A River of Light and Darkness

by Chris Augusta

Spill them into the river,
Sprinkle them on the water's way
among the mountains, small and great
-Popol Vuh

 

The river bleeds from the base of the mountain; it runs between jagged limestone rocks, over two small waterfalls and swirls into a large silent pool. The water in the jungle pool is cool and the rocky bottom slopes toward the deep. Stars pierce the night sky as billum nip my flesh.

The billum dance like silver moths in front of my small but powerful underwater light. The pool is so clear and the night so dark that if it weren't for the water's coolness on my skin I would swear the fish and I are floating in air. A single four inch billum crashes against the lens of my flashlight; it backs up and charges again. Another billum charges, then another, confirming their lineage with the notorious piranha. Two cichlids hang at right angles to each other near the bottom and not to be outdone chase any wandering billum which happen to cross some invisible line.

I swim across to a huge limestone boulder rising out of the water; it drips llianas and epiphytes as it hovers twenty feet or more above me. I take a deep gulp of night air and dive down along the bare rock. Small catfish with fiery eyes cling to the rock and wriggle like live question marks into cracks and crevices. I work my way down along the rock face hand over hand to a depth of about fifteen feet, where the base of the rock cuts away into blackness. At the bottom of the pool ten inch crayfish with eyes gleaming tiptoe over and around granite rocks. I struggle against a slight current and my own buoyancy to peer under the boulder. Silver and gold flash in front of my light-- the illuminated eyes of a dozen large machaca transfixed . A two foot mountain mullet swishes into the light and quickly swishes back into the darkness. Two large catfish heads peer from the recess, barbels swaying; I move closer and they recede as if retrieved by the darkness itself.

 

In the beginning, according to the Popul Vuh, the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life,

"Whatever there is that might be is simply not there: only the pooled water, only the calm sea, only it alone is pooled... Whatever might be is simply not there: only murmurs, ripples, in the dark, in the night."

Out of this undifferentiated void the original Gods conceived a world,

"... the earth arose because of them, it was simply their word that brought it forth... It arose suddenly, just like a cloud, like a mist now forming, unfolding."

From a profound act of imagination was formed a world of spectacular complexity where every billum, every human and every rock was encompassed in a vast dynamic description of a universe stretching through space and time from the remote heavens to the deepest regions of the underworld, from thousands of years in the past to thousands of years into the future. In this conception the past is in the present, the present is in the future and the future is in the past. All parts partake of all other parts as they swirl through time like eddies and purls in a stream.

The Bladen River Valley of Southern Belize, the locus of our modest expedition, is, or was the land of the Maya. This spectacular and mysterious limestone gorge has been virtually devoid of humans for centuries, having reverted to its primeval rhythms like a domesticated animal turned feral. Although now obscured, Maya sites-- perhaps small cities-- unexcavated, undescribed and, no doubt, undiscovered remain in the rugged valley of the Bladen. Hundreds of bewildering caves riddle the limestone hills; sinkholes drop hundreds of feet; and rivers and creeks appear, vanish and reappear like bad ideas. The true course of the Bladen River itself remains somewhat of a hydrological mystery as it only follows the valley course at the height of the rainy season. Most of the year (especially from our camp up) the river flows underground, somewhere under the mountains coursing from unknown caverns, deep from the maw of Xibalba, the Maya Underworld.

 

Arturo, our brusque head guide, makes his way up the edge of the river toward our camp. He ambles like a two legged beetle over and around limestone boulders. He sloshes in and out of the current carrying a machete in his right hand and a string of fish in his left. He wades the swift section of stream just below the pool in front of our camp and drops a half dozen machaca and a few catfish at my feet which he has just caught at another pool about a half mile downstream. The fish are strung with a single long palm leaf passed through each mouth and gill slit. They don't bite, Arturo observes, where people have been swimming.

I sit at the edge of the clear pool and lay a machaca on a smooth rock between my legs. I snap open my small watercolor box and place it next to a tin cup of water. I open my sketchbook on my lap. Machacas look like giant billum, or sleek piranha, predaceous jewels with emerald scales and golden tails. When painting anything from life, even a dead fish on a rock, the inescapable embeddedness of a "subject" in its environment is apparent. We want to think of a fish as a thing in itself, a creature made of bone, flesh and scales of a certain size and weight swimming in a medium. The hard edges which we conceive as separating a fish from its medium or background are often only in our minds, or at least this discreteness is not what we experience when we observe a living fish in its world. A patch of gold, blotches of pink, a few spots of green, a black streak can describe, in some way, a machaca.

