Don Winslow - Way Down on the High Lonely

Now Neal realized that the chanting came from the cliff on the north side. He looked up and saw a small circle of light about fifty feet up on the rocks, and the voice seemed to come from that glowing orb. This is getting really spooky, he thought.

“What am I hearing?” he asked Jory. He pointed to the circle of light that seemed to float on the sheer cliff. “What the hell is that?”

“That’s the angel,” Jory said calmly. “The guardian.”

“Is he guarding Cody?” Neal asked.

“Always.” Jory stopped the horse. “I usually walk from here, but we might need your horse this time. I think we can walk him most of the way up there.”

Neal swung down as Jory hopped off. Jory took the reins and led Midnight as they hiked to the base of the cliff. They jagged west for a few hundred feet and then Neal saw that there was a narrow shelf of rock that led like a ramp up to the light. He got scared as they made their way up the shelf. It seemed like one slip would send him plunging down the sheer rock cliff.

One foot at a time, he told himself. Just think about placing one foot at a time.

Even Midnight seemed edgy, carefully placing his hooves down on the slippery rock. Only Jory didn’t seem concerned. He had his head down and just plodded up the ramp toward the light.

As they got closer Neal saw that the light wasn’t mysterious at all. It came from the mouth of a cave. As they got closer still he recognized the flicker of a small fire.

Jory stopped and listened to the chanting. When he heard a pause he made a sound like a bird.

The singing stopped and a similar birdcall came back.

Jory pressed on until they came to a large fissure that split the rock diagonally. “This is far as we can go with the horse,” he said.

Neal watched as Jory led Midnight about twenty feet into the fissure and tied the reins to a scraggly cedar bow. He came back out and led Neal another thirty yards up the shelf until they came to the cave mouth.

It was a shallow indentation in the rock, maybe four feet high, ten feet wide, and a couple of feet deep.

Neal saw a tiny man sitting perfectly still, backlit by the fire that seemed to be burning from inside the rock. But there was no smoke. The man certainly could be no more than five feet tall, if that, and he looked ancient. He was wrapped in what looked like rabbit skins. His silver hair was long and matted.

Jory pointed behind the old man and then pointed to himself.

The small man shook his head. Then he pointed at Neal.

Then the man got up into a crouch and Neal saw the light burning behind him. The man crawled into the light. Jory followed, and both men suddenly disappeared. Neal got on all fours and crawled into the biggest part of the light.

It was a hole, a small, round tunnel entrance. Neal crawled for about ten feet in total darkness and then he saw the cave.

A fire was burning. Lying beside the small fire, wrapped in wild sheepskin, looking dirty and thin but peacefully asleep, was a small child. His face was turned to the warmth of the fire and his eyes were closed. His thin lips were open slightly and Neal could see them purse as he breathed.

Neal could stand up now-easily, for the chamber was twelve feet high in the center. The air was clear because the smoke from the small, efficient fire was drafting out the back of the cave.

Neal walked to where the child was lying and gently pulled the sheepskin blanket from the boy’s head. He looked at the dirty blond hair and whispered, “Hello, Cody. It’s nice to meet you.”

He pulled the cover back over the boy and looked to Jory for an explanation. Jory just pointed at the cave walls.

Neal looked around him then and suddenly understood.

There was no telling how old the paintings were, but even in the faint, flickering firelight Neal could see that they were beyond ancient. They told stories of a time when men hunted giant animals on foot, and women gathered seeds and roots, and thunder and lightning were the music of God. They spoke of an age when men battled lions, and women hid their children in the safety of the cave, and when God sometimes took the children anyway, took them to the heavens.

And seeing them, Neal understood. Understood how poor, sick Jory, who had been taught what he had been taught and who had seen the horrors he had seen, could come to this prehistoric spot and think he had found the place where the lost tribe of Israel, the Aryan ancestors, had settled in the promised land.

For on those figures where some color survived and faces could be clearly discerned, the color on those faces was immutably, unmistakably, white. Especially on the smallest figure, clearly a child, who was depicted reaching his arms up to the sky toward a large figure that was not quite human but had a head formed by three concentric ovals. The child’s hair was yellow.

“White people,” Jory said. “The sons of Seth, the sons of Jacob. This proves that we were here long before the Indians. The old man here even says so.”

The old man nodded and pointed to the cave paintings. In a combination of his own tongue and sign language he tried to tell Neal his people’s legend about the race of white giants who once walked the earth. They were men of strength and courage, men who had knowledge. And the Sun loved them, so he gave them hair the color of dawn and dusk and eyes the color of the sky. For he meant them to join him in the heavens, and indeed, one day the white giants disappeared. But the legends said they would come again at the end of time, come again to rule the earth, to save it from the new whites, the ones who were everywhere but not quite men. For the new whites had come with their machines and guns and diseases and ruined the earth and most of the people died. The rest ran away and hid in the mountains, found the canyons and the caves, and waited for the white giants to return, waited for the foretold child of the Sun to come back to the sacred place. And the ones who were everywhere but not quite men would try to kill the child, and there would be a terrible battle between the good spirits and the bad, and many would die. But the child of the Sun would live, and the people would be reborn and rise from the earth, which would be clean again. And the child of the Sun would rule and all would be peaceful, as in the days when the white giants strode the earth.

Neal looked at Cody McCall sleeping by the fire and tried to figure out how to get him to safety. He could make a sling from his jacket, perhaps, and tie it in front of him like one of those baby carriers he had seen women wear. It might work.

“The Book of Revelation talks about the same thing, Neal,” Jory said. “It talks about the infant who comes again, and the serpent tries to kill it, and the angels battle the serpent, and…”

“And the child lives and rules the earth with a rod of iron,” Neal interrupted. He’d read Revelation while studying the white supremacist movement.

“And this is the child,” Jory said. “So when they were going to kill him, I knew it was a terrible mistake. So I took him here, to the sacred place, the Place of the Beginning and the End.”

Neal debated what to do. He could wait the storm out in the cave and go in the morning, but that would mean moving in daylight, and who knew where the SOS boys would be. Or he could move now under cover of darkness, but that would mean exposing the child to a dangerous trip at night through a snowstorm.

Just then the old man cocked his head toward the cave mouth. Then he mimed the trotting of horses.

Neal couldn’t hear a thing.

The old man scrambled to the cave mouth and came back moments later. He counted to six on his fingers. Then he stepped over to the fire, wafted his hands through the smoke, and pointed to the ceiling.