Jungle Rock Blues, page 3
Following the new sound he scrambled up a north-facing slope. It was a long way, further than he’d thought, but the humming – was it a hum? – drew him on. Moving silently among the treeferns, along a mossy bank, finding a twisty path, and then all at once the bush opened out, there was a clearing, and only luck prevented Caliban from stepping out into it. Instead of losing his life he peered around the thick trunk of a tree.
What he saw first was the wetas. There were lots of them. At that time Caliban couldn’t count but from his various descriptions of this moment and from studying the site of the cabin I think we might guess that there were thirty or so – great spiny things, all facing the same way, into the sun, which was high in the hole that the clearing made in the sky and pouring warmth down on the whole valley and especially it seemed on this open space, where in the middle of it the wetas were glowing. Was the hum coming from them? There was a tone that shifted. But the wetas had always been silent. However, they were vibrating. It was fascinating to watch. The movement wasn’t great. They were tense, their legs and heads held stiff. It was their bodies that were moving – a tightly controlled undulation of the thorax. A current was going through them. There in the sun, shiny-backed, with just a little slime hanging in strings from their jaws, a pulsing mass of giant cave wetas.
His first instinct was to escape. But there was something fascinating about them, throbbing there in the sun, and also he hadn’t yet got to the middle of the sound. At first, shocked by the sight of the wetas, he’d stopped listening and simply gazed, but now his ears were working for him again and inside the hum he heard another sound, something that stayed with him all his life.
Caliban was a wonderful mimic, this was proved over and over again in the middle years of his career when he could upon demand produce any tune he’d ever heard and make it sound exactly like the original. When asked to reproduce this particular moment he would smile and then a faded look would come over his features, as though he was thinking of an old girlfriend. He would open his mouth and come out with ...
You, whose sweet brown eyes will hold me,
You, whose little lies don’t fool me,
You, with your heart
Right there on your sleeve,
You are the one I believe.
So corny, but Caliban liked corn, we know this, it was part of his gift to find the essential part of such trite things, that had been worn away by repetition, and to restore it, to sing those old items as though he was writing his autobiography as he sang. There exists a tape of him crooning this old chestnut and while it never made the charts it has quietly sold over a million copies. But at that time he didn’t recognise it, he simply heard it, a remarkable new type of sound. It reached him on a shift in the breeze, on a shifting wavelength. Where did it come from? Somewhere in the middle of the wetas, a thing he hadn’t attended to because of his horror. The cabin.
Not that he recognised the cabin for what it was either. But over the years he came back to this place and made it his own, exploring every inch of the ground around it, finding tiny objects and insignificant little markings which were of course to him of great significance – all the while listening to that sound, that fascinating sound. What was it? Now, at this first encounter, he tried to make the shapely part of it come clear of the humming – this was like separating out the call of one bird from the mass of the dawn chorus. The humming faded in and out and now he grasped that it wasn’t actually being made by the shiny beasts. They were merely shivering to it. The hum was coming from somewhere in the middle of them, something standing there, pointed, with straight lines, taller than him, wooden, something with an utterly different shape and nature than anything he’d seen before.
The sound faded, then came back, changed.
Is there anybody out there?
Or am I here all alone?
Please, if you should happen to hear me
Could you get on the phone?
Into his study of this new amazement came faint from far away down the length of the valley the deep cough of Terjick, calling. The wetas all heard it and there was a kink in their dance. Caliban was torn. But he knew that he needed to think – how to go among the wetas, how to get closer to the source of this astonishing new thing. He would come back here. There was of course no need to mark the place, he knew the valley as we know our neighbourhoods and so he padded his way silent back downhill. But at every step his ears sought that sound and, in places in the valley, he could now catch it, faint but clear. From that day his centre of gravity shifted. For him the middle of the valley was now upslope and that is where his mind sat.
4
Caliban had to wait until it was late fall and the cold had driven the wetas back into their caves before he could safely begin to investigate the source of the sound he had heard at the cabin. In the meantime he found places in the valley where he could pick it up, faintly, natural sound-shells where hollows in the land gathered the humming, and the other sound too, the part that rose and fell in such an intriguingly shapely way. In these spots he would lie, on a mossy bank, eyes half closed, concentrating, while the creeping life of the bush went on around him. He would go into a kind of swoon – in this mood he on one occasion came to suddenly, to realise that a doe was licking his knee. The creature was harmless and bolted as soon as he lifted his hand, its spotted fawn skipping beside, leaving him to drift again on the thin signal. I’m too blue, to get over you ...
