Island - Aldous Huxley [85]
“And I’ll go and talk to those boys and girls.” Vijaya walked away towards the group at the foot of the red crags.
Leaving Murugan to his Science Fiction, Will followed Dr. Robert through a pillared gateway and across the wide stone platform that surrounded the temple. At one corner of this platform stood a small domed pavilion. They entered and, crossing to the wide unglazed window, looked out. Rising to the line of the horizon, like a solid wall of jade and lapis, was the sea. Below them, after a sheer fall of a thousand feet, lay the green of the jungle. Beyond the jungle, folded vertically into combe and buttress, terraced horizontally into a huge man-made staircase of innumerable fields, the lower slopes went steeply down into a wide plain, at whose furthest verge, between the market gardens and the palm-fringed beach, stretched a considerable city. Seen from this high vantage point in its shining completeness, it looked like the tiny, meticulous painting of a city in a medieval book of hours.
“There’s Shivapuram,” said Dr. Robert. “And that complex of buildings on the hill beyond the river—that’s the great Buddhist temple. A little earlier than Borobudur, and the sculpture is as fine as anything in Further India.” There was a silence. “This little summerhouse,” he resumed, “is where we used to eat our picnics when it was raining. I shall never forget the time when Dugald (he must have been about ten) amused himself by climbing up here on the window ledge and standing on one leg in the attitude of the dancing Shiva. Poor Lakshmi, she was scared out of her wits. But Dugald was a born steeplejack. Which only makes the accident even more incomprehensible.” He shook his head; then, after another silence, “The last time we all came up here,” he said, “was eight or nine months ago. Dugald was still alive and Lakshmi wasn’t yet too weak for a day’s outing with her grandchildren. He did that Shiva stunt again for the benefit of Tom Krishna and Mary Sarojini. On one leg; and he kept his arms moving so fast that one could have sworn there were four of them.” Dr. Robert broke off. Picking up a flake of mortar from the floor, he tossed it out of the window. “Down, down, down…Empty space. Pascal avait son gouffre. How strange that this should be at once the most powerful symbol of death and the most powerful symbol of the fullest, intensest life.” Suddenly his face lighted up. “Do you see that hawk?”
“A hawk?”
Dr. Robert pointed to where, halfway between their eyrie and the dark roof of the forest, a small brown incarnation of speed and rapine lazily wheeled on unmoving wings. “It reminds me of a poem that the Old Raja once wrote about this place.” Dr. Robert was silent for a moment, then started to recite:
“Up here, you ask me,
Up here aloft where Shiva
Dances above the world,
What the devil do I think I’m doing?
No answer, friend—except
That hawk below us turning,
Those black and arrowy swifts
Trailing long silver wires across the air—
The shrillness of their crying.
How far, you say, from the hot plains,
How far, reproachfully, from all my people!
And yet how close! For here between the cloudy
Sky and the sea below, suddenly visible,
I read their luminous secret and my own.”
“And the secret, I take it, is this empty space.”
“Or rather what this empty space is the symbol of—the Buddha Nature in all our perpetual perishing. Which reminds me…” He looked at his watch.
“What’s next on the program?” Will asked as they stepped out into the glare.
“The service in the temple,” Dr. Robert answered. “The young climbers will offer their accomplishment to Shiva—in other words, to their own Suchness visualized as God. After which they’ll go on to the second part of their initiation—the experience of being