The Cave (essay)

Author's note: This personal essay recently won 2nd place in this year's contest at USU, and will therefore be published in the 2009 Scribendi. It's the literary, but completely true account of something that happened to Ken and I in Mozambique. I knew going into this day that the whole cave adventure would be a good story, but the disappointment turned out to be a much better one.



The helicopter settled on the dirt like an old man into a recliner, and the weed scraps that had been tossed into the air fluttered back to earth. The villagers had seen us coming from miles away over the flat savannah, and many gathered around to discover what prominent figures would emerge. It could have been the president of Mozambique and his entourage, and they wouldn’t have known. They didn’t even know they lived in Mozambique. It wasn’t the president, anyway. It was my uncle Ken and me—two distinctly unimportant American travelers. He, a robust, blonde college professor working in the country, and I, a wiry student writer sent to report on his project. This particular jaunt into the bush, however, was strictly for pleasure. We brought with us a translator, Domingos, and Tatu, one of the kitchen boys at the Chitengo café. We never would have thought to invite him, but he had mentioned at breakfast that he was born and raised in this very village, so we figured he could take the afternoon off and ride along. I sure didn’t mind. All I wanted was to see the cave.

Tatu was the first one out of the helicopter, and I think that’s really what surprised them the most. He left this home village of Nhaminga ten years before and had never returned, let alone with shoes, a cell phone, and from the sky. Nhaminga was alone in the tall, yellow-green grass, only twenty kilometers from the Chitengo camp at the edge of Gorongosa National Park. Only twenty kilometers, but in all those years, Tatu hadn’t been home even once. It dawned on me that he must have had no way of getting there, save by foot, and that’s assuming he somehow knew the way, using trees or rivers as landmarks. Heaven knows there were plenty of trees and rivers to go around. Even from only a couple hundred feet up, the landscape looked like a thick, rolling bed of moss. I reached down in my mind and squeezed a clump of it, then brushed off my hands in the helicopter. Nhaminga was at the edge of the moss, in a vast flatland that was just as much golden as green. The river, like most in Africa, was brown.

An ecstatic man in his early twenties, who turned out to be Tatu’s cousin and childhood friend, received us as we emerged, and a bevy of wide-eyed children rounded out the greeting party. The cousin had on a bright blue Hawaiian shirt with a fist-sized gash taken out of the back, but it was still nicer than most of the children’s clothes. He explained to the local youths who this rich stranger was, and they lined up to shake his hand, then ours. Ken and I exchanged humble smiles.
When I arrived in the capital a few days before to gather information for my article, I noticed right away how friendly everybody was. My uncle said, “If you think they’re nice, wait ‘til you meet the people out in the bush.” I had to admit I was intrigued at the thought. The city was exotic in its own way, but honestly, it was nothing too out of the ordinary—just a lot of potholes and street vendors selling quasi-authentic trinkets, little voodoo masks and the like. Standard third-world fare. Now we were really in the middle of nowhere. The Chitengo camp was the only habitation of any kind within 30 kilometers of Nhaminga, and thick cornstalk-like growth made the prospect of a shoeless trip to anywhere all the more menacing.

A couple of other young men and some young mothers with babies joined the group congregating around the helicopter. One mother in her early twenties sported a pink bandana over her head, along with a faded royal blue World Cup shirt with different national flags around the collar. She carried one small child and tethered at least one other in the dirt nearby. Another mother weaned her own toddler unabashedly in front of us on a breast roughly the size and shape of a plastic baby bottle. Everything here was so real. At one point in my awkward glancing about, she gathered it back into her shirt, at which point the child immediately thrust down his searching hand to reclaim it.

