The green tunnel widened, brightened, and suddenly they were out of the dripping forest on a wide shelf of almost level ground, walled in on three sides by red rocks that towered up two thousand feet and more into a succession of jagged crests and isolated pinnacles. There was a freshness in the air and, as they passed from sunshine into the shadow of a floating island of cumulus, it was almost cool. Dr. Robert leaned forward and pointed, through the windshield, at a group of white buildings on a little knoll near the center of the plateau.
“That’s the High Altitude Station,” he said. “Seven thousand feet up, with more than five thousand acres of good flat land, where we can grow practically anything that grows in southern Europe. Wheat and barley; green peas and cabbages, lettuce and tomatoes (the fruit won’t set where night temperatures are over sixty-eight); gooseberries, strawberries, walnuts, greengages, peaches, apricots. Plus all the valuable plants that are native to high mountains at this latitude—including the mushrooms that our young friend here so violently disapproves of.”
“Is this the place we’re bound for?” Will asked.
“No, we’re going higher.” Dr. Robert pointed to the last outpost of the range, a ridge of dark-red rock from which the land sloped down on one side to the jungle and on the other mounted precipitously towards an unseen summit lost in the clouds. “Up to the old Shiva temple where the pilgrims used to come every spring and autumn equinox. It’s one of my favorite places in the whole island. When the children were small, we used to go up there for picnics, Lakshmi and I, almost every week. How many years ago!” A note of sadness had come into his voice. He sighed and, leaning back in his seat, closed his eyes.
They turned off the road that led to the High Altitude Station and began to climb again.
“Entering the last, worst lap,” said Vijaya. “Seven hairpin turns and half a mile of unventilated tunnel.”
He shifted into first gear and conversation became impossible. Ten minutes later they had arrived.
10
CAUTIOUSLY MANEUVERING HIS IMMOBILIZED LEG, WILL CLIMBED out of the car and looked about him. Between the red soaring crags to the south and the headlong descents in every other direction the crest of the ridge had been leveled, and at the midpoint of this long narrow terrace stood the temple—a great red tower of the same substance as the mountains, massive, four-sided, vertically ribbed. A thing of symmetry in contrast with the rocks, but regular not as Euclidean abstractions are regular; regular with the pragmatic geometry of a living thing. Yes, of a living thing; for all the temple’s richly textured surfaces, all its bounding contours against the sky curved organically inwards, narrowing as they mounted towards a ring of marble, above which the red stone swelled out again, like the seed capsule of a flowering plant, into a flattened, many-ribbed dome that crowned the whole.
“Built about fifty years before the Norman Conquest,” said Dr. Robert.
“And looks,” Will commented, “as though it hadn’t been built by anybody—as though it had grown out of the rock. Grown like the bud of an agave, on the point of rocketing up into a twelve-foot stalk and an explosion of flowers.”
Vijaya touched his arm. “Look,” he said. “A party of Elementaries coming down.”
Will turned towards the mountain and saw a young man in nailed boots and climbing clothes working his way down a chimney in the face of the precipice. At a place where the chimney offered a convenient resting place he halted and, throwing back his head, gave utterance to a loud Alpine yodel. Fifty feet above him a boy came out from behind a buttress of rock, lowered himself from the ledge on which he was standing and started down the chimney.
“Does it tempt you?” Vijaya asked, turning to Murugan.
Heavily overacting the part of the bored, sophisticated adult who has something better to do than watch the children at play, Murugan shrugged his shoulders. “Not in the slightest.” He moved away and, sitting down on the weatherworn carving of a lion, pulled a gaudily bound American magazine out of his pocket and started to read.
“What’s the literature?” Vijaya asked.
“Science Fiction.” There was a ring of defiance in Murugan’s voice.
Dr. Robert laughed. “Anything to escape from Fact.”
Pretending not to have heard him, Murugan turned a page and went on reading.
“He’s pretty good,” said Vijaya, who had been watching the young climber’s progress. “They have an experienced man at each end of the rope,” he added. “You can’t see the number-one man. He’s behind that buttress in a parallel chimney thirty or forty feet higher up. There’s a permanent iron spike up there, where you can belay the rope. The whole party could fall, and they’d be perfectly safe.”