While waiting for colors to set up I watch living machaca and an occasional mountain mullet drift in and out of the deep shadows cast by the gigantic rock looming on the far side of the pool. A single machaca swims into the sunlight; waves of light wash over the fish; its yellow tail ignites and its sides flash. It swims into the rippling current where it fractures into a dozen bewildering shapes only to reform in the calmer water. Within those few seconds, as the fish moved from shadow to light, the colors of the machaca transformed from one set to a completely different set of colors. And likewise I witnessed a complete distortion of its body in the current. Yet even as all of its parts had altered something of the fish remained the same-- some strange and persistent rhythm of light and shadow, pulsing beyond any attempts to classify and identify the parts.

The eyes of the dead machaca I am painting have begun to darken and much of its color is vanishing as if lit by a set of dying batteries. In death, as in life, the fish transforms. As I work I become less concerned with the fish itself and more with the colors on the paper: the vermilion, cadmium yellow, and viridian take on a life of their own. Sometimes remembering is born only by forgetting.

 

Our expedition consists mostly of herpetologists and over the days a steady stream of snakes, lizards and toads is captured, identified and generally released. A few species, unusual or difficult to identify, are collected live or preserved in formalin for further study.

There are only two species of toad in the Bladen. That is unless there are three. Jungle explorer and herpetologist Bruce Morgan noted and photographed an unusually golden toad in 1991 in these same remote areas seemingly quite different than the common gray to burnt sienna gulf coast toad, Bufo valleceps. Part of the rationale for our expedition into the Bladen Valley is to collect specimens of what may be a new species.

Valleceps tadpoles swarm in pools and creeks; tiny toads hop between the rocks of the dry Bladen river bed and full grown toads can be found hundreds of feet up the limestone hills. The valleceps species manifests a wide range of grays, oranges and browns as it flows through time and perhaps, by what scientists call the forces of random mutation and natural selection, a new species has arisen. Toads were not, according to this view, placed on the Earth by Gods with some arcane purpose. Toads come about like everything else: from blind chance-- the dumb combination and recombination of the pieces which create stars, planets and life with glowing eyes swarming in crystalline pools.

Jake, a young herpetologist and one of our expedition leaders, drops a recently collected specimen in a Tupperware container of formalin and snaps the lid shut. The toad will quickly absorb the formalin through its porous skin; its eyes will cloud; its heart, its breath, its digestive juices, the very motion of its cells will freeze, like a stop action film, in a single moment of their becoming. The toad will be shipped to the Smithsonian where it will be prodded, poked, measured and dissected. And, if it's lucky, it will get a new name.

 

Arturo strokes the tip of his machete on a smooth granite rock as he scans the irregular hills and cliffs along the river. "That damn map will send you to Hell." Arturo spits on the rocks of the dry river bed as I query him with one too many questions from my topo map. How could a piece of paper substitute for experience?

The light drains behind the hills to the West and the peaks on the eastern side of the Bladen are capped in a fading orange light. The walking is tedious on the rubbly granite washed from the higher igneous Maya Mountains over the millennia into the limestone valley. We arrive at a series of pools fed by streams dribbling over a limestone wall . A small turtle dives under some dead leaves in one pool; mollies and cichlids eye us from another. To circumvent the larger pools we duck into the jungle.

We follow a very faint trail which Arturo marked only a couple of years earlier. An ant-tanager hisses in the lower tree branches as we slice through a light forest of spine palms beneath unlogged giants-- tamarind, fig, mahogany, sapodilla among others. As a boy Arturo had worked these forests tapping chicle, formerly the main ingredient in chewing gum, and many of the large sapodilla trees bear telltale scars. We startle a large currasow which rustles in the canopy above; it squawks and flies deeper into the forest.

Lying in our path, dead, is a large mottled brown bird. It lies on its breast and its head is cocked to one side as if listening to the earth. The bird appears to be an owl- perhaps a stygian-- the messenger, according to Maya legend, from the Underworld. I flip the intact bird onto its back with my machete. Its chest feathers quiver, its lower body squirms and ripples with life as thousands of maggots swarm beneath the skin-- the messenger from Xibalba has become the message.

