VOICES IN THE WILDERNESS
An Excerpt from
Islands of Desire
By Phil Trupp
We made our way north toward La Soufriere, the live volcanic mother of St. Vincent. It is a long haul up
the west coast of the island and the best way is by sea.
There were whitecaps to the north, a warning to our old junker of a wooden boat that motored haltingly
with a messy bilge and an disconcerting list. The vessel had been abandoned in the sixties by some
anonymous Stateside dropout, leaving behind a hull more floatsom than seaworthy, its paint peeling away
in long strips, its metal parts rusting and altogether down-island. She took on plenty of water and there
was only partial cover against the eastern Caribbean sun of the Grenadines.
Don Carlos Jack stood with me in the stern. I had hired him as mate. He was a skilled seaman and
dignified as his name. Cally was amidships, driving. Both men were Rastafarians, but very different in
approach and appearance. Cally was pensive and mordant; he did not conceal his distaste for the "white
devil." Don Carlos Jack was at least civil; he cut the white devil a few meters of slack, met him dead-on
with a respect Cally thought to be absurd and misplaced, if not immoral.
A few miles outside our port of Kingstown we sailed under the shadow of Fort Charlotte, named for the
wife of King George III. Its spiky gray mass dominated the rugged cliffs and the tiny settlement nearly a
thousand feet below.
The Isreali photo crew came up from the sheltered bow and began making their pictures.
"It has been attacked many times," Don Carlos Jack said.
He provided us a running commentary on the history of the island and it ways. Neither Napoleon's navies
nor the impaccable black Caribs had much success against the fort, he explained. Now the gray stone
monolith doubled as a prison and occasional tourist attraction. The death penalty was enforced in these
parts, and the last soul to be hanged at the fort was a Vincencian woman who had butchered her
husband, his lover, and the lover's several children. Don Carlos Jack pointed to a platform where the
gallows had been erected and the hanging carried out.
"It was a terrible crime," Don Carlos Jack said. "They say she was a Carib. So the fort is still good for
something."
"You think it is good to hang people?"
"Take life. Lose life. Balance. They say she kicked at the end of the rope for a long time."
There was a small bay at the base of the fort. Calley turned into it, dodging the wind. The water was very
calm inside.
"Many relics on the bottom," Don Carlos Jack said. "British soldiers--rummies day and night. All sorts of
odds and ends down there."
Don Carlos Jack did not say this derisively; he was an anomolous Rasta, and his worldview was larger
than most. He did not wear dreadlocks, the pigtails of aggression. His hair was not coarse and his
manners seemed more Latin than West Indian. He had attended the English schools, quoted from
Marcus Garvey, studied western nuance and understood its use. He had adopted Rastafarianism very
carefully, "as a choice," he said, rather than as a reaction against white supremacists or as a shield to fend
off the emerging island gang culture which had adopted the Rasta style and appearance. They were
"pretenders," he said. "Island dogs."
Calley was another matter. He was a dark, brooding fundamentalist. Hardcore and prideful. All whites
were evil, irredeemable, corrupt, inferior. He held fast to "Rasta-Fari" and was a member of the radical
faction attacking the old island ways on St. Vincent.
Calley only grudgingly tolerated our presence and my questions, answering mostly with grunts and
nods.He was openly contemptuous. When we started out from Kingstown he had refused to meet my
eyes. He offered the islander's limp handshake, and we set about stowing the camera gear in a dense,
uncomfortable silence. He would have nothing to do with the Isrealis and spoke only when it was
necessary. Somehow, I thought, I'd find a way into that dreadlocked universe of his, the one which
aggressively kept the white "beast" at a distance. I did not fully understand that for Calley there was no
truly safe distance, except perhaps in the "homeland" of Ethiopia. In Ethiopia they knew the white devil
was clever as a cobra, that he was inventive, persistent, a brute; the true sons of Zion knew how to
properly deal with these heretics.
"Orthodox," Don Carlos Jack told me when we hired
Calley.