“So they’re taking us to the cave?” I asked the translator, Domingos, the only one I could really converse with. He explained that they were taking us into Nhaminga first, where we’d have to ask formal permission from the regulo. He didn’t know how to translate that. Apparently, the cave held a special significance to the villagers, and they wanted to ensure we wouldn’t screw around in there. Fair enough. We had landed only about a hundred yards away from the village, but I couldn’t see it at all through the grass. And then, only when we were right on top of it, it appeared—a circular clearing, no bigger than the third floor of my apartment building, dotted with burnt yellow structures spaced out on the dirt floor. There were twelve of these structures in their village. I counted them. Among them, about eight or nine had walls of dried golden mud from the river, or horizontally woven sticks, and the rest were open on all sides. Ken and I poked our heads into one of the stick-walled ones and found it completely empty—nothing more than pale shelter. The huts weren’t anything pretty, but I supposed they kept out the sub-Saharan sun, which was beginning to assert its authority on the back of my neck. Also, the thick, bright blanket of endless sky made up for anything lacking in aesthetics. And the huts had a sort of understated majesty. They were just as I had imagined them, lying in bed on the third floor. Just like on the Discovery Channel. They were ideal.

How simple this bush life, and how untainted by impure motives, I thought, as the villagers led us toward the center of the clearing. The quest to understand people at their innermost selves is what drove me to be an English major in the first place. It is a quest I had become somewhat obsessed with. I knew that in our modern world, any attempt to discover the core of humanity was liable to be lost in a fog of interpretation at the hands of business, politics, and media. Opinions rarely stood independent of ulterior motives. Such it was in civilization. Such, they said, wouldn’t be the case here. “Simplify, simplify, simplify,” shouted Thoreau, and his words resonated through my skull. My literature classes had strangely prepared me for this meeting with the regulo in the exact same manner that years of TV had. Every single source agreed that from uncorrupted noble savages like these, I would gain actual perspective on life. I knew it was true. According to everything I had learned, this village, this salt-of-the-earth people had the potential to embody the pure, elemental goodness of human nature more so than any people I had ever met.
One slightly larger communal structure stood in the middle of the scatter of huts, with a thatched roof, like the rest, and about twenty knotty wood poles to hold it up. As we approached it, some of the children rushed ahead to set up a circle of chairs and benches in the shade of the only tree nearby, while the remaining adults sauntered out of their huts. The log benches were rudimentary, but the chairs came from a lighter wood, and had square corners- a sign that they had likely been fashioned by someone with more sophisticated tools than were available in Nhaminga. My uncle said that priests visited these isolated villages sometimes, and probably brought them the “nice” furniture. I wondered what else they brought, noting that the huts wouldn’t successfully conceal much.

So this cave was supposed to be pretty good. “Oh, you have to see the cave,” gushed the employees at the national park. “I’ve heard it’s really something.” I had never been a particularly devoted spelunker, but the anticipation was starting to get to me. Ken was excited too. After a month in Maputo teaching an MBA course and attempting to negotiate an exchange program with the university and the national park, he had earned a scenic detour.

Two of the legs of my chair had steady contact with the ground, and I rocked indecisive about the third as I tried to catch words from the conversation among the men of the village, which was in Sena, the local language, but which also had words from Portuguese. I didn’t know much Portuguese either, but my chances were considerably better than with Sena. Domingos translated as the regulo, who appeared to be the only elderly person in the entire village, welcomed us to Nhaminga and chattered away happily about it. He had an old, light brown button-up shirt that was too big for him. He was even thinner than the others, and was missing most of the teeth that should have been in his shriveled little avocado head. Poor guy. As he talked, one younger, stronger man ambled out of his hut a few minutes later with bloodshot eyes, squinting against the brightness of the sun, and holding a pink hand towel loosely against the left side of his head. He had malaria, one whispered to Domingos, who whispered to us. He joined the circle, but kept his head down most of the time. My own time in the circle was spent both worrying about the poor malarious man, and watching the long benchful of restless boys across from me poking each other and whispering secrets. I yearned to know what they could possibly be talking about. What would you whisper about if your entire life was twelve huts, tall grass, and a river? Surely, the hunt would make for good stories. I knew for a fact that there were lions, hippos, and all sorts of predators who viewed these humans as no more than another link in the chain.

My focus returned to the adult conversation, both ends of which Domingos was handling with seemingly limited success. I picked up a word here or there, but nothing substantial. Domingos told the villagers that we wanted to see the cave. We were not the first with such a request. He also translated our message to them, which was that we would be able to bring in a nurse from the park from time to time to heal their ailments. The adults each nodded, some more heavily than others. The regulo agreed to show us the way to the cave, and even offered us a live chicken in return for our kindness. We told them thank you. We couldn’t take it in the helicopter, we said, but we’d eat it together with them the next time we came. Thank you very much.