Night seeps into the valley and we stumble back toward camp along the rocky river bed. My headlamp catches the eyes of a large Bufo marinus, or marine toad, the other toad of the Bladen. The toad squats motionless on a rock as we approach. These warty toads can grow as big as baseball gloves and they have extremely toxic parotoid glands containing alkaloids thousand of times more powerful than cocaine. If a dog bites "toad", Arturo informs me, the dog is dead. Dead dead.

I pick up the toad by its hind legs and judging by its large size it's probably a female. The toad makes no effort to escape. Its skin is cool and dry and as I turn the toad I notice its right front foot is curiously deformed. All of its digits are missing and only a crude purple stump remains. I try to imagine some sort of simple amputation-- bitten off by a wild animal, caught in a crevice-- until I look at its left front foot. It is identical to the right one. More likely the deformation is congenital, possibly what biologists might describe as a mutation, a chance misreading of the genetic code. Or, perhaps fingerless toads are necessary, part of a higher order, a mysterious recurring pattern in nature stretching over the centuries whose purpose is, from our puny perspective, obscure.

The ancient Maya were quite aware of the hallucinogenic properties of Bufo marinus though exactly how the desirable alkaloids were extracted is unknown. Enter into the proper relationship with this toad and you would be transformed. Through some arcane combination of toad alkaloids, pain, and perhaps isolation the doors to the parallel world of Xibalba were opened, a dark and watery world beyond appearances and waking consciousness ruled by strange and malevolent gods-- One Death, Jaundice Master, Pussmaster, Bone Scepter-- the embodiments of the forces of death, decay, and the unknown.

The fingerless toad seems healthy and little impaired by her deformity. Released to the riverbed she makes one hop, stops and props herself, as toads do, on her forelegs. She blinks once with an impassive eye. I swing my light back toward the formless night to conjure other wonders.

 

Spots of morning light stain the forest floor a hundred or so feet below as several of us scramble along an irregular series of cliffs in the rubbly hills on the Southeast side of the river. We follow Moses, our other guide, who chops vines and undergrowth with one hand and climbs with the other. The hills are pocked with dozens of caves most of which are quite shallow or stopped up. We come upon an unimpressive small cave, at first glance not much bigger than a six man tent, but it narrows towards the back to a small opening which drops into complete darkness. We hear the unmistakable tinkle of flowing water. Between limestone boulders my light bounces off the slick blackness of a flowing stream about thirty feet below.

Moses sets to work cutting a long thin tree with his machete. Chips of yellow wood fly and shortly the tree crashes to the ground. Moses trims the branches and cuts some crude notches along the trunk. His job, Moses asserts, is to get us into that hole.

We slip about thirty feet of tree into the hole making sure to jam the base of the tree securely between some boulders at the edge of the subterranean river. Like firemen we slide down the pole landing on slick mud covered rocks. A compass check confirms the river as flowing from the Southwest toward the Northeast parallel to the main valley. To the Northeast, about a half mile away, is our camp where the Bladen river appears from under the hills. Most of us aren't well prepared for underground river exploration but I have a headlamp and my underwater light so I strip down to my shorts and ease into the water alone.

The water is over my head. I struggle against the current with a crude one-handed dog paddle. I am only partially able to hold my small waterproof light above the water; shafts of light streak through the air and through the cool water. Fortunately the river is shallow enough in many places for me to wade . The water is clear and lifeless as it slides over the white scalloped limestone bottom covered in many paces with sand-- siliceous sand which somehow and some way must be from the granite Maya Mountains many miles to the Northwest.

The river winds through an irregular cavern about twenty feet wide and about twenty feet high. Again the bottom slopes away and I am swimming around another bend. The current is relentless and the river moves deeper into the stone, another bend, then another and another. This is-- what else could it be?-- the lost River of the Bladen.

I stand in several feet of water as the current whirls around my legs. I flick off my lights. The river gurgles somewhere ahead. My blindness is absolute: I have no sense of having eyes and sight is only a memory. Somehow I can sense the course of the river, and the cavern flowing back into the earth, into a million streams, crevices and drips. And the darkness flows with it, seeping back into the earth; the mountains heaving and crumbling; stones dissolving and reforming, everything forming and dissipating even the darkness itself.

