“The only truly wise adviser we have is death. Every time you feel how it often happens to you that everything goes wrong and you are on the verge of complete collapse, turn left and ask your death if this is so. And your death will answer that you are mistaken, and that besides its touch there is nothing that really would matter. Your death will say: “But I have not touched you yet!”
Carlos Castaneda.
Part six Chaper one Lis sleeps
Mountains were black, as if covered with soot. A gloomy landscape. On one of the sooty sites in front of the dark pharynx of the cave people were working. People? Liswas not at all sure of this. Wrapped from head to toe in black, clothes as dirty and soiled as everything around, they made up a whole with a bleak landscape. But the outlines of their figures and measured movements still resembled human ones. Lis couldn’t say more precisely which creatures were working there. Slowly, as if they had an eternity in reserve, they rolled some iron barrels into the cave. As black as these mountains, and these entities and this cave, in the depths of which Lis caught a glimpse of the
flame. From time to time its distant but bright reflections burst from the depths, illuminating the arches of the entrance and the platform. In these moments, the creatures froze, as if waiting, then again took up work.
Lis, fascinated, watched their tricky actions. He didn’t know who they were, and what the name of the place was, but he KNEW what was in these barrels! Remains. The human remains.
And these gloomy and detached workers were not people, they could not be people, the world of people remained somewhere there, far, far away, Lis felt it, and an expression involuntarily came to his mind: “Not a single living soul” . So it was. Angels, or demons, in any case, of a lower order, were monotonously rolling barrels into the cave. And
their work had no end.
Lis didn’t smell the decay, the smell of rotting remains of perishing flesh. No. There were no such smells, because in the barrels were not parts of the bodies: arms, legs, tripe. In these terrible vessels of death lay the remains of dead human souls. The human nature itself. The immortal eternal starlet ceased to shine. Eternal? Lis saw now that no. Empty shells, distorted pieces, radiating no more life. Souls: dead, broken, broken, unable to survive, turned into dust.
And therefore, in the air there was no smell of decomposition of flesh, but something much worse – longing. Relentless, all-embracing, bottomless and endless longing. The one that makes you want to howl and tear off the hair on your head. The longing that you will never experience on earth, so hopeless and absolute it was.