Satisfied with our dealings to that point, the regulo conferred with a couple of other men in Sena, and then rose and informed us that a sort of ceremony would required before outsiders could see the cave. How appropriate, I thought. How perfect! I had realized earlier in the morning that it was Easter, at least in the Christian world. Certainly, this particular cave-access ceremony would not be akin to Easter services I’d attended since childhood, I imagined, but it would be some sort of unique spiritual experience, nonetheless.

The men of Nhaminga eyed down their white American visitors. Trying my best to show respect and not patronize our hosts, I attempted to capture a couple of non-invasive, candid shots of the council with my digital camera, which I held upright on my left knee. Ken held his hands together on his lap and gauged their faces. He had hardly said a word upon arriving in the village. The council was discussing something in Sena in a tone far different from the gentle greetings that had been occurring thus far, but I couldn’t pin down what it was exactly. Finally, Domingos rose from his chair near the little boy bench. He nervously related to us that the villagers would be requiring beer, bread, and cigarettes to properly perform the ceremony. Ken and I turned to each other in alarm. “What? No one told us about this!” Ken pleaded with Domingos.

“What about that cooler you brought?” Domingos inquired. It was nothing but a few small dinner roll sandwiches and sodas and bottled water for the four of us. Our translator took a liberty and offered the group as much of the cooler’s contents as they’d need for the ceremony, but that that’s all we had. The adult men conferred with one another yet again and agreed that that would have to do. It was decided that the ceremony would be performed there, at the mouth of the cave itself, and so off we went, in single file through the tall grass.

The mile-long “path” to the cave was visible for only ten or fifteen feet ahead at any given time. The golden, cornstalk-like grass weaved itself across the dirt from both sides, rising up over my head like a bridal arch as I plodded ahead into the unknown. I walked at the distant helm of our little non-native contingency, preferring the guise of solitude in the wilderness to Ken and Domingos’s louder-than-necessary joking—western voices which obscured the grass, the crickets, the birds, the bellow of frogs. I wanted to hear Africa. The pack of villagers up ahead darted and glided through the curves with great ease. They knew exactly what they were doing. Even the man with malaria passed us up and took off through the grass. I picked up my pace. I wanted to learn Africa, and I wanted the villagers of Nhaminga to teach me.

And then, just off the path, a gaping hole in the rock.

Many of the villagers already sat at the mouth of the cave, watching as the regulo spread a thin, white cloth on the ground and knelt in front of it. The crowd reverently followed suit, kneeling or sitting in place on the rocks all around. About twenty different people came to the ceremony with us, though most would not be proceeding down into the cave, and many, again, were children. The regulo spoke slowly and resolutely as he sprinkled flour—the one ingredient the village provided—onto the center of the cloth in a perfect little mound. He then took one of the squatty 300mL glass bottles of Coke, which one of the others had opened for him with his teeth. That was hard to watch. The regulo poured a dollop’s worth into a mangled plastic cup on the cloth, a little more onto the ground between his knees and the cloth, and then propped the remainder in its bottle up against the rock. He then did a similar thing with one of the Fantas, only more hastily. He didn’t use much of the soda at all, and none of the bread. There would be plenty left for lunch after the cave, and I was beginning to feel hungry already. A thin scar of light pushed through the trees onto the surface and reached the sacramental cloth as the skinny old man pleaded with his ancestors first for permission to enter the cave, and safety once inside. Such Domingos explained, anyway. The light smiled down upon the little ceremony for an instant, then moved off the cloth and onto a nearby rock. I waited reverently for the tokens to be passed around, or consumed by the regulo, or something, but they remained, and the ceremony ended. The old man’s face rose slowly from the dirt and twisted as he gazed directly into Ken’s eyes, then mine. He spoke to us in his native tongue: “Next time, don’t forget the beer.”

