The Descent Part 11

'Perhaps,' said de l'Orme. 'But then there is the face.'

It was the face that had brought Thomas so far. 'You said it's horrible.'

'Oh, the face is not horrible at all. That's the problem. It's a common face. A human face.'

'Human?'

'It could be your face.' Thomas looked sharply at the blind man. 'Or mine,' de l'Orme added. 'What's horrible is its context. This ordinary face looks upon scenes of savagery and degradation and monstrosity.'

'And?'

'That's all. He's looking. And you can tell he will never look away. I don't know, he seems content. I've felt the carving,' de l'Orme said. 'Even its touch is unsavory. It's most unusual, this juxtaposition of normalcy and chaos. And it's so ba.n.a.l, so prosaic. That's the most intriguing thing. It's completely out of sync with its age, whatever age that may be.'

Firecrackers and drums echoed from scattered villages. Ramadan, the month of Muslim fasting, had just ended yesterday. Thomas saw the crescent of the new moon threading between the mountains. Families would be feasting. Whole villages would stay up until dawn watching the shadow plays called wayang, with two-dimensional puppets making love and doing battle as shadows thrown upon a sheet. By dawn, good would triumph over evil, light over darkness: the usual fairy tale.

One of the mountains beneath the moon separated in the middle distance, and became the ruins of Bordubur. The enormous stupa was supposed to be a depiction of Mount Meru, a cosmic Everest. Buried for over a thousand years by an eruption of Gunung Merapi, Bordubur was the greatest of the ruins. In that sense, it was death's palace and cathedral all in one, a pyramid for Southeast Asia.

The ticket for admission was death, at least symbolically. You entered through the jaws of a ferocious devouring beast garlanded with human skulls - the G.o.ddess Kali. Immediately you were in a mazelike afterworld. Nearly ten thousand square meters - five square kilometers - of carved 'story wall' accompanied each traveler. It told a tale almost identical to Dante's Inferno and Paradiso. At the bottom the carved panels showed humanity trapped in sin, and depicted hideous punishment by h.e.l.lish demons. By the time you 'climbed' onto a plateau of rounded stupas, Buddha had guided humanity out of his state of samsara and into enlightenment. No time for that tonight. It was going on two-thirty.

'Pram?' Santos called into the darkness ahead. 'Asalamu alaik.u.m.' Thomas knew the greeting. Peace unto you. But there was no reply.

'Pram is an armed guard I hired to watch over the site,' de l'Orme explained. 'He was a famous guerrilla once. As you might imagine, he's rather old. And probably drunk.'

'Odd,' Santos whispered. 'Stay here.' He moved up the path and out of sight.

'Why all the drama?' commented Thomas.

'Santos? He means well. He wanted to make a good impression on you. But you make him nervous. He has nothing left tonight but his bravado, I'm sorry to say.'

De l'Orme set one hand upon Thomas's forearm. 'Shall we?' They continued their promenade. There was no getting lost. The path lay before them like a ghost serpent. The festooned 'mountain' of Bordubur towered to their north.

'Where do you go from here?' Thomas asked.

'Sumatra. I've found an island, Nias. They say it is the place Sinbad the Sailor met the Old Man of the Sea. I'm happy among the aborigines, and Santos stays occupied with some fourth-century ruins he located among the jungle.'

'And the cancer?'

De l'Orme didn't even make one of his jokes.

Santos came running down the trail with an old j.a.panese carbine in one hand. He was covered in mud and out of breath. 'Gone,' he announced. 'And he left our gun in a pile of dirt. But first he shot off all the bullets.'

'Off to celebrate with his grandchildren would be my guess,' de l'Orme said.

'I'm not so sure.'

'Don't tell me tigers got him?'

Santos lowered the barrel. 'Of course not.'

'If it will make you feel more secure, reload,' said de l'Orme.

'We have no more bullets.'

'Then we're that much safer. Now let's continue.'

Near the Kali mouth at the base of the monument, they veered right off the path, pa.s.sing a small lean-to made of banana leaves, where old Pram must have taken his naps.

'You see?' Santos said. The mud was torn as if in a struggle.

Thomas spied the dig site. It looked more like a mud fight. There was a hole sunk into the jungle floor, and a big pile of dirt and roots. To one side lay the stone plates, as large as manhole covers, that de l'Orme had referred to.

'What a mess,' said Thomas. 'You've been fighting the jungle itself here.'

'In fact I'll be glad to be done with it,' Santos said.

'Is the frieze down there?'

'Ten meters deep.'

'May I?'

'Certainly.'

Thomas gripped the bamboo ladder and carefully let himself down. The rungs were slick and his soles were made for streets, not climbing. 'Be careful,' de l'Orme called down to him.

'There, I'm down.'

Thomas looked up. It was like peering out of a deep grave. Mud was oozing between the bamboo flooring, and the back wall - saturated with rainwater - bulged against its bamboo shoring. The place looked ready to collapse upon itself.

De l'Orme was next. Years spent clambering around dig scaffolding made this second nature. His slight bulk scarcely jostled the handmade ladder.

'You still move like a monkey,' Thomas complained.

'Gravity.' De l'Orme grinned. 'Wait until you see me struggle to get back up.' He c.o.c.ked his head back. 'All right, then,' he called to Santos. 'All clear on the ladder. You may join us.'

'In a moment. I want to look around.'

'So what do you think?' de l'Orme asked Thomas, unaware that Thomas was standing in darkness. Thomas had been waiting for the more powerful torch that Santos had. Now he took out his pocket light and turned it on.

The column was of thick igneous rock, and extraordinarily free of the usual jungle ravaging. 'Clean, very clean,' he said. 'The preservation reminds me of a desert environment.'