I gasp as if slit: some creature bites my big toe. The animal brushes across my foot as I fumble to turn on my light. In a shimmering web of light a dark form whirls around my legs. I kick my foot, the water splashes and a large catfish saunters off toward deeper water. Small waves of disturbed water pulse toward the cave walls and farther into the cavern. I stand motionless; my breathing slows; and the river settles. I turn on my second light and head back toward my companions.

 

The sun has dropped behind the hills on the West side of the Bladen; I sit on a rock at the edge of the small waterfalls which empty into the pool. The water curls and rolls in dozens of inscrutable patterns. I begin to sketch but I find myself trying to freeze a moment; my efforts are clumsy and forced. A few billum and an occasional mullet drift in and out of the shadows of the boulders on the deep edge of the pool. At no point are the fish, the river bottom and the river itself not grossly distorted by the rippling surface. Whatever I think I'm drawing is not there; the fish are not quite as I want them to be; the sienna granite rocks scatter in the currents; eddies die and are reborn; the surface curls. I half close my eyes, half look away...

It was, if I recall correctly, from Mr. Mazurski, my eighth grade science teacher, that I learned water consisted of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. I was quite impressed by this bit of knowledge and for a while, at the smug age of twelve, I cleverly referred to water as simply "H2O." As I sit here in the Bladen at this pool at this time millions of water molecules pulse and swirl at my feet. The knowledge of the atomic structure of a water molecule however reveals little of the nature of a river, little of its watery creatures, little of its eddies, vortices and ripples dancing through the stream. A Maya Indian could very well have sat on this same rock a millennium ago fishing machaca or contemplating the rhythms of the river. Every single water molecule of the Bladen of that time has vanished from this gorge. Yet the river remains- perhaps even the same eddies and the same ripples. The shapes, the forms and the patterns of the river exist in a state of perpetual and miraculous creation.

I continue to gaze into the river; it seems to be murmuring and it seems to be alive. The reflections of the golden sky are bent, fractured and twisted in the motions of the river precisely as are the fish of the mid-depths and the rocks and sand of the river bottom. From these broken squiggles and swirling shapes forms and greater forms emerge as words emerge from letters and sentences from words.

We see as we experience. We see as we imagine. The line between thing and event is blurry and all descriptions are, what they have always been, metaphorical and tentative. We sometimes forget in our dreams of reason that the world is, fundamentally, mysterious. A painting of a fish is not a fish and a theory of the world is not the world.

We return to the water cave and this time we are prepared: extra lights, food, carbide lamps, snorkeling gear, dry shoes and extra clothes all of which we carry in a sealed five-gallon bucket. It is quite possible that the cave chamber might move higher, and thereby become drier as we move farther into the mountain. We had in fact recently explored, about ten miles to the Southwest, a huge water cave which had done just that.

Moses swims just ahead with the five gallon bucket, struggling to keep it upright. Our headlamps bob and the cave ahead flashes in and out of view as we swim down the narrow passage. Water laps chaotically at the cavern walls between our yips and pants in the cold and the dark. The absence of stalactites and other formations on the ceiling and walls indicates periodic flooding and scouring. We wade past where I stopped the previous day and slosh forward into deeper water.

We arrive at a large room where the stream swells to a pool and sumps, disappearing under the walls. The water is several feet deep and the bottom of the pool is covered with fine mud as are parts of the walls. We search the walls and ceiling with our lights for any passageway. One part of the chamber slopes toward what may be a small opening near the ceiling but this is clogged with mud. Everything is clogged with mud. We stand silent and bewildered by our abrupt halt.

A puff of silt billows from between my legs as a catfish tickles my ankle then swims away. My light traces its casual movements toward a wall at one edge of the pool. I move closer, slip on my dive mask, crouch in the water and wait for the mud to settle. A faint current streams from under the wall. As the silt settles the form of the catfish appears motionless on the bottom several feet ahead. We watch each other.

My underwater light catches a swish of the catfish's tail; a swirling cloud of mud envelops the light and the catfish swims to where I can only imagine. I stand and gulp the cave air. Water trickles off my mask and tinkles in the stillness. "The night is dark," Moses' hollow voice echoes through the cave, "and I am far away from home."

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