The Land of Painted Caves - Jean M. Auel [131]
“But we’ll never know for sure, will we?” Jondalar said.
“No, not likely,” the One Who Was First said. “But the guesses people make often tell us something about the one doing the guessing.”
They waited together in silence; then Ayla had an urge to touch the wall between the mammoths. She reached out with her right hand and placed it palm down on the stone, then closed her eyes and held it there. She felt the hardness of the rock, the cold, rather damp sensation of the limestone. And then she thought she felt something else, like an intensity, a concentration, heat—maybe it was her own body heat warming the stone. She took her hand down and looked at it, then shifted her baby into a slightly different position.
They went back to the main passageway and headed north, with lamps for light now instead of torches. Zelandoni continued using her voice, sometimes humming, sometimes expressing greater tonal qualities, stopping when she thought there was something she wanted them to see. Ayla was particularly fascinated by the mammoth that had lines indicating fur hanging below, but that also had marks, perhaps bear claw marks, scratching through it. She was intrigued by the rhinoceroses. When they got to a place where the song in the large cave grew more resonant, Zelandoni stopped again.
“We have a choice here of which way to go,” she said. “I think we should go straight first, then turn around and come back to here and take the left passage for a while. Then turn around and go back the way we’ve come, and out of the cave. Or we can just take the left way, and then return.”
“I think you should decide,” Ayla said.
“I think Ayla’s right. You have a better sense of the distance, and you know how tired you are,” Jondalar said.
“I am a little tired, but I may never come here again,” Zelandoni said, “and tomorrow I can rest, either in camp, or with a horse dragging me on that seat thing you made. We’ll go straight ahead until we find the next place that could lead us closer to the Mother’s Sacred Underworld.”
“I think this whole cave is close to Her Underworld,” Ayla said, feeling a tingling sensation in the hand that had touched stone.
“You are right, of course, which is why it’s more difficult to find the special places,” the First said.
“I think this cave could take us all the way to the Other World, even if it’s in the middle of the earth,” Jondalar said.
“It is true that this cave is much larger and there is much more to see than we will in this one day. We won’t go into the caves below at all,” Zelandoni said.
“Has anyone ever gotten lost in here?” Jondalar said. “I should think it would be easy enough.”
“I don’t know. Whenever we come here, we always make sure we have someone with us who is familiar with the cave and knows the way,” she said. “Speaking of familiar, I think this is where we usually replenish the fuel in the lamps.”
Jondalar got out the fat again and after the woman added some to the stone bowls, she checked the wicks and pulled them out of the oil and up a little higher, making them burn brighter. Before they started out again, she said, “It helps to find which way to go if you can make sounds that resonate, that make a sort of echo. Some people use flutes, so I think your bird whistling should work, Ayla. Why don’t you try it.”
Ayla felt a little shy about it and wasn’t sure which bird to choose. Finally she decided on a skylark and thought about the bird with its dark wings and long tail framed in white, with bold streaks on its breast and a small crest on its head. Skylarks walked rather than hopped and roosted on the ground in well-hidden nests made of grass. When flushed out, a skylark warbled a rather liquid chirrup, but its early morning song was sustained for a long time as it flew high up in the sky. That was the sound she produced.
In the absolute dark of the deep cave, her perfect rendering of the song of a skylark had an eerie incongruity, a strangely inappropriate haunting quality that caused Jondalar to jerk with a shudder. Zelandoni tried to hide it,