"Sorry," I said. I told him how I had lived with virulent racism and hatred in the States, had sacrificed a
few teeth to it,to say nothing of the irreplaceable years of my youth. I told him I would not tolerate a
bigot.
"No need for outrage," Don Carlos Jack replied. "You have to know where you are and who you're
dealing with."
At the moment we were together in the leaky boat and we had to deal wisely with each other. There was
the sea and La Soufriere and the Falls of Baliene. These were sufficient for the day.
There was a small community of thatch on the hillside near the fort. A ribbon of hibiscis ran behind it into
the bush, the bush turning black at the base of the steep rockface where the mountain rose green and
black and vertical and you could not build a village so high up. Elsewhere in the Grenadines, at gentle
Bequia, we saw the "moonscape village," fabulous dwellings carved deep into the face of the limestone
cliffs. Moonscape was a hideaway for the ultra-wealthy. Now at St. Vincent the criss-crossing of thatch,
the shadows standing erect against the mountain, the pristine wilderness: these were a little more down to
earth as I had come to know it.
In any case, I was more interested in the volcano. I asked Don Carlos Jack about La Soufriere's last
eruption.
It came on a Friday the Thirteenth, in 1979. His recollection was evocative.
"I was a kid but I can still remember the sound--like bombs. Boom! Boom! Boom! I remember. Three
times like that. It was morning and the sky was dark. There was the sulphur stink. I was living with my
parents and I was plenty scared."
He told how the molten lava mounted the walls of the fifteen-hundred foot high crater. He did not see it
himself but for years Don Carlos Jack heard talk of the burning red stone cresting at the rim of the crater
and rushing down into the forest. Some on the island called it "the red death."
"The sky was full of ashes," Don Carlos said. "Glowing red sky. Ground shaking. I will never forget."
La Soufriere is still very much alive, and it has been violent for a very long time. Archaeologists say an
eruption occurred as early as 160 A.D.. The first verified eruption came in 1718. Another, almost a
century earlier, took a terrible toll.
The "big one" hit the island in 1902. Explosions shook the mountain for three days, with devasting results.
By the time the earth stopped trembling, thousands had died. Whole villages simply vanished. Thousands
of casualties were never reported; there was no way to come up with an accurate body count, but
everyone knew it had to be very high.
"So many deads," Don Carlos Jack told me. "You could not see the sea for all the
deads."
The 1979 eruption, the day of glowing red ash in the sky, forced evacuation of seventeen thousand
islanders. The banana crop was destroyed. The tourist economy died. The island slipped backwards in
time and was only now beginning its recovery.
Today the rainwater at the bottom of La Soufriere's main crater bubbles and steams; it forms a
permanent cloud above the peaks. Everyone takes bets on when the mountain will blow again.
We sailed close to shore, hugging the coast. Don Carlos Jack assured me Calley could sail safely close
in. He had local knowledge, knew the little bays and hurricane holes, the positions of the submerged
boulders and reefs. On a strange island local knowledge is everything.
"You know the coast very well," I said to
Calley.
"Yea."
"We're hugging pretty tight."
"Yea."
"Have ever you worked with a film crew?"
"Yea."
"I'll need to talk to you, Calley."
"Talk?"
"Yes, about the island, the volcano. You know many things to help us tell the story."
He turned away, his face a stoic African mask. He stared straight ahead through the salt strained
windscreen, his dreadlocks glistening with salt. Contemptuous stoicism: it's what the white man paid
for--what he has earned!--and it is what the white man deserves and what he will get. Local knowledge
and silence.
I had a certain lingering anxiety about Rastas, but faux Rastas were downright frightening. Thankfully
Calley was no pretender. A week earlier, at Union Island, I'd been confronted by a gang of youthful
Rasta-pretenders outside the money exchange in the tumble-down village of Clifton. Four of them, evil
little thugs flaunting their dreadies and ratty t-shirts with black supremacist slogans slashing across their
chests.
"Aaeee, white mon!"
It was mid-day, stunningly hot. Dust hung in the air, goats nibbled at what little vegetation remained in the
ruin of the village. The boys surrounded me and delighted in their taunting.
