Forest of the Pygmies(44)
"How could you know that!" Alexander burst out.
"The ancestors told me. They know many things. They do not go out only at night, as people believe. They also go out during the day; they walk with other spirits of nature, here and there, among the living and the dead. They know that you will come to them to ask for help," said Nana-Asante.
"And will they agree to help their descendants?" asked Nadia.
"I don't know. You will have to speak with them."
An enormous full moon, yellow and radiant, rose over the clearing in the jungle. While it was shining, something magic happened in the cemetery, something that in years to come Alexander and Nadia would remember as one of the pivotal moments of their lives.
?
The first sign that something phenomenal was occurring was that Alex and Nadia could see perfectly, as if the cemetery were lighted by enormous stadium lamps. For the first time since they'd been in Africa, they were cold. Shivering, they hugged each other for courage and warmth. A growing murmur, like bees, filled the air, and before the young people's astounded eyes the clearing filled with translucent beings. They were surrounded with spirits. It was impossible to describe them because they had no defined form. They seemed vaguely human, but they changed constantly as if sketched in smoke. They were neither naked nor clothed; they had no color but were luminous.
The intense musical hum of insects vibrating in their ears had meaning; it was a universal language they understood, a kind of telepathy. They had to explain nothing to the spirits, tell them nothing, ask them nothing—in words. Those ethereal beings knew all that had ever happened and all that would take place in the future: Time did not exist in their dimension. There were souls of dead ancestors and of beings yet to be born, souls that remained indefinitely in a spiritual state and others ready to take on physical form on this planet or on others.
The friends learned that the spirits rarely intervene in events of the material world, although sometimes they assist animals through intuition and humans through imagination, dreams, creativity, and mystic or spiritual revelation. Most people live their lives without any link with the divine and do not note the signs, coincidences, premonitions, and small daily miracles in which the supernatural is manifest. Alex and Nadia learned that the spirits do not cause illness, misfortune, or death, as they had heard; suffering is caused by the wickedness and ignorance of the living. Neither do they destroy people who violate or intrude into their domains, because they have no domains and it is not possible to offend them. Sacrifices, gifts, and prayers do not reach them; their only usefulness is to mollify the mourners making the offerings.
The silent dialogue with the ghosts lasted for a time impossible to calculate. Gradually the light grew brighter still, and the space around them opened to a larger dimension. The wall they had climbed to get inside the cemetery dissolved, and they found themselves in the midst of a forest, although it seemed different from where they had been before. Nothing was the same; everything emitted a radiant energy. The trees no longer formed a compact mass of vegetation; now each had its own character, its name, its memories. The tallest among them, from whose seeds other, younger trees had grown, told them their stories. The longest-living plants revealed that imminently they would die and replenish the earth, while the newest stretched out tender shoots to grasp onto life. Nature's continuous murmuring denoted subtle forms of communication among the species.
Hundreds of animals surrounded Alexander and Nadia, some they had never known existed: strange okapis with long necks like small giraffes; musk deer; civet cats; mongooses; flying squirrels; golden cats; and antelopes striped like zebras. There were scaly anteaters and a horde of monkeys in the trees, chattering like children in the magical light of that night. A parade of leopards, crocodiles, rhinoceroses, and other beasts passed before them in perfect harmony. Extraordinary birds flooded the air with their songs and lighted the night with their bold plumage. Thousands of insects danced on the breeze: many-colored butterflies, phosphorescent scarabs, noisy crickets, delicate fireflies. The ground seethed with reptiles: snakes, turtles, and large lizards, descendents of the dinosaurs that observed the two young people through three-lidded eyes.
They were in the heart of the spirit forest, surrounded by thousands and thousands of plant and animal souls. Alexander's and Nadia's minds expanded still further, and they perceived the connections among creatures, a universe interlaced with currents of energy, an exquisite network as fine as silk and as strong as steel. They perceived that nothing exists in isolation; everything that happens, from a thought to a hurricane, is cosmic in effect. They sensed the palpitating, living earth, a great organism generating flora and fauna, mountains, rivers, the wind of the plains, the lava of volcanoes, the eternal snows of the highest mountains. That mother planet, they intuited, is a part of other, greater organisms, and is joined to the myriad of stars in the unbounded firmament.
Alexander and Nadia saw the inevitable cycles of life, death, transformation and rebirth as a marvelous design in which all things occur simultaneously, without past, present or future: now, forever been and forever being.
And finally, in the last phase of their fantastic odyssey, they understood that the hosts of earthly souls, along with all things in the universe, are particles of a single spirit, like drops of water in an ocean. One spiritual essence animates all existence. There is no separation among beings, no frontier between life and death.