The Cleft

by Doris Lessing

  Another babe had been born and the young men told the girls to keep to themselves with their noisy infants, and so the girls were always at a little distance from the general community.

  Horsa could not get any of the big boys to take him on, or even accept him as a comrade. No one wanted to listen to his talk of the other land, which at sunset gleamed in its inky-pearl and gold colours under the heavy blue cloud.

  No one wanted Horsa at all.

  And yet, with the crippling of Horsa some kind of unifying spirit had finally gone from the company. How could it be possible, he wondered, lying wounded in the shade of his rock, that recently he had stood among these people as a being stronger, better, than they, and everything he said was attended to?

  Except, of course, for the little boys: it had been some time now since they had listened to anyone.

  Maeve, the girl who could be kindly and who had warned Horsa, came to tell him that the little boys had found a cave, or a system of caves, where they spent their time. Had he not noticed that they had not been around with the others recently? This was a shock to Horsa. He had not noticed. He seemed to notice nothing but his pain, his heavy dragging limb. He forced himself upright, using the stick, and practised walking, or rather pulling himself about, over the sand.

  Once he was on his feet, even though he could not let go of the supporting stick, it seemed people saw him again. They did not want to listen to his tales of the new land, but when he spoke they did pay attention.

  Maeve asked about the children, and the young men were uncomfortable and even impatient. What were they supposed to do? Horsa saw that the absence of the children troubled the older boys and that there had been discussions and decisions among them he had not noticed.

  Standing, Horsa said he must be taken up to this cave, or caves, and some kind of authority seemed to have returned to him, because with the aid of his stick, and a youth on either side, supporting him he dragged himself up the side of a cliff behind their beach and saw the entrance to a cavern that had a path to it, telling them all that the little boys used it well – and often.

  And now here is a hint as to how many the children were. To make a ‘well-used’ path takes more than, let’s say, four, or six, or even ten; or perhaps we are seeing here a measure of time. These people had been on this new shore of theirs for much longer than they supposed. And outside the cavern’s mouth was a space made by the hacking away of bushes and grass. From there the boys could look down at the beach where their elders built their fires and at meals where they should have been too, with their contributions from the hunt. Very easy was it to imagine the childish sniggers and jeers of the children who were so well out of reach of supervision.

  The cave itself was high, and large; on either side it fell into dark edges where it was easy to understand that no one, child or adult, would want to go. The main cave was smooth, and had been used – perhaps was used now – by animals. On some low rocks were the little boys’ possessions: some animal skins, some fish-skin loincloths, a large shell with water, and some meat from a past supper. The smell was not pleasant. And where were the children? Not a sign of them. The adults called, shouted, even threatened and commanded, but silence answered them. Either the children had gone hunting, or they had taken themselves far into the cave, and were waiting to be left alone again. Horsa suggested to the big boys that they might go a little way into the back of the cave and saw them agreeing, but with reluctance: the big tunnel at the cave’s back almost at once bifurcated. It seemed some of the youths had already gone a little way into the rear of the cave and had found a maze of caves. Horsa could see the young men were embarrassed, even ashamed. Yes, they should have kept an eye on the little boys, if they could be called that, while Horsa had been weak and not himself.

  Horsa suggested some might climb up here at evening, to see if the children had returned; yes, but one called out that he wouldn’t want to go far into this cave or any of them: there were animals, you could hear them. Then another said that he had to say he would not like to encounter the children in the dark, if he was by himself. Horsa stood, holding himself on his stick, trembling with weakness still, and listened to their talk. There were systems of caves, and tunnels between them, and deep underground rivers, and even lakes. If any attempt was to be made on the lines of recovering the children then it would have to be in the day, and at least two search parties, with the strongest ropes they could make out of the forest, and torches. If one group got lost, then another could go and rescue them. Horsa said, ‘We can’t just leave the children, if they are lost somewhere.’ Then, knowing it sounded less than convincing, he said, ‘After all, we forget, they are only children’ – and saw the eyes of his companions turn towards him, speculatively, surprised, some disbelieving. ‘Children’ he was calling those dangerous boys?

  Horsa stood waiting till the youths were well out of the cave before grasping his stick and staggering after them. And now Maeve came to aid him. Outside, on the platform where were the scuffed remains of evening fires, Horsa grasped tight to a young tree trunk, and closed his eyes to recover. When he opened them, Maeve was still holding him up and he was staring straight out to sea where a line of shining light, with dark cloud above, told him that he was looking at his other land. From up here, high on the cliff, it stretched a good way along the horizon. And was it deep, as well? Horsa strained and could not see. How far away was it? Did he ever ask himself, or did he measure its distance by the slow voyage he and his friend had made towards it, then the rapid skimming of them both back over the waves? He could have leaped into the hot summer’s day air and taken two steps towards his place, which waited for him. Maeve, seeing how he stared, looked too, but said, ‘Horsa, the others don’t like it, when you stare over there. What is it that you see? There are always clouds building up there, we can all see that.’ It seemed then to Horsa that light flashed up from the ‘cloud’. Lightning? What could be making that flash, which was like a signal to him: ‘I am here, don’t forget.’

