The Land of Painted Caves - Jean M. Auel [60]
The entrance to the small cave seemed barely large enough for a person to enter and it seemed to get smaller as she looked farther inside. It made Ayla wonder why anyone would want to go inside it. Then she heard a sound that made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end, and gooseflesh appear on her arms. It was like a yodel, but faster and more high pitched, an ululating wail that seemed to fill the cave hole in front of them. She turned and saw that it was Falithan who was making the sound. Then a strange muted echo reverberated faintly back to them that did not quite synchronize with the original sound, but seemed to originate from deep inside the cave. When he finished, she saw Zelandoni of the Twenty-sixth smiling at her.
“It’s quite a remarkable sound he makes, isn’t it?” the man said.
“Yes, it is,” Ayla said. “But why did he make it?”
“It’s one way we test the cave. When a person sings or plays a flute or makes a sound like Falithan in a hollow, if the cave responds, sings back with a sound that is true and distinctive, it means the Mother is telling us that She hears, and She is telling us that one can enter the spirit world from here. Then we know it is a sacred place,” the Twenty-sixth said.
“Do all sacred caves sing back?” Ayla asked.
“Not all, but most do, and some only in certain places, but there is always something special about sacred sites,” he said.
“I’m sure the First would be able to test a cave like this, she has such a beautiful and pure voice,” Ayla said, and then she frowned. “What if you want to test a cave but you can’t sing, or play a flute, or make a sound like Falithan? I can’t do any of those things.”
“Surely you can sing a little.”
“No, she can’t,” Jonokol said. “She speaks the words of the Mother’s Song, and hums in a monotone.”
“You have to be able to test a sacred site with sound,” the Zelandoni of the Twenty-sixth Cave said. “That’s an important part of being Zelandoni. And it must be a true sound of some kind. You can’t just yell or scream.” He seemed gravely concerned, and Ayla was crestfallen.
“What if I can’t make the right kind of sound? A true sound?” Ayla said, realizing at that moment that she did want to be a Zelandoni someday. But what if she couldn’t just because she couldn’t make a proper sound?
Jonokol looked as unhappy as Ayla. He liked the foreigner Jondalar had brought back with him from his Journey, and he felt he owed her a debt. She was not only the one who found the beautiful new cave; she had made sure he was among the first to see it, and had agreed to become the First’s acolyte, which had allowed him to move to the Nineteenth Cave, which was near it.
“But you can make a true sound, Ayla,” Jonokol said. “You can whistle. I have heard you whistle just like a bird, and you can make many other animal sounds. You can whinny like a horse, you can even roar like a lion.”
“That I’d like to hear,” the Donier said.
“Go ahead, Ayla. Show him,” Jonokol said.
Ayla closed her eyes and gathered up her thoughts to concentrate. She put her mind back to the time when she was living in her valley and raising a young lion alongside a horse, as though they were both her children. She remembered the first time Baby managed to make a full-throated roar. She had decided to practice making the sound, too, and a few days later answered him with a roar of her own. It wasn’t quite as thunderous as his, but he recognized it as a respectable roar. Like Baby, she had always built up to it with a series of distinctive grunts, and began with a series of unhk, unhk, unhk sounds that grew louder with each repetition. Finally she opened her mouth and pushed out the loudest roar she could. It filled the small cave. Then after a period of silence the roar echoed back on itself with a distant, muted