"What you got dah, white mon?"
"Your funny money," I said, lightly.
"Aaeee, fuck you, white mon!"
They closed in, forming a ring of dusty black faces, crooked smiles, cagey eyes of predation knowing the
prey is cornered and taking satisfaction in the coming torment.
"You, froggie! White mon! Clifton not you town."
"No, I don't live here. You do. Are you froggies?"
They thought this was very droll. One of the boys stepped forward. He was about sixteen years old, the
apparent titular leader. He was trying to be as intimidating as possible, which wasn't hard, given the odds.
Perhaps he had a pistol-o, a deadly little popgun like the one the Customs Inspector wore up in Great
Abaco; a little five-round .32-caliber revolver. Or maybe he had something better, more up-to-date: a
Glock or a MAC-10 or one of those large, cheap handguns they churned out in Pakistan. The bulge at
his waistband defined his manhood and it would do the job to enforce his self-esteem.
"You fuckin' frog-bastard," he hissed. "Give it up you' money!"
"What have you got there?" I said, motioning to his waistband.
"Fuckin' ting to take you fuckin' fonny money. Wanna see?"
"Yeah," I said. "Let's see."
The others pulled back, leaving the two of us inches apart on the dirt road with the goats and chickens
and tumble-down tin shacks and the ubiquitous red, black and green Pan-African pennants drooping in
the jungly heat. I could feel the boy's breath, count his ruined teeth, taste the gritty red dust that seemed
to cover everything.
"You best not come to Clifton, frog-bastard."
"But it's such a friendly place," I said, flatly.
He turned to the others. "Boyz, he say he love Clifton. Maybe he best stay."
The others chimed in with taunts and raucous laughter. I kept my eye on the boy in front me, my main
tormenter. The others were talking and gibbering with a kind of manic glee.
I looked at the boy dead-on. He was a dangerous kid, probably not very bright, and he was a punk like
any other punk, only this punk had nowhere to run. He was captive: a prisoner of foreign capital, stuck in
this awful poverty the French are so good at maintaining in their tropic colonies. I stared at the bad boy
and past him, to Mount Toboi, with the shacks and the sheer rockface imposing as a prison: a wall of
misery, the end of the world.
"Goodbye," I said, turning away and starting up the road.
They shouted after me, "White frog-shit!"
The head punk again leaped in front of me. Now he was menacing, snarling, "You gimme dat fonny
money. I not foolin' wid you!"
I kept walking. We bumped shoulders. I felt his dreadies brush my cheek like the teeth of a steel comb.
He and his crew followed, cursing and taunting and threating. It was bravado, unpredictable and at the
same time pathetic. If he had pulled the gun (assuming he had one at all) I would have taken it away from
him. He wouldn't have dared use it, because in the end there was the commissariat de police, the simple
hanging justice of the Foreign Legion.
By the time I arrived back at the marina with its electric fence and concertina wire I was drained and
angry. I do not do well with bigots. They make me crazy. They make me do foolish, dangerous things.
And if there are enough of bigots, with sufficient resources, they can make the whole world do crazy and
dangerous things.
I told the Israelis what had happened, but they insisted on going into Clifton for dinner anyway, despite
my warnings.
We ate a miserable meal in a filthy little cafe behind the tin-can house go-go club. The waiter, a sad
Indian boy with large black eyes, apologized for the cafe's lack of bread and fresh vegetables and
cheese.
"We have no wine," he sighed.
The Isrealis complained and groused. The waiter didn't respond and only seemed more saddened. We
gave up and headed back to the marina.
We passed the go-go. Post-Marley one-drop reggae cut through the moonless night, loud and
percussive and stultifying as the dust. Shadowy figures danced in the road, danced in ways I had
imagined primitive peoples would dance. It was wild scene of whirling, leaping shadows and dusky faces;
cries and curses against the night; the bitter-sweet aroma of ganja, Union's major cash crop, mixed with
the acrid haze of tobacco. Claws of strobe light illuminated the dancers who flung themselves into and out
of the lightbeams, bare feet pounding the red dust.