Eight of the men and older boys of Nhaminga accompanied Ken and me down a guano-sloshed ladder into the deep. At last, this was it. The ground was springy with untold inches of deposit, and thousands of bats lined columns rising up toward, but not reaching the sky. Ken and I waved our feeble flashlights around and searched out possible pathways to each other, anticipating what was surely to come. The ceiling was high, the rooms spacious, and the spongy walls swallowed up the beams of light so that visual detail was hard to come by. Developing patterns suggested that there was nothing to see but bat excrement, anyhow. That’s certainly all there was to smell. Still, I didn’t care. I thought back on the sterilized offices at university advancement, where the publisher of the alumni magazine called me in and asked if I wanted to spend a week in Africa during my 18-credit semester. I said yes. It was an easy question.

Ten minutes more of slowly traversing loose rocks and wading through chest-high freezing water, and we were there. The corridor opened into a hollow where actual sunlight poured in and reflected off the wet rocks. It was an underground lagoon. Roots and vines from trees on the surface hung down dozens of feet and looped around a tree somehow growing out of a rock in the middle of the chamber. Other vines hung down and pleaded to be swung on. The whole room was like a Vegas menagerie, only more perfect than man could have hoped to create on his own. Water from an underground river cascaded down levels of weathered rock, surrounded the crag with the tree, collected in a series of pools, and flowed out the other end of the room and out of sight.

A shout echoed down from the sunlight, and the man with malaria, standing on the surface, waved to his friends. Ten minutes later, he was with us. Ken said matter-of-factly that he didn’t think the man actually had malaria. I had to admit that he sure was bouncing around a lot for being deathly ill. In fact, he seemed to be getting better as the day went on. No longer waiting for our guides, Ken and I climbed ahead and explored the lagoon. After five minutes, though, we had scoured the whole of it and returned to where the villagers squatted on some rocks near the water’s edge. Pretty as it was, the room wasn’t huge. “Where to next?” I asked, anxious to see what else the cave had in store. Domingos relayed the question to Tatu’s cousin on my behalf. I received the short response on my own. This was it. “They told us there was three hours’ worth of cave!” I started. “The helicopter won’t be back until 4:30. There has something else we can see, somewhere else to go.” A villager pointed out what appeared to be a room up high on the rock wall, and sent one of the more silent natives to guide me there. I exercised my merit badge skills and climbed up, having to take my shoes off halfway there for better traction.
“Anything up there?” Ken inquired. There wasn’t. From my perch, however, I could see that down on a rock in the lagoon, the younger village boys had found an injured bat, and were jabbing it with sticks and fingers. The men sat nearby and watched. Ken urged Domingos to tell the boys about a disease worse than malaria, but they didn’t seem too concerned. The little bat screeched in pain with each prod. Ken and I started back toward the surface on our own.

We didn’t make it far before the natives started following us. It dawned on me that most of them didn’t have any way of generating light down there in the abyss. We ascended the guano-soaked ladder and returned to the site of the ceremony, where the empty cooler sat open. Our lunch was gone. Released from the cave and standing on my own in the sunlight, I knew that what I had been seeing my entire life were nothing more than shadows on the wall. These people were tainted, and so was I. Ken took up the cooler, and we made the silent trek back to where the helicopter would pick us up over two hours later.

My uncle dropped the empty box onto the dirt, sat upon it, and began watching two ant colonies down between his knees. Domingos found a sharp ramp of dead tree branch, and offered it to me for a chair. I thanked him, not sure where on it I was supposed to sit. I improvised, and the villagers followed and squatted in the dirt nearby, talking amongst themselves. Domingos joined them and began asking questions and taking notes about their history for the park records, or so I gathered. I wondered how much of it was real.

I tried to doze off on the log, knowing full well that my slowly-simmering neck and arms would continue to burn if unchecked. I didn’t care, though. More than anything, I just wanted to take off my sopping wet shoes and socks, but I knew it would have been a bad idea, what with all the ants.

I slept for a little while sitting there, I think. The next thing I remember, Ken had a short stick, and was passing the time by attempting to transplant ants from one colony into the other, unsuccessfully. He sensed my movement and asked if I was hungry. When I answered in the affirmative, he told me he still had some of that weird South African jerky from the plane. The unidentifiable burgundy and gray meat he pulled from his back pocket wasn’t appealing in any way, but this wasn’t a time to be picky. We two stood up and turned our backs to the villagers of Nhaminga as Ken worked the vacuum-packed meat free as discreetly as possible, transferring exactly one half of it from his closed hand to mine. That was our ceremony.