The Ghost Wall

In the first moment of realisation we pressed forward with new urgency, plunging into that struggle which seems always to occur at the beginning of the end. I have since become familiar with the struggle that sets in motion the process of letting the struggle go but back then we probably convinced ourselves that we still had a chance. To that end, we renewed our efforts. We well knew, even at that early point in our careers, the implications under those conditions, at that latitude, of the rapid onset of dusk. I suppose our first response to night was to race against its approach, as if it were a deadline set especially for us.  Neither of us rated highly the chances of our keeping to the trail in absolute darkness – our inexperience was no longer sufficient to secure the former sense of our invincibility. But then, we were all too well aware how unlikely it would be for us to find a place nearby to safely wait out whatever might pass before daybreak. And anyway, it was in our nature not to welcome the prospect of remaining exposed in the jungle for a further twelve hours without contributing something to our own cause, however illusory. As desperation took hold, I suggested that we retrace our tracks to the orangutan’s nest and take shelter there as best we could. The plan implied the settling of the earlier conflict one way or another, which neither of us relished, and from which we had been retreating in the first place. In the absence of any other remotely plausible alternative, my suggestion was met with wearied agreement. As you know, we never gained our revised objective. The jungle released, as a sort of sign of the hour, clouds of swirling bats into the canopy. Shaking out, from the great multitudinous flapping of their repulsive brown wings, a cloud of descending dust upon us, the bats brought down night’s darkness over the world, and our own end over us. We went on, semi-blinded, into an anxious and cacophonous dusk, and for no reason, encountered a wall which unexpectedly blocked the path that we had taken, in a happier frame, earlier that day. I have mentioned to you before the phosphorescent quality of the stone; its baffling height, solidity and extent; the arbitrary suddenness of its appearance at that place; but after all these years, only now do I recall the most uncanny and decisive of its features. It was the wall’s coolness, I mean the unintelligible inpenetrability that its temperature conveyed, which finally put an end to our endeavour, relaxing all the heated coils of our ambitions.