"Savages," one of the Israelis grumbled.
"You have not seen Africa," the other Israeli said.
"No," replied the first.
"If you had seen Africa you would not say what you said."
"Savage is the same, no matter where it is."
We were well past Clifton when someone rushed up to us and squealed, "Philippe!" It was one of the
waitresses we'd met at Palm Island, a chubby West Indian girl who probably made passes at anyone she
thought had a few extra francs. I was pleasantly surprised. How did she recognize me--or anyone--in this
leaden darkness?
"You' voice," she said. "I would know it anywhere."
One of the Israelis flirted with her. I kept walking.
"You have a death wish," I said to him when we were safely inside the the fenced marina. "You have to
know where you are and who you're dealing with."
* * *
The incident at Clifton was still fresh in memory as we ran close to the beach. There was the bitter smell
of trash smoldering up in the hills. Don Carlos Jack pointed to what appeared to be a black highway
cutting through the rain forest. A wide spillway of volcanic material, smooth and hard as obsidian, parted
the forest and cascaded into the sea. Pillars of lava jutted above the surface of the water, sharp, invisible
boat-killers.
"From 1902," said Don Carlos Jack, motioning to the black strip of cooled lava. Jungle loomed over
both sides of the flow, but the trail of lava itself supported no life.
There were no true villages in this area. The Rastas had formed occasional enclaves. There were a few
huts, fishing smacks skewed akimbo up on the beach, nothing like an organized community. Mangy,
half-starved dogs yelped at the boat and followed us as we sailed northward along the dark lava beach.
"All Rastas here," Don Carlos Jack said. "It's far from Georgetwown. The authorities do not harrass
them."
"How do they live?"
"Planting, fishing. There is plenty breadfruit, and plantain."
The shoreline grew progressively darker. The beaches near Kingstown were powder-soft and white, the
kind of beaches they brag about in the tourist advertisments. Yet as we moved nearer the volcano the
sand was noticably coarse to the touch. The face of the mountain appeared more formidable, its
overburden dense and wild and confused. This was an alien world, an outback, supporting an anarchic
collection of Rastas who lived without electricity or running water or anything like modern medicine.
I wondered if Calley lived up here.
"Yea," he said.
"Is it good?"
He winced, as if I had asked an impolite question. "Good, yea. It is peaceful."
I asked one of the Israelis to make a photograph, perhaps with Calley in forefront the picture.
"Nay!" Calley snapped. "No picture!" he warned.
"Don Carlos Jack, will you pose?" I asked.
Don Carlos Jack shrugged. "All right."
Calley projected a withering stare as the photographing got underway.
I decided to take another chance. I asked Don Carlos Jack if we might visit one of the Rasta enclaves.
The two black men looked at each other, perhaps in a kind of silent debate.
"It is possible," Don Carlos Jack said at last.
"May we take photos?"
"We'll see."
Calley was not happy. His face hardened to a hostile mask, the dreadlocks resting heavy on his
shoulders, the whole of him impassive, impenetrable.
We neared a line of breaking white water and shallow reefs. Don Carlos Jack stood on the bow and
barked directions to Calley.
"Come right...Closer in...."
Calley repeated Don Carlos Jack's words, gingerly making for the beach. It was increasingly clear that
he and Don Carlos Jack operated in different worlds. Don Carlos Jack was Rastafarian, but he was also
a "brown man"--a mixed blood. His skin was bronze, corrupted perhaps by Latins, Orientals, the white
devil. Don Carlos Jack understood the white devils; he 'tolerated' them. Did he secretly wish to be one of
them? Skin color was destiny and Calley believed in destiny, in black superiority. He also believed that
one day, a day of glory, he would return to the ancestral root of Rasta-Fari, Ethiopia, land of Zion, land
of the one God, Emperor Haile Selassie-I (the I pronounced "eye").
