaps some had been there for hundreds of years. A number of the huts were filled with bones; others were half filled, while some were entirely empty.
"What an eerie sight!" Alexander observed with a shiver.
"I don't understand, Jaguar. If no one comes here, how can everything be so orderly and clean?" asked Nadia.
"It's very mysterious," her friend agreed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Encounter with the Spirits
THE LIGHT, WHICH WAS ALWAYS faint beneath the green canopy of the jungle, was beginning to fade. For a couple of days—from the time they left Ngoubé—the friends had seen the sky only through occasional open spaces among the treetops. The cemetery was in a clearing, and overhead they could see a patch of sky starting to turn dark blue. They sat down between two tombs, prepared to spend a few hours in solitude.
In the three years that had passed since Alexander and Nadia had met, their friendship had grown like a great tree, until it had become the most important thing in their lives. The youthful friendship of the first months had evolved as they matured, though they never spoke of it. They lacked words to describe that delicate sentiment, and feared that if they talked about it, it would shatter like glass. To express their relationship in words would be to define it, put limits on it, diminish it. As long as they never spoke of it, it would remain open, and uncontaminated. So the friendship had quietly expanded in silence, without their having noticed.