The Liminal Compass: The Clock of the Cave

The clock of the cave measures in years, centuries and millennia. Its seconds are formed in the billions of silicate drops it takes for the stalagmite to rise another centimetre. Its minutes are counted out in hundreds of years of cavern-forming strides along the footpath of the Andes. Its hours are the millennia between one reverberating volcanic beat and the next.

When we clattered in to Cueva de los Tayos with our twenty-four hour clocks illuminated on phones and laptops, our ‘long’ exposures lasting seconds, our barrage of batteries for torches that limped on just enough to illuminate four days in the dark, we grafted a mouse’s heartbeat over the whale rhythm of the cave. Four days of intense activity against the backdrop of Tayos’s timeless leviathan longevity. The rhythm was syncopated and it was set by that slower pulse; the unhurried beat of the cave playing out a melody that would last countless lifetimes.

A year later, I sat watching lightning strike over hills of amethyst, heather, violet and slate, echoing memories of ripples of rainforested Ecuadorian hills, as a friend described to me the route she took in her mind’s eye when she needed to shift from freneticism to calm. Peeling away from the shoal movement of a crowded city street, leaving the city behind for a path through the delicate new green of pine forests, a bed of needles underfoot, moving slowly up an alpine mountain, a plateau, a bear, a deer and finally, a cleft high in the mountainside, known only to her. As she described the meditation; always the same route, always the same landmarks and encounters; her own personal pilgrims walk, I imagined the slowing down from mouse pulse to the quiet tick of the second hand of the cave.

She asked me: “Where do you go? What is your place?” and I felt a moment’s pang for the lack of my own story to spin and re-spin.

I don’t have a route. I haven’t a mountain path to climb. But I realised as I sat counting the seconds between lightning flash and the roll of thunder, that since I emerged from the cave I have been carrying remnants of that different timepiece; an echo of the slow heartbeat of Tayos. Three little snow globe facsimiles to shake myself into whenever I feel my heart race too fast.

The first is a sound. I woke for the first time in the cave to three unhurried notes, sounded one after the other; a long pause, a repetition. Over and over. The sound was somewhere between mournful and seeking, like the low tones of a wooden flute. In my disorientation on that first unlit morning it seemed unlocatable and uncatagorizable; a noise that somehow signalled the suspension of normal rules and logic. It sounded at times just like a bird and at others like a human imitation; a bait-like hunting call. The cry did not correspond to any of the species that called the cave their home. Everyone heard it, it was met by all with confusion and it is testimony to the power of suggestibility of the cave that it was only two days into our time in Tayos that we reached what should have been the most obvious explanation: that this bird was not a ghost or spirit but a daily visitor from the forest outside, drawn in the early morning hours to search for food deep down in the cavern that formed our temporary home. I listen sometimes to the recordings we have of that bird’s call. More often I just play its song in my mind, and like a metronome tied to the pace of my breath it slows me down.

The second snow globe is a moment. A synching of the cogs of the cave’s clock with the tiny teeth of our own gears. Down in the swooping, interconnected chambers, after the stalagmites, before the route became vertical, we stopped on a soft slope of deep soil, our boots sinking into the ground, and turned off every light. The sound of our breath was the only reminder that we were not alone in the dark, that we were not lost forever. The presence of the cave, held at arms length by the beam of our torches, pressed suddenly close, snuffing out the tinny tune of our movements and swelling the vastness and silent, alien, unendingly labyrinthine landscape of Tayos. The air was warm and humid there and the moment was thick with the realisation of the utter fleetingness of our occupation and paper-thin reliance on light to find our way. When I think of that moment now it is with a complicated mingling of emotions; a sublime mixture of awe, reverence, terror, gratefulness, reassurance. I imagine it might be a paler version of the feeling an astronaut might have stepping out into the boundless black of space: full of wonder at the beauty of an environment, that with just the slightest shift in situation, could spell long, silent, lonely death instead of inspiration. Perhaps this was what Neil Armstrong meant when he said of his own experience of Cueva de los Tayos that it was “up there with the moon.”

And the third still, slow memory is like a fragment of silent film, played over and over. Droplets of water, falling in from the rainforest above into the place referred to as the Altar of Light. Brought up without familiarity with the language of religion I found the term uncomfortable and hyperbolic. Until that is I stood at its foot, staring up at the path the water took along the dense shafts of morning light that illuminated the bowl-like base, carpeted in a rich covering of lush green, surrounded by rock faces it was impossible not to see faces in. From where we stood, the precipice moment when the droplets broke free of the forest undergrowth and launched into the void was obscured. And into the dark of the loamy ground and fallen rocks, the hiding place of snakes tumbled unwittingly into the cave from the forest above, the sight and the sound of the water was silently swallowed. The droplets were suspended: never seen to commence and never to meet their destination but instead, caught perpetually in the void, falling as if in slow motion, defying the laws of gravity and the normal pace of time.

I’m not the only one with this need. To crane our neck back, to slow our breath and watch the water fall. To synch our pulse with the sound of a ghost. To look blindly out into the dark and listen for a sigh as we turn out the lights. But as our mouse hearts beat faster and faster, against a backdrop of flickering lights, 24-hour news cycles, throwaway clothes, we burn the places where a slower pulse is found. How will we fill our need when those places are gone?