He was probably about six years old at this point, skinny, tall for his age, with a long shaggy mass of black hair that fell over his face. That year he had a sore on his thigh that wouldn’t heal, an ugly thing that leaked pus through a thick crust, and many scratches and bites. But he was cleaner. He liked washing. No soap, of course. But the dousing in the king weta’s internal fluids had made him feel that on his skin there was always something he should be getting off. Upstream was a waterfall which the gorillas didn’t visit, they weren’t keen on being splashed, they generally avoid water, gorillas get enough moisture from all the leaves they eat, but Caliban would stand on a flat stone and let the heavy flow fall upon his shoulders. What a marvellous weight it was, that load which shifted on your back and kept breaking over your head. Caliban liked to be inside the water, to see the world through its opaque rush. It was cold to the bones, though.
Nudu he didn’t take to hear the distant sound. The times when he listened were always when she was dozing, plus she would not have followed him such a long way from the group – except, of course, that she would do anything for him. He still slept each night in her arms. This had become a source of dispute. Zembak had on several occasions come and dragged at his body, signalling to Terjick that this shouldn’t be, that this hairless thing was sleeping with the boss’s wife, but Terjick had already received one good bite from Nudu over this matter and so he merely put his hands over his head and turned away. Zembak would poke Caliban with sticks and find spiders to place on his leg, but Caliban had always been an enthusiastic eater of spiders.
The truth was, since he had discovered the cabin he had grown away from the group. He was always among them for the nights but during the day he was often at the very edge of what could be called contact with them, the limits of connection, busy with his own purposes. They were easy to keep up with, they tended unless threatened by bad weather to move slowly and he had discovered that he could catch up with them in a few moments by swinging from the thick vines, supplejack the New Zealanders call it, a lovely name, which wound like a connecting thread through the densest parts of the bush. He had routes he could travel for half a mile without touching the ground – running down the back of a broad sloping branch, leaping, seizing a vine, swinging – letting go. Ahead was the next vine, his hands would stretch towards it. But in the instant before he caught he was free, in the air ...
He began to seek wilder and longer flights.
Gorillas are essentially ground-dwelling creatures. Their arms are longer than their legs, which is thought by those who are expert in these matters to be a remnant of a branch-dwelling past, but these days they rarely take to the trees. And so Caliban’s fondness for height became another difference, another source of separateness.
And yet he was part of the group and they would have mourned his death; Terjick would have fought for him. Caliban made them laugh. Sometimes it was his skinniness – he was a stringy thing, long, but unable to digest as much greenery as them and needing Nudu’s milk to sustain him – and sometimes it was his ingenuity. They would see him using a stick to tip a bird’s nest out of a tree so that he could lick the egg-goo from the ground, and cackle with delight. And then sometimes he would try and reproduce for them the sounds he had heard at the cabin.
The older gorillas seemed to recognise it. As soon as he started, they broke into a chorus of hoots and yowls. This set the whole group going. Birds flew startled from the trees. The bush lost its silence – it was like the arrival of a gang of kids with a boom-box. The gorillas all grunted his name. “Caliban!”
Caliban finding his voice.
Then when the land was cold he followed the bushland trails, slithered up the muddy banks and swung his way along his highway in the trees, following the aural trace until he was once again at the edge of the glade where the cabin stood. No wetas. He could see their droppings scattered thick on the ground and his sensitive nose wrinkled. But there was, he quickly confirmed, nothing to be afraid of. His every sense told him this. What a delicate instrument he was, thinking there at the edge of the clearing, his long dark hair in cowlicks all around his registering head.
Wide-eyed, alert, he picked his way across the open space. Following the manner of the gorillas there was something indirect in his approach to an object, a series of tangential passes, and so it was some time before he was alongside the solid wooden rectangle, where he squatted as though it was a rock he had been used all his life to climbing and from there he gazed around, interested, taking in the clearing and the trees and the drifting clouds.
He was at the source of the sound now and was deeply affected by its vibrations.
Beside him the rectangle was solid, strong. He knew without testing that it would not shift if he touched it. He knew it was wooden, a wood he was familiar with, there were stands that smelled like it everywhere, but this particular wood also had an odour that was part of the thing that was strange and new about this place. Caliban squatted, letting the histories here come to his senses. Wetas, yes, and the faint feet of smaller creatures, these he filtered out. The usual patina of leaf-litter and mould. Yes, but there was another thing. Caliban also knew that the wood was hollow and he was afraid of the energy that was humming in there, making this sound. Would it come out?
At the same time he knew that this was no living thing, not a creature. His mind during these years was not given to making pictures, he was a repository of factual knowledge, of the uncontaminated actual, and was used to dealing with the world on the basis of the information that came to him – this was a quality that served him all his life. But then when he lifted his hand so that his finger could touch the wood, his clean brain was entirely in his fingertips. Yes, the sound was in the wood.
It was in the ground too, his feet told him that, but fainter – it was there the same way as it was in the air. Touching the wood made his spine stand erect and his eyes float up in his head.