Spread-eagled between footholds in either wall of the narrow chimney, the leader kept shouting up instructions and encouragement. Then, as the boy approached, he yielded his place, climbed down another twenty feet and, halting, yodeled again. Booted and trousered, a tall girl with her hair in pigtails appeared from behind the buttress and lowered herself into the chimney.
“Excellent!” said Vijaya approvingly as he watched her.
Meanwhile, from a low building at the foot of the cliff—the tropical version, evidently, of an Alpine hut—a group of young people had come out to see what was happening. They belonged, Will was told, to three other parties of climbers who had taken their Postelementary Test earlier in the day.
“Does the best team win a prize?” Will asked.
“Nobody wins anything,” Vijaya answered. “This isn’t a competition. It’s more like an ordeal.”
“An ordeal,” Dr. Robert explained, “which is the first stage of their initiation out of childhood into adolescence. An ordeal that helps them to understand the world they’ll have to live in, helps them to realize the omnipresence of death, the essential precariousness of all existence. But after the ordeal comes the revelation. In a few minutes these boys and girls will be given their first experience of the moksha-medicine. They’ll all take it together, and there’ll be a religious ceremony in the temple.”
“Something like the Confirmation Service?”
“Except that this is more than just a piece of theological rigmarole. Thanks to the moksha-medicine, it includes an actual experience of the real thing.”
“The real thing?” Will shook his head. “Is there such a thing? I wish I could believe it.”
“You’re not being asked to believe it,” said Dr. Robert. “The real thing isn’t a proposition; it’s a state of being. We don’t teach our children creeds or get them worked up over emotionally charged symbols. When it’s time for them to learn the deepest truths of religion, we set them to climb a precipice and then give them four hundred milligrams of revelation. Two firsthand experiences of reality, from which any reasonably intelligent boy or girl can derive a very good idea of what’s what.”
“And don’t forget the dear old power problem,” said Vijaya. “Rock climbing’s a branch of applied ethics; it’s another preventive substitute for bullying.”
“So my father ought to have been an Alpinist as well as a woodchopper.”
“One may laugh,” said Vijaya, duly laughing. “But the fact remains that it works. It works. First and last I’ve climbed my way out of literally scores of the ugliest temptations to throw my weight around—and my weight being considerable,” he added, “incitements were correspondingly strong.”
“There seems to be only one catch,” said Will. “In the process of climbing your way out of temptation, you might fall and…” Suddenly remembering what had happened to Dugald MacPhail, he broke off.
It was Dr. Robert who finished the sentence. “Might fall,” he said slowly, “and kill yourself. Dugald was climbing alone,” he went on after a little pause. “Nobody knows what happened. The body wasn’t found till the next day.” There was a long silence.
“Do you still think this is a good idea?” Will asked, pointing with his bamboo staff at the tiny figures crawling so laboriously on the face of that headlong wilderness of naked rock.
“I still think it’s a good idea,” said Dr. Robert.
“But poor Susila….”
“Yes, poor Susila,” Dr. Robert repeated. “And poor children, poor Lakshmi, poor me. But if Dugald hadn’t made a habit of risking his life, it might have been poor everybody for other reasons. Better court the danger of killing yourself than court the danger of killing other people, or at the very least making them miserable. Hurting them because you’re naturally aggressive and too prudent, or too ignorant, to work off your aggression on a precipice. And now,” he continued in another tone, “I want to show you the view.”
“And I’ll go and talk to those boys and girls.” Vijaya walked away towards the group at the foot of the red crags.
Leaving Murugan to his Science Fiction, Will followed Dr. Robert through a pillared gateway and across the wide stone platform that surrounded the temple. At one corner of this platform stood a small domed pavilion. They entered and, crossing to the wide unglazed window, looked out. Rising to the line of the horizon, like a solid wall of jade and lapis, was the sea. Below them, after a sheer fall of a thousand feet, lay the green of the jungle. Beyond the jungle, folded vertically into combe and buttress, terraced horizontally into a huge man-made staircase of innumerable fields, the lower slopes went steeply down into a wide plain, at whose furthest verge, between the market gardens and the palm-fringed beach, stretched a considerable city.