The boat listed to starboard, and when we came around the end of a reef we took a wave. The boat
made a soft, slopping sound, as if she wanted to roll all the way over on her beam. Calley steered
wonderfully. The hull righted and we sailed toward a gray-black strip of sand with the heavy foliage rising
behind it.
Don Carlos Jack remained crouched the bow, his back broad and sweating and reflecting the sun. Calley
killed the engine. We drifted shoreward. When we were in chest-deep water, Don Carlos Jack slipped
over the side clinging fast to a hemp line. He struggled forward in the backwash of the waves, made fast
to a moored oil drum, and motioned us to follow him.
The Israelis stumbled on the hidden boulders and nearly went under! They lugged a necklace of Nikons
and assorted lenses and gyros and lots of complicated, bulky gear which only they understood.
"Cheeps," one of them said, complaining that his computerized Nikon was "frah-jeel."
Calley stayed with the boat, not that it might have been stolen if left unattended. Calley was a boatman
and he had a duty to stay with the boat. He was not like those those foul-mouthed Ashanti pretenders
who lived in Jamaica, the black man's hell on earth. In Jamaica the pretenders fell asleep at anchor. Men
drowned. Boats drifted out to sea or went up on a reef. Pretenders to Rasta-Fari had no sense of duty
or honor. They sold holy herb to the white devil. Calley hated and pitied them.
The sand was warm and gritty: the leavings born of the last eruption.
As we made our way up the beach I told Don Carlos Jack I'd never seen a full eruption.
"Terrible," he said. "A sky filled with fire."
"Where you afraid?"
"Very afraid."
"You were a child."
"A schoolboy. I will never forget it."
A collection of tin-can huts slumped behind the beach; they got their name because they were mostly
thatch and corrugated tin. Children ran carelessly around a clearing and laughed, but they lapsed into a
curious silence as we approached. The woman, wrapped in batik print sheaths, took little notice of us. I
felt at once conspicuous and invisible. It was very hot.
"Where are the men?" I wondered.
"Fishing, hunting, tending."
Then came the dogs: mangy, scrawy, flies orbiting around them, tormenting them. You could see the ribs
of the dogs and their yellow eyes--wolf eyes, desparate and hungry-mean.
"Dogs aren't pets here," Don Carlos Jack explained. "People say it is cruel that we do not to feed them.
Well, the dogs must survive somehow or they are eaten. Maybe dogs eat dogs."
We walked among the tumble-down huts. Slogans leaped out at us, silent spray-painted voices on the tin
walls: One Jah. One Aim. One Destiny. Rasta is Night. Rasta is Blood. Informers Beware!
I wondered about the "informers."
"Authorities do not harass them unless an informer makes noise about thieving or violence. Authorities
destroy the ganja. It is very bad," Don Carlos Jack said, sadly. "Authorities have little respect for their
own kind."
A small, leathery woman sat on the ground outside one of the huts. Her eyes were downcast as she
slowly worked a bowl of maize. Don Carlos Jack asked if we might make a few photographs. She
shook her head vigorously. He leaned close to her and she whispered something in his ear. She did not
meet our eyes.
"She can not make such a decision. We must come later, when the men return."
Even as he spoke I heard the sound of the clicking Nikons. The Isrealis were busy at work with their
"cheeps." The woman Don Carlos Jack had been speaking to jumped to her feet, spilling the contents of
her bowl. She was a young woman, but the tropic sun had made her appear a lot older than she really
was.
"Nay!" she cried. "Nay! Nay!" When the children heard her protests they shrank back into the shadows
of the huts.
By now a number of frames had been fired off. We'd taken advantage, and taking advantage in these
parts can be quite dangerous.
"Let's go," Don Carlos Jack said, hurt and now impatient.
It was good to be out of there. I made a point of telling the Isrealis to make no more people-pictures
without permission.
"We will have to pay them," replied one of the photographers. "But don't worry. We have very long
lenses."
"No," I said. "Not without permission."