On a green hill,
On a blue day,
Your brown eyes
Looked my way
And told me
With a smile
That you were gone ...
What did it mean?
He stayed there touching the wooden walls while the long shadows of the clouds went over him. From that day the weather in Caliban’s head was changed forever.
Finally he straightened, moving his hands up the wall with him like pads, one over the other, so that he would not lose contact. The thing was higher than his head. He found a length of wood that protruded and used it to haul his birdy bones up onto what we would call the roof. Now he could see the whole clearing. No wetas. He crawled along the ridgeline and came to a square turret that smelled of old fire – the chimney. Its hole was covered by a wire mesh. When he put his ear there the sound was thrillingly clear.
Squatting on the ridge pole, listening.
Eventually he dropped down and circled the cabin. The quality of the sound had changed... . and so Allied forces were able to complete the manoeuvre without further loss and take the town. Now here is the voice of Corporal Arthur Stenson, recorded some two hours after the capture was complete ...
Caliban froze. What had he done to cause this change? He didn’t like it, the voice made something in him shrink. Scrambling up one side, he found a place to look through the wall, it was square and he seemed to be able to see into the thing, in to some faint light, but it was like looking out through the waterfall, you couldn’t really see clearly. Dropping down again, he found another place to investigate. It was a break in the surface of horizontal wooden lengths and he sensed that this wasn’t as strong. He bumped it. His fingernails scratched at it. Now his nose told him that there was a place to sniff, to the side, right at the height of his nose, a strong scent there – phew, strange! His finger touched the small cold thing that stuck out, grasped it. Shook it. Turned it.
A doorhandle – and the door of the cabin swung open.
He jumped back, his foot sliding on a weta dropping. Crouched, he was ready to run. But nothing moved. From the tree top, upslope, the tui continued to sing.
Caliban entered the cabin in stages – peeping in, then withdrawing to see if anything had changed. The child was in a state of high excitement. Here the humming was quite powerful, it ran a shiver through his teeth. He found it hard to see. The cabin had windows on either side but they were dark with grime and didn’t let in much light. But the open doorway revealed all. If he could only bring himself to go all the way in, then he could see what it was that sang. But he wanted part of himself to stay outside, to be on watch and not wholly enclosed.
Then he was squatting on the boards of the floor and his huge eyes were gazing round.
A decade or so later, when the cabin was studied by those who were used on an everyday basis to living among human things, what they found were the meagre practical objects that a reclusive man might take with him if he wished to escape the world and establish a primitive life of survival and thought. There were a couple of oddities, which we shall come to, but in the main the cooking pots, implements, tools and raw materials were entirely commonplace.
However, for Caliban they were objects of great mystery, especially because every one of them seemed to be alive with that sound which, now that he was inside, appeared to be everywhere in this place. He picked up a pot – apart from the doorhandle, it was the first metal he had touched – and peered into it. Held it at arm’s length. Touched it with his tongue, bit it. “It tasted metallic,” we say – I guess this is what we mean. Caliban had no idea of metal and no idea of cooking and no idea of pot – well, he may have understood the purposes of containers, a bird’s nest is a container. But gorillas have no possessions and, in the wild, don’t use tools. So to Caliban these objects were just so many random items – art objects, if you like. But even he, squatting there, intuited that these things were of a different order. For example, the spade. Its particular handle, its hard iron shoulders, the sheer flatness of its blade. Its edge. Everything about the spade was as different from say a spade-shaped branch, if such a growth can be imagined, as it is possible for a thing to be. The purposefulness of a spade. Its wroughtness. Even Caliban, a brain-carrying being, yes, who could figure that if he wanted eggs then he wanted a stick, but who thus far had had little need of that part of our equipment which divines the purpose of an object – even he could grasp that this was something new under his sun.
But not something of great interest, not when there was that sound to investigate.
Inside the cabin the humming lodged itself in his teeth, it was a sensation he could hardly bear. But at the same time the part he liked was more intense too. He moved carefully across the floor – he’d never been on a floor before – to where, low in one corner, the source of the sound resided. As he went close he saw that it appeared to come from an oval thing the size of his hand, black, which was embedded in a panel of wood. This was the place. Caliban crouched, brought his face close. Looked. Touched, first with a fingernail and then with the hard tips of his fingers. All kinds of information came to him. It was in his arm, it rose up his spine. But his ear was the thing. Without removing his fingers he carefully lowered his head so that it was beside the black oval – the loudspeaker. His lips were drawn back, against the humming, and against something else too – fear, maybe. And so his hearing was filled, his head was filled, with the most wonderful thing, a woman’s voice singing, against a velvet curtain of other voices, her voice draped in a lush setting of horns and strings – all arrangement, all shape, all design. The extraordinary phenomenon of human music.
