The Trouble with the Truth

The cliff face dropped away some four hundred feet to a rocky, scrub-clogged ravine below.

"Runs from there," Nanda said, nodding up at the peaks of the Himalayas lost in the clouds, "all the way down into India."

The rock face was dove-gray, striated with meandering bands of white and cinnamon. Its edges looked to have been specifically sculpted for breaking skin and bone. The jagged boulders peaking through the thorny scrub brush below seemed poised to receive a hurtling body, to crack it open and spread its fluids amidst the leaves and lichens. While Sri Mani leaned far out at the cliff's edge to peer below, I hung back, shaking, trying to convince myself it was due solely to the exhaustion. But that first glimpse over the edge had been enough for me. My stomach was in knots. My knees were weak. I felt lightheaded and nauseous.

Nanda made one end of the rope ladder fast to a tree and hurled the remainder over the edge of the cliff. It uncoiled smoothly, spilling down the face of the rock, stopping some seventy or so feet short of the bottom.

"We're not ..." I couldn't even finish the sentence.

Neither of them bothered to answer. Sri Mani set his gun aside, gathered two of the bamboo poles I'd carried, and vanished over the edge, walking down the ladder as nimbly as a circus performer. The fact that he had set aside the gun baffled me. Just what exactly were we here to hunt?

Nanda extracted several coils of rope from my bundle and shoved several more at me. "Ties those to basket. Like this," he said, indicating the rim of the basket, "so the basket does not spill."

"Spill what?"

But he'd already turned away and starting tying other ropes to