For S.H.

Kenilworth

New member
The Hill

Hills, like men, are visible easily and from afar, but only knowable through patient and intimate years.

I think that last night?s frost will be the last of the year. The birth of a night will be gone somewhere before nine o-clock. Possibly too it will be my last frost, so knelt at a patch of mullein, I acknowledge the structures of ice on erect fur. Swirls and towers and walls all proud before the watery death of a rising sun. To look at small things one must become small and still, and imaginative.

?The sky is fire-red, but gloomy looking.? That?s about as good as anything you?ll hear on the radio. Besides, my radio doesn?t work since the antenna got torn off driving the overgrown path to what they used to call Cowshit Pit. ?Better down the road,? anyway, ?without that load.? But if it?s going to rain I might as well find a place underground. The limestone in this mountain is thick, steeply tilted, but sandy or shaley in places. Not super-double good, good enough. On this side of the hill is the exposed cut of it, a vast series of crags broken here and there by ledges, joints, and scree. Resting on one of the ledges, I find that I can see Campton City, fifteen miles distant, but nothing of the difficult ground around me. To know a hill like this one would take a very long time, which I do not have, so while I?m here I will try to honor it with perseverance, thoroughness, attentiveness. There could be anything around any corner, and around every corner is something.

The joints and hollows and overhangs of this rock are for the raccoons and rats, dogs, possums, and vultures. Eventually one will learn to distinguish between the scents of their urine and manure. The rats leave a hot, chemical scent, the possums a sour, earthy one, the raccoons a fruity, sour, earthy one, the foxes and coyotes a large, sickeningly savory one, and the vultures a truly vile ammoniac stench. I see none of these animals, only birds, and a lizard in a tree, but these scents of the limestone cliffs are constantly a reminder that I am in a household not my own. It is an odd hospitality to hide from one?s guests, so I am left to wonder what I am.

The morning is gone and a hundred little holes lighted and passed before, rounding a bulge in the rock face, I come suddenly into the coolness and gravity of a large cave entrance.

The Cave

I went as far as I safely could do without light, and held still. Uphill was the flat glow of the entrance, grey now, and the scent of the beginning of the rain. Downhill, the blackness seemed to suggest a steep falling away. Looking toward the blank onward, moist breeze pushed at my sails. I waited. After a while, I dug in my pocket for my light and turned it on. I was in a room twelve feet high and twenty feet across. The floor was mostly dry, crystalline, like instant coffee. On the ceiling were a few weathered and molded stalactites, and the drops of condensation over yellow mold that my grandfather always points to in pretend ecstasy, ?Look! Gold!? To my right, deeper into the cave, was not the deep chasm I imagined, but a low hole, three feet wide and two feet high. Turning fully downslope, I moved slowly and eagerly into the unknown.

Having been in a hundred caves, or a thousand, can anything be learned from yet another one? I do not know. I hope so. I stood up in the entrance some hours later, having seen perhaps eight or nine-hundred feet of steep, dripping, unadorned passage. In a cave so indistinctive, my anticipation of some change had been a constant motivation onward and downward. What had I been hoping for? Despite all my protests, was quantity muse? I hope not. I wrote earlier that there was gravity at the cave entrance, and that?s currently the only fitting expression I can find. Gravity is of course a sort of magnetism, but more than that it is a call downward, to the ground, the grave. The words themselves form a fascinating coincidence with my thoughts, for though ?gravity? and ?grave? are not related, ?grave? and ?cave? are. Could it be that I, resting in the wet dusk over Elkhorn Valley, am now resurrected from the dead? I am unsure. I only know that I never explored anything simply because it was there. Exploration for its own sake is at best pointless, at worst idolatrous. Perhaps, learning being the life?s work of mankind, this is as simple a thing as learning truth by going bodily into it. Maybe I?ll never know, or be able to say.

Where I stopped is a ledge ten feet high. Wet, sandy gravel that has funneled over the ledge is piled undisturbed against the rock wall. Onward the cave passage roars downslope, calling to me questions that I cannot answer, being two-hundred miles away. It was only a day, after all, alone on the Virginia border. They join the calling horde.
 

Kenilworth

New member
No, his genre has never interested me. Moreover I disagree with his philosophy. Maybe I'll try him again one of these days.
 
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