Though Calley did not respond to this remark his contempt was palpable. The Israelis called themselves
"Sons of Zion," but see how they practiced the white ways of exploitation. From that moment onward the
Israelis were invisible to Calley, non-beings, as we had been non-beings among the huts behind the
beach.
* * *
The wind piped up, making for a steady, jarring chop. La Soufriere was about an hour away. I hunkered
down in the stern to make notes and study our map. The volcano accounted for most of the northern tip
of the island and, again, there was no fixed landing site. We'd anchor off the beach and wade ashore at
the entrance to Baleine Falls, about which the tourist literature said: "The Falls of Beleine epitomises the
unspoilt beauty and atmosphere of St. Vincent." Tourist-speak is sugary pap designed to gloss over the
imperfections of an impossibly "perfect" paradise. I do not envy tourists. They buy their tickets and they
come away with a mirage. Like an audience in a darkened theater they suspend belief until the lights
come up and the play is ended.
As we neared the falls the sand shone jet-black; it had the spiky glint of shattered glass. There was a
hush, an uneasy stillness: nature holding her breath. And, by surprise, the sea was suddenly calm, as if
deferring to the power of the mountain.
Calley headed in. The mountain soared above the rain forest. La Soufriere, its flanks rising four thousand
feet, its summit darkened by rain-burdened clouds. The air was suddenly cool and damp and the clouds
of steam made blue shadows on the water.
"She is a cruel miracle," Don Carlos Jack said. "Her vent is a mile wide."
The crater was a moonscape: barren rock, gray and tormented. Skyscrapers of frozen lava collapsed
into the caldera or gripped the flanks of the mountain like the claws of a prehistoric creature. I listened
for a rumbling sound--any sound at all--but there was only my breathing and the quiet hiss of the bow
slicing through the dark, flat water.
We anchored fifty yards off the beach. Don Carlos Jack announced he would stay with the boat. Calley
would guide us to the falls. It was a decision not much to Calley's liking; he glared at Don Carlos Jack.
Don Carlos Jack was impassive. Then, like an automaton, Calley slipped over the side and waded to
shore.
Cold, fresh water from the falls washed over the beach and into the surf, a narrow river running to the
sea. Mossy boulders, slippery and hard to see, covered the bottom. The Israelis grumbled; one false step
and their costly "cheeps" were gone.
The beach was a magnificent chaos of lava, boulders and black glassy sand; a prehistoric wasteland.
The forest began at the top of the beach as a solid green wall. Columns of sunlight penetrated the clouds
and vanished in the dense overburden.
"Maybe we see dinosaurs," one of the Isrealis joked.
He had captured the true ambiance. Here was a land before time, unchallenged, unspoiled, overseen by
the forces of evolution. It was easy enough to imagine a pod of carnivorous reptiles crashing through the
bush, jaws dripping, yellow eyes fixed on this feast of easy human prey.
We made our way higher up the beach. We entered the forest and the sea was instantly lost behind the
opaque curtain of overbrush. The suffocating tropic heat was now chilled; ovals of sunlight played cooly
on the high rock faces.
We negotiated a field of lichen-covered boulders. Cameleons scurried about; others stood motionless,
sharp claws dug in, curious black eyes fixed on us. The remains of leeches clung to the boulders, their
stony blue and white exoskeletons reminded me of barbaric jewelry, but jewelry made unbareable by
stench of decay.
I stood still as I could, listening. In the same way one's eyes grow accustomed to darkness, so the sense
of hearing becomes accute after a certain interval of silence. Slowly the sharp cries of small birds drifted
through, punctuated by the quick, raspy squawks of parrots. I became aware of what sounded like a
continuous sigh, a sigh strangely human, layered and divided by treble and bass. It was the distant water
of the falls rushing from the forest to the sea. I recalled a similar sound a few years earlier when we
explored the Darien Rain Forest of Panama. The rushing sound issued from the upper reaches of the
mountainside, and within minutes a flood crashed through the wilderness, a wall of water carving a path
to the sea. I will not forget how the sigh became a growl, then mounted to a roar as we ran for our lives
along an overflowing riverbank that threatened to take us at any moment. But the sound I heard at the
entrance of Baleine Falls remained constant; there was no oncoming calamity.