'Sans peur et sans reproche,' de l'Orme said. Without fear and without reproach. 'It's perfect.'

Thomas appraised it professionally, the material before the subject. He moved the light to the edge of a carving: the detailing was fresh and uncorroded. This original architecture must have been buried deep, and within a century of its creation.

De l'Orme reached out one hand and laid his fingertips upon the carving to orient himself. He had memorized the entire surface by touch, and now began searching for something. Thomas walked his light behind the thin fingers.

'Excuse me, Richard,' de l'Orme spoke to the stone, and now Thomas saw a monstrosity, perhaps four inches high, holding up its own bowels in offering. Blood was spilling upon the ground, and a flower sprang from the earth.

'Richard?'

'Oh, I have names for all my children,' de l'Orme said.

Richard became one of many such creatures. The column was so densely crowded with deformity and torment that an unsophisticated eye would have had trouble separating one from the other.

'Suzanne, here, she's lost her children.' De l'Orme introduced a female dangling an infant in each hand. 'And these three gentlemen, the Musketeers I call them.' He pointed at a gruesome trio cannibalizing one another. 'All for one, one for all.'

It went much deeper than perversion. Every manner of suffering showed here. The creatures were bipedal and had opposing thumbs and, here and there, wore animal skins or horns. Otherwise they could have been baboons.

'Your hunch may be right,' de l'Orme said. 'At first I thought these creatures were either depictions of mutation or birth defects. But now I wonder if they are not a window upon hominids now extinct.'

'Could it be a display of psychos.e.xual imagination?' Thomas asked. 'Perhaps the nightmare of that face you mentioned?'

'One almost wishes it were so,' de l'Orme said. 'But I think not. Let us suppose our master sculptor here somehow tapped into his subconscious. That might inform some of these figures. But this isn't the work of a single hand. It would have taken an entire school of artisans generations to carve this and other columns. Other sculptors would have added their own realities or even their own subconscious. There should be scenes of farming or hunting or court life or the G.o.ds, don't you think? But all we have here is a picture of the d.a.m.ned.'

'But surely you don't think it's a picture of reality.'

'In fact I do. It's all too realistic and unredemptive not to be reality.' De l'Orme found a place near the center of the stone. 'And then there's the face itself,' he said. 'It's not sleeping or dreaming or meditating. It's wide awake.'

'Yes, the face,' Thomas encouraged.

'See for yourself.' With a flourish, de l'Orme placed the flat of his hand on the center of the column at head level.

But even as his palm lighted upon the stone, de l'Orme's expression changed. He looked imbalanced, like a man who had leaned too far forward.

'What is it?' asked Thomas.

De l'Orme lifted his hand, and there was nothing beneath it. 'How can this be?' he cried.

'What?' said Thomas.

'The face. This is it. Where it was. Someone's destroyed the face!'

At de l'Orme's fingertip, there was a crude circle gouged into the carvings. At the edges, one could still make out some carved hair and beneath that a neck. 'This was the face?' Thomas asked.

'Someone's vandalized it.'

Thomas scanned the surrounding carvings. 'And left the rest untouched. But why?'

'This is abominable,' howled de l'Orme. 'And us without any record of the image. How could this happen? Santos was here all day yesterday. And Pram was on duty until... until he abandoned his post, curse him.'

'Could it have been Pram?'

'Pram? Why?'

'Who else even knows of this?'

'That's the question.'

'Bernard,' said Thomas. 'This is very serious. It's almost as if someone were trying to keep the face from my view.'

The notion jolted de l'Orme. 'Oh, that's too much. Why would anyone destroy an artifact simply to -'

'My Church sees through my eyes,' Thomas said. 'And now they'll never see what there was to see here.'

As if distracted, de l'Orme brought his nose to the stone. 'The defacing is no more than a few hours old,' he announced. 'You can still smell the fresh rock.'

Thomas studied the mark. 'Curious. There are no chisel marks. In fact, these furrows look more like the marks of animal claws.'

'Absurd. What kind of animal would do this?'

'I agree. It must have been a knife used to tear it away. Or an awl.'

'This is a crime,' de l'Orme seethed.

From high above, a light fell upon the two old men deep in the pit. 'You're still down there,' said Santos.

Thomas held his hand up to shade the beam from his eyes. Santos kept his light trained directly upon them. Thomas felt strangely trapped and vulnerable. Challenged. It made him angry, the man's disrespect. De l'Orme, of course, had no inkling of the silent provocation. 'What are you doing?' Thomas demanded.

'Yes,' said de l'Orme. 'While you go wandering about, we've made a terrible discovery.'

Santos moved his light. 'I heard noises and thought it might be Pram.'

'Forget Pram. The dig's been sabotaged, the face mutilated.'

Santos descended in powerful, looping steps. The ladder shook under his weight. Thomas stepped to the rear of the pit to make room.

'Thieves,' shouted Santos. 'Temple thieves. The black market.'

'Control yourself,' de l'Orme said. 'This has nothing to do with theft.'

'Oh, I knew we shouldn't trust Pram,' Santos raged.

'It wasn't Pram,' Thomas said.

'No? How do you know that?'

Thomas was s.h.i.+ning his light into a corner behind the column. 'I'm presuming, mind you. It could be someone else. Hard to recognize who this is. And of course I've never met the man.'

Santos surged into the corner and stabbed his light into the crack and upon the remains. 'Pram.' He gagged, then was sick into the mud.

It looked like an industrial accident involving heavy machinery. The body had been rammed into a six-inch-wide crevice between one column and another. The dynamic force necessary to break the bones and squeeze the skull and pack all the flesh and meat and clothing into that narrow s.p.a.ce was beyond comprehension.

Thomas made the sign of the cross.

5 - BREAKING NEWS.