gua telinga, the sign reads, and then: you are responsible for your own safety.
all around, the forest is thick with life: dripping, rustling, looming life. nailpolish-red flowers bloom straight up from black loam. ropey vines sneak up tree trunks, spill down in thick snakey coils, surge and twine together with roots above the surface of the soil. sky and earth in a fine network, connected. an electric neon caterpillar as thick as my thumb swings the soft spikes of its head and tail from side to side, like an 80s dance move. the sounds of birds: like water droplets, like the pow-pow-pow! laser guns of an x-wing fighter. the air is a fertile soup, scented with loam and the weight of a hundred million years of decomposition and rebirth. i saw only one other human: an orang asli woman, pink hibiscus tucked behind one ear, equally as surprised to see me as i was to see her.
there is no gaping maw of a cavemouth, just a fissure between two jagged rocks and a little painted arrow pointing down. i peer inside, and a cool draft of air lifts up to greet me. no sound but that of my breath, whistling, my heart hammering. there is that instinctive primitive feeling of cave: that oppressive sense of the air being full all around you, too full for sky. i am not great with enclosed spaces.
inside, the air is cool and moist, not completely still, but quiet enough that each breath of air is a distinct touch on the skin. each rock is a different kind of slippery: the smoothly worn; the murky damp, slick with moss, slick with bat guano. i can feel the giant toads watching me with their submerged golden eyeballs, watching me haul myself up, hand over hand, ropes tied to roots. there is a fine rustling, like someone shaking out a sheet, like sheets flapping on a clothes line. bats bats bats.
i brace my feet, angled ankles against the smooth stone. the rope doesn’t reach, quite, to the bottom of this rock and it feels too loosely attached up above – a guiderope only, not strong enough to lever me back up if i chose to go back. my fingers skitter over the thin strand of the next rope and i let myself slide down towards it, pulling the rope a bit for balance. it gives. a closer look with the headlamp: not a rope at all, but a root. and the rope before it, also suspiciously loose? also a root. i have still just enough balance remaining to haul myself back up the rock i’ve just slid down. status: location of rope to guide me forward – unknown. location of rope to guide me backwards: unknown.
this is your life, says my internal monologue. this is your life and you are inside a cave full of bats and you don’t know how to get out. don’t freak out. and then there comes at once the realization that i have started climbing up, towards a faint light from the roof of the cave, without any actual moment of decision to climb. the hole is big enough for me: i lift myself out of the cave and into the sweet air of freedom. i examine the kidney-shape of the cave in my mind to orient myself: i will walk over the top of the cave, mirroring what would have been my interior progress, as if the cave were a prison-maze from which one may only escape by refusing to play by the rules of the man. confidently, i strike out towards the exit-mouth of the cave. hm, impenetrable jungle. i realize abruptly that (1) my mental cave-schematic is pure fabrication and (2) if i lose the actual cave, i will have even less idea of where to go than i did inside the cave. i breathe the last breath of sweet freedom air and lower myself back in.
the internal monologue is back: you are trapped in a bat cave, it says again. shut up, i say, i’m trying to think. i systematically survey possible routes. that crevice looks too small. i try it anyhow: it is. this three-dimensional situation requires a lot of creative surveying. the mouth of another likely-looking crevice is fanged with the hairy, teardrop-shaped bundles of sleeping bat, each wrapped in her transparent blanket of fleshy wings. not that way. o, but maybe this way? yes. yes, yes, yes.
do you know what is an underrated emotion? sweet relief.