"Are we far?" I asked Calley.
He shook his head.
"Does it flood?"
Again he shook his head, his dreadlocks wet and heavy in the moist air and sliding over his neck and
upper body, a nest of wet hairy snakes.
We came to a narrow footpath. Calley took the point and I continued to ask questions: what was the
name of this plant or that flower? He replied with scornful brevity. And when he could not answer with
one or two words he said nothing at all. He was getting to me.
Then came total shock. About a quarter-mile up the path, in an area flanked by vertical walls of stone, I
saw it. Graffiti! Detestable graffiti! Symbols of decay and transfiguration, the terminal leprosy of the spirit.
Black People Unite! 'Destroy White Supremacy! Black is Life! Repatriation and Power!--hideously
spray-painted on the boulders, on the mountain itself. A sickening pollution, whorls of paint defacing one
of the few primordial forests left in this hemisphere. Take Power! Destroy the Oppressor! It was
everywhere, a cancer overwhelming the forest, ravaging the dignity of millions of years.
The words were out of my mouth before I was even aware of speaking them.
"Calley, what has been done here?"
He turned, glared, his bloodshot eyes boring in. "I--we-- have done nothing!"
"I know Rasta-Fari when I see it."
The Israelis joined in. "Look at this," the chief photographer said. "It is disgraceful."
"You are Isreali," Calley shot back. "But you know nothing."
"You say you are man of Zion. Yet you do this?" the cameraman pressed.
"Who made this anger?" Calley said. "Anger. So much anger."
"Why here?" I wondered."This is wilderness, the work of your god."
"Rich people come. They see."
"They see politics. Propoganda."
Calley's body shook. He clenched his fists. He did not wish to speak too much and risk losing his wages.
Then he decided to let go.
"You be at Trench Town? Jones Town? Back-O-Wall?" he asked. "Tin-can houses. Wattle and daub.
Open pit-latrines. Killers and deads. Police thugs. Who made these these abominations?"
"I didn't make them, and this is wilderness," I protested.
He held my eyes for the first time. "A diamond in the rough, who bites with his abhorence," he
whispered.
A quote from Rastafarian poet Sam Brown. I knew a little of his work and quoted a line in reply:
"Conscience of man, humanity, civilization in reverse...."
"Yea," Calley said."Once there was civilization. Once we were free in Ethiopia. Now it is all Trench
Town!"
"Awful," the Israeli said. "It is jihad."
"We are helpless," Calley countered. "Investors come. Make big hotels. Now everyone must work.
Must have money. Money kills the old ways of trust."
I felt weak, sickened. Calley lamented the loss of--what? This was the Earth, the god of all. One did not
deface it and speak with the voice of injury. There was no justice here, only anger and vanity.
We continued along the trail to the falls. Graffiti, most of it obscene, followed us on the rock faces.
Lichens had masked some of it, but this made its presence all the more pathetic. Political cliches gave
way to youth-gang symbols, the fingerprints of violence.
As the trail grew more demanding the graffit disappeared. Perhaps the slogan-makers were too indolent
to have pressed this far.
The leafy canopy was heavy, the light dim. You could taste the wonderfully fresh moisture in the air.
We reached Baleine Falls. Furious white water spilled from the clouds into a deep stone basin carved by
the rushing water. The horizon vanished. The mountain rose into the clouds. If there are gods, I thought,
they must come here to meditate, they must come here to weep.
Almost imperceptibly the sound of the falls modulated; it was no longer a roar, but rather a pulsing echo
of time made audible. It created a rhythm, the beating of an unseen heart. Faces appeared in the boulders
surrounding the pool, the faces of the ancient spirits, and where the sunlight penetrated the canopy their
eyes appeared to stare impassively at this strange band of visitors.
Calley had vanished.
"You are so quiet," one of the Israelis said. "What are you thinking?"
I turned away and slipped silent and naked into the cold waters of Baleine Falls.
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