  Pressured gently by Maeve’s strong arm, Horsa got down the hill to the beach. He did stumble, but picked himself up and hoped the others hadn’t seen him fall. Maeve patiently held him till he reached the level of the beach and he sat on a rock and waited till his weakness left him.

  And now when they lit their supper fires on the beach, they looked up the cliff path to catch sight of the children, if they were there. They looked up to see if there was a fire burning outside the cave. Night after night they waited, and a heaviness settled on them all. There were mutters that the children were lost. Then, as had been suggested, parties with ropes and torches set off at midday when the light was strongest and might penetrate a little way into the caves, and came up to report that there were labyrinths, dangerous ones, and it was easy to imagine children being swept away by the rivers, or falling down precipices. They called, they shouted, in cave after cave, and though that was hard, in that echoing system of caves and caverns where any voice was multiplied, they believed they did hear the cries of lost children, who were calling for help, though probably what was being heard were the voices of seabirds on the cliffs, or even animals who lived in the caves. There was another attempt to penetrate deeper, but the trouble was there was not just one cave, or system, but many, and now they had to believe the children were indeed lost. Horsa said they must wait, just in case the boys turned up, but the talk was for them all to move on and away from this beach, which it was felt was unlucky.

  ‘Don’t you care about us, Horsa?’ And Horsa heard Maronna’s voice in his dreams and in the sound of the waves and in the wind. ‘Don’t you care, Horsa?’

  And then some boys were found in the labyrinth, ‘some’. And they were like skeletons. So that is a clue. Healthy little boys don’t become all bones in a day or so. They were frightened and their eyes ‘stared’. Something very bad had frightened them. They were in a hole deep down a shaft. The big boys had nearly not gone further, but taunts from their fellows of �
�Cowards! You are scared’ made them go further than they should have gone. If the underground waters had shifted, as they do, real skeletons would have been found. The boys at first could not eat, then ate a great deal, and no one could move until they were fit to travel. They refused to go down into the caves again. In the way of children they swore they would rather die than ever go into any cave. What had happened to the other children they did not know, or were too afraid to say. Their interlocutors heard names: ‘Brian’ fell into a river; ‘Big Bear’ fell into a shaft; ‘Runner’ was caught by a big snake. So at least they had these names to take back to the waiting women – who were more and more on their minds.

  For a long time no one had thought of or mentioned the women but now, and because of the lost children, they talked of Maronna and what she would say if she knew. The men were more and more saying how it was long past the time for going back. This means that they did know not only that it was they who put babes into wombs, but that time was important – periods of time. These, our ancestors, our so distant forebears, never spoke, as far as we can tell from their records, of how they measured time, but did at least match the getting of babies with time. The men around their great fires, which sent long scarlet and gold reflections across the waves when they were near and not out on a tide, spoke of the women and their waiting and, apart from the jokes which I am sure we may deduce were made (I imagine a group of legionnaires around their fires, thinking of waiting women), said that Maronna would be anxious, she would be angry with them when they did turn up. And when did they expect that would be?

  The plan was to go on around the island as far as they could, or until they came on the women’s shore. Did they know by then it might be an island? We know, and that gives a shape and a limit to our imaginings of their journey. There were islands in the great river in the valley, and in their slow measuring of the shores in their argosy they must have encountered islands, that is, land by itself where waves washed around it. Did Horsa see his tempting captivating shore as the edge of an island? He never used the word. Perhaps the idea of his shining place as something with a circumference would have put a shadow on his thought of it.

  While the little boys were recuperating – and the histories make it clear this was as much a mental recovery as physical, something else happened. The big boys with a leaning towards a sympathetic understanding of badly shocked children spent time with them, talking and listening, and so did the girls, but then one girl gave birth and at once the babe died. This shocked them all. Why should this new baby die, without any reason, and without much warning? There were no flies on this beach, with their poisonous stings. And for the first time we read that this baby was valued, when so many had disappeared. The bereft mother was distraught, and while they found her wailings and mourning irritating, they were not as impatient with her as they had been with earlier weeping mothers. Again there was talk of Maronna: why were babies dying here, with them, when as far as they could remember, they didn’t with the women?

  The party setting off to ‘go home’ – and this phrase was actually used, showing how sentiments had changed – was not as carefree as it had been. When the children were judged well enough to travel, and the newly bereft girl too, they had to debate about where to set off.

  The young hunters, chasing a hare through undergrowth, had found what they believed to be a main cave, high and wide, whose depths did not fragment into a hundred small tunnels, but ran back straight and level away from the cliff. It was, it seemed, a roadway for animals. Large and small animals lived there, or had until the noise and disturbance of the hunters sent them away. The prints were everywhere in the dust of the cave. And here we are again: what animals? Giant bears? Pigs? Great cats? How very strange these minds are to us, that knew no need to ask, what? How many? How?

  The animals had fled but apparently the youths did not seem to connect their disappearance with the din they made, the running feet, the shouts, the yells, the stones flung at cave walls to reverberate. Before deciding on the main cave as at least the start of their return, some girls went into the very first cave and called the names of the lost boys, and then as far in as they dared. And here is a hint that they might have been missing brothers, or even sons. They called names and listened, called and listened, but heard only their own voices reiterating the echoes of names.

  It was said around the fires that it was as well Maronna had insisted on taking some of the little boys back with her. ‘Otherwise we would have no boys to grow up and become like us.’ And this was repeated sagely by all the youths, once it was said by someone. ‘Just think! Suppose there were no children born – what then?’

  Horsa said to them that even as things were there would be a time when the generation of youths who hunted and defended them all would be few. ‘It will be a dangerous time, while we wait for the boys we have to grow up.’

  And this thought made even greater care and attention go into their watch over the boys they had left, who were being difficult and nervous after their ordeal. They still said they could not go down into this new cave, which was not nearly as hazardous as earlier caves. It was not completely dark, and had many exits up to the forests above where Horsa travelled. There were shafts of sunlight into this cave, and the aromas of trees and fresh water stronger even than the smell of animals. Below the great cave were systems of tunnels and holes, and no one ventured down there. But it did become a game to see how far they could go along the cavern before they found obstacles. There were sometimes mounds of debris from a fall in the roof, or a shaft down, so big they had to walk carefully round it. They were going easily along, without much danger; and this was made pleasanter because it was so easy to call up to Horsa, travelling above with the small boys. His hurt leg made it hard for him to go as fast as the boys, who were recovering well, but the party on the forest floor and the one below, in the cave, stopped often at the same time, to have a meal together, and to check that everyone was still there.

  By now it had become clear to them all that this land was as riddled as an old piece of wood that the borers had got at. Caves and tunnels and wells and great worlds of underground rivers and lakes. Who would ever have suspected this if the little boys had not made a home for themselves high on the cliff above the beach?

  It is not comfortable for me to think of the tunnels and caves undermining the surface of the island – a maze, a labyrinth, like a hidden truth to our known world. When I was young I never thought of the catacombs. Why should I? For me death and the deathly were postponed for many years. But now I, and all Romans, have to remember the catacombs. Criminals and escaped slaves and prisoners hide there, and now, too, the Christians, wicked impious fanatics who it is said by some set fire to our Rome. Only because the wind veered in time was my house spared by the flames. Fire, crime, mockery of our laws and our gods are always with me.

  There were soon not two, but more parties. While the great cavern that ran on for ever, so it seemed, provided a wealth of thrills and excitements every day, they were bound to get tired of it, and some youths came up to travel with Horsa and the little boys till that pace was too slow and they went off and found beaches, which they had to assume were different from their former beach. The sun went down into the sea in a way that reminded them of the women’s shore. Did that tell them anything? Did they know they were now going straight towards the women? If straight is a word to use, with many parties exploring here and there, going off and coming back. The one place no one wanted to visit now were the beaches, which were not far away on their right sides – if they had decided yet, our ancestors, that there was a left and a right, and that this was a measurement they could use. But the beaches had lost their attraction. They had been on beaches, and by them, for so long now. There was nothing they did not know about beaches and the seas that changed even as you looked at them.

  Horsa, being told by one of the girls that from a little hill you could see right across the tops of trees to a stretch of sea where his
shores gleamed, climbed up. They seemed so close, the pink-pearl streaks like the inside of a shell, that seemed always to carry a marker of a dark-blue cloud. He sat up there and dreamed, but the others became restless, and he descended the hill and joined the little boys, who were recovering fast, so that some were even ready to venture down into the caves again.

  Then some hunters came back to report a deep well or pit, full of bones … yes, they had thought of the bones that filled The Cleft. It took them some time to admit they had flung stones down into the pit, and there had been an explosion: the stones had disturbed some pocket or store of bad air that had been waiting to explode. They were a little shamefaced, but not much, though Horsa was angry, and said there must not be more provocations of this kind. The noise of the explosion must have disturbed animals and birds. He was always telling them they were noisy and disruptive of the forest’s ways.

  Sometimes the hunters would be gone more than a day before finding game. And that was part of another difficulty. They all of them depended on the hunters for their food, to bring in animals to cook over the fires. But the young men did not hunt enough: they preferred the exploration of the caves and hills where they always found new systems of caves. The girls fetched fruit from the forest, a task which the boys found too tame, so there was always fruit. But there were not enough girls to feed them all, even though none was pregnant now and there were no babes to hinder them.

  Horsa ordered a big hunt and again the carcasses dripped their fat into the fires and the flames licked up into the branches and in the morning the leaves hung brittle and pale.

  The chroniclers did remark that if the women ever wanted to catch up with the men, they could easily follow them by the ashes of the fires, the bones, and the trees whose branches hung down marked by the flames.

  They were talking about soon reaching the women’s shore, but this was because they were all hoping it would be soon. Hungers, not merely for sex but for the women themselves, were making them restless, impatient, and full of optimism. Did they miss the scoldings, the nagging? ‘Maronna would say this, would say that,’ Horsa might remark. She certainly would not have approved of their setting off the explosion in the pit which was like the real Cleft.