CHAPTER SIX: DREAMTIME - CONTINUED

In an instant I found myself lying faced down in a shallow stream. Soaked and cold, I choked on gulps of water, reviving me from unconsciousness. The experience of my encounter with Moise was still vivid in my mind, but for the most part I wasn’t able to determine if it had been real or not. I pulled my stiff body out of the chilly stream waters. It was a laborious task. The gravity of the earth was excessive.

My head throbbed. Each step I took was a complete effort because my muscles were rigid. I still found strength to stagger in the shallow stream, coming upon a gap in the foliage. I hoped it was the trail to the settlement. The waist-high grassy meadow I stood in before was nowhere to be seen so I was completely disoriented. The day had filtered into the crepuscular of dusk.

With no other sense of a route to take, I instinctively followed on the path eventually recognizing the way by the familiar arrangement of the foliage about me. Eased by familiar territory, I tried to sort out what had just happened. If in fact this was an indigenous dreamtime experience, and the mysterious Moise explained my dream as the means to find the lost Mayan temple that contains the Soul Chamber, to go there would mean the price of human life.

Was I divining my own end? What could I tell Hornsby or for that matter confide in Cassarina? As much as there was a startling revelation, understand that I was even more confused and unsettled by Moise.

Montezuma, the Aztec priest of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, had several boding evil omens appear about a decade before the arrival of Cortez. It was recorded that fire shot out like a huge spurt from the sun; a divine temple burned down; a mysterious lightning bolt was seen devoid of a thunderclap that caused another temple to be consumed by fire; water boiled by a fierce wind that flooded villages; an unseen woman cried out at night with a lamenting song for the people; a strange bird with mirror-like plume was caught in the fishing nets that made Montezuma see a war in the future, and then two-headed deformed men started appearing before the people, only to disappear when brought before Montezuma.

When the first Spanish Conquistadors arrived in the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, Montezuma sent his magicians and wizards to put curses on them to no avail. Thinking they must be deities from the heavens he sent captives to be sacrificed as an attempt to appease the supernatural gods. This only repulsed the Spanish further. Just as Montezuma was overwhelmed by doubts and indecision to the foreboding doom of an invading danger, I as well, was stuck in a cauldron of perplexity. It was dark by the time I arrived back at the settlement.

Cassarina confronted me as I entered our campsite, shining a bright flashlight in my face. She was livid with a mix of anger and worry.

“I hope that something deathly important caused you to wonder off for three days!”

“I’m surprised you noticed,” I said cynically. Then it dawned on me that she had said “three days.”

“I started to go looking for you but Jorge wouldn’t allow me. There was a jaguar prowling outside the settlement. Besides, Dr. Hornsby is probably right. You’re becoming irresponsible.”

I would have been more grateful for some supportive words, but instead, Cassarina was back to her ridiculing self.

“Put a cork in it,” I spewed out at her, taking refuge in my hammock under my lean-too, draping the mosquito net about me. I was famished, light headed and so physically exhausted, I fell fast asleep in my hammock.

For the ten days that followed, awaiting Dr. Hornsby’s return, little was spoken between Cassarina and I. I continued to document her plant collections, dutifully so as not to interrupt her progress. During my idle time, I stretched out in my hammock meditating on the sound of raindrops during passing cloudbursts or playing with the Lacandon children in the warm sunlight.

It seem that she had abandoned any respect for me, feeling betrayed by my silence about my unusual disappearance. Certainly our working arrangement was strained, as I had taken off without prior word to her. The longer I kept silent and resigned the more convinced she became that my expulsion from the settlement was best. Never did she suspect that I was in shock from an unbelievable experience that did not contrast with anything I had ever known.

To even find the words to explain the appearance of Moise would most likely cause Cassarina to suspect that I was taking some of the hallucinogenic Datura inoxia she had collected. And after my denouncement of any credibility of dream interpretations it would be hypocritical to try and retract my position. Anything I would say that looked like I was trying to reinstate myself would be seen as a far-fetched attempt to cover up my foolishness. I had plunged myself into a self-incriminating pit by not telling the truth.

I couldn’t see my way out, except to leave the expedition. Cassarina found it best not to voice her righteous thoughts on the matter of my disappearance. She recognized it would have been impossible to open me up as I avoided her like the plague around the settlement.

Regardless, she couldn’t confirm the reality of my dreamtime experience being a medical doctor and not a psychologist. That was the crux of the conflict that built up an animosity between us over the past two months. I was kept at bay, silent and guarded in an exiled angst. The days dragged on into an eternity of monotonous waiting for Hornsby.