“Brilliant. You’ve experienced Dreamtime,” Hornsby muttered. “I had thought that one of the Lacandones would have come forth with this, not an occidental, especially a member of our expedition.”“And the mention of Yaxkin,” Cassarina queried. “How is that you knew of this prior to our discovery. Are you making up some kind of fable?”
“I wanted to see if in fact Hornsby, I mean we, would actually find some tangible proof, without planting the idea first.”
“And, I suspect you were concerned about the symbolism of death,” Hornsby interjected.
“Yes, I was scared that to continue, one of us would die,” I said nodding in agreement.
Inspired by my dreamtime occurrence, Hornsby went into one of his philosophical lectures. He explained, emphatically, that there are three hypothesis of life.
First of all that the universe has existed for all eternity.
Second that the antiquity of life had no precedent to follow and thirdly, our present state has evolved by a natural process and will continue to do so as it always has just as the first single cell bacteria mutations occurred over sixty million years ago.
Everything in the mind of humankind is inextricably woven together, whether we accept it or not. Everything is running from the specific to the generality of conscious perceptions; from the archetype to the symbol to the myth. Regardless of metaphoric meanings derived from our dreams, we are an infant civilization in the grand scheme of the multiversity of the cosmos.
As each individual comes to terms with their place in life, the truth of their existence will only be revealed to them in the last split second of their last breath of mortal consciousness.
“So what a glorious thing to meet,” Hornsby said pacing about the campsite. “A goddess who will embrace you with compassion, forgiving you of all your inequities.”
“Easy for you to say,” Cassarina said condescendingly with an obvious change of heart about dream interpretation. She wasn’t enthralled by my dreamtime message and continued to look suspicious when I related my tale about Moise. Cassarina was beginning to think our interpretations were nonsense.
“It is a dangerous precedent to base theory upon myth,” she said. “How much further can this imbecility go?”
But the whole dream spin and encounter with Moise had a dramatic charm for Hornsby. His enthusiasm returned without question of my prophetic vision for a catastrophic outcome and possibly death.
“Have a good heart, Cassarina,” Hornsby cajoled while he got his map to show us what he had been working on since early morning.
His tone of voice was more paternal toward her. Their relationship had been cultivated, I suspected, for some time prior to this expedition. There was no doubt that Cassarina came from affluence or lived off of a substantial inheritance. She never mentioned having parents the whole time we were together.
Regardless, she flaunted a justified privilege to snob me as if her academic endowments made her an elitist in contrast to my impoverished insights. She was a complex woman. On one hand maternally nurturing as a healer, but on the other, if you crossed her intellect, she would deluge you with a tempestuous storm of razor-sharp words.
“Every civilization is enlivened by eccentrics.” Hornsby spouted as he was getting situated with the map on his lap. “Without them, the human race wouldn’t evolve.”
“Your quest, James, is like a narcissistic vice,” Cassarina argued. “You’re caught up in this new age hysteria to find some missing cosmic link between humankind and the omnipotent.”
“You’re right, I’ve forgotten there is a serious person among us,” Hornsby said, thoughtfully drummed his fingers on the worn map that lay in his lap
This only infuriated Cassarina more. Hornsby obviously had tangled with her tirades before and seemed to enjoy pushing her to her limits.
“Garthwaite had the good sense to see through you,” Cassarina retorted. “As for him,” she said pointing in my direction, “he’s as daffy as you are.”
Cassarina was fuming as she turned away from the campfire to start packing up her camping gear. Hornsby had gone too far. He looked dejected and hung his head. This was the worst spectacle I’d seen between them and neither of them was making moves to apologize. Jorge and I went about breaking camp.
Cassarina and Hornsby had an unsettled issue, a deep burning conflict that was yet to come to some equitable resolve. I surmised that our discovery of the possible location of the Soul Chamber, my dreamtime encounter with Moise, and the possibility that there really is a lost temple in the Yucatan jungle made Cassarina more distraught. Perhaps she believed all along that we were not going to find anything of sufficiency.
The expedition served her more for a productive and practical purpose, in which her goal was to further her medical career in jungle medicine, not Mayan mysticism. She hadn’t planned on this turn of events.
And though it was unspoken, I felt that her argument with Hornsby was more out of fear of him losing his life if he pursued this expedition any farther. And for that matter my own. Beneath her objecting veneer I suspected she secretly believed my dream cast a fatal spell upon us. Her worse fear, as had been my own, was that one or all of us would perish if we were to press on.
We returned to Metzabok without a word spoken between us.
No comments:
Post a Comment