The Land of Painted Caves - Jean M. Auel [400]
The First was feeling the effects of her rather large taste as well, and struggled to keep her control as she signaled the zelandonia to begin chanting. That is a powerful root, she thought, and I only had one drink. What must Ayla be feeling now after all she drank? Zelandoni thought.
The ancient taste was familiar, and it brought on feelings Ayla would never forget, memories and associations of the other times she had tasted the drink, and of times long past. She felt the cool and damp of a deep forest, as though she were enveloped within it, with trees so huge it was difficult to find a way around and between them as she climbed up the steep side of a mountain followed by the horse. Lichen, damply soft and silvery grayish green, draped the trees, and moss covered the ground and rocks and logs of dead trees in a continuous carpet that ranged in shades from bright true green to deep pine green to rich earthy brownish green and all shades in between.
Ayla could smell fungus, mushrooms of every size and shape: fragile white wings sprouting from fallen trees, thick woody shelves attached to old stumps, large dense sponge-like brown capped, tiny delicate thin stemmed. There were honey-colored tight clusters, compact round spheres, shiny red tops with white spots, tall smooth caps that melted to black ooze, ghostly white perfect caps of death, and many more. She knew them all, tasted them all, felt them all.
She was in a great delta of a huge river, carried by a stream of muddy brown water, breaking through thick stands of tall phragmite reeds and cattails, and floating islands with trees and wolves that climbed them, spinning round and round in a small leather-covered bowl boat, rising up and floating on a cushion of air.
Ayla didn’t know her knees had buckled as she went limp and dropped to the ground. She was picked up by several zelandonia and carried to a resting place that Zelandoni had thought to have brought into the cave for her. The First almost wished she had one as well as she reached for her strong padded wicker stool. She struggled to stay aware, to watch Ayla, and felt a dark tinge of worry start to develop in the back of her mind.
Ayla was feeling peaceful, quiet, sinking into a soft mist that was drawing her deeper in, until she was surrounded. It thickened around her into a fog that obscured all vision, then became a heavy damp cloud. She felt swallowed by it. She was suffocating, struggled to breathe, gasped for air, then felt herself begin to move.
She was moving faster and faster, caught in the middle of the suffocating cloud, rushing so fast it took her breath away, left her with no air. The cloud wrapped itself around her, squeezed her, pushing in from all sides, contracting, expanding, contracting, like something alive. It forced her to move with accelerating velocity until she fell into a deep, black empty space, a place as black as the inside of a cave, mindless, terrifying.
It would have been less terrifying if she had simply dropped into sleep, become unconscious, as it appeared she had to those watching, but she was not. She couldn’t move, didn’t really have a desire to move, but when she tried to focus her will to move something, even just a finger, she could not. She couldn’t even feel her finger, or any other part of herself. She couldn’t open her eyes, or turn her head; she had no volition, no will, but she could hear. At some level, she was aware. As though from a distance and yet with great clarity, she could hear the chant of the zelandonia; she could hear the faint murmur of voices from one corner, though she couldn’t make out what they were saying; she could even hear her own heart beating.
Each donier chose a sound, a tone with a pitch and timbre each one was comfortable with on a sustained level. When they wanted to maintain a continuous chant, several of the Doniers would begin to make their tone. The combination might or might not be harmonic; it didn’t matter. Before the first one got out of breath, another voice would join in, and then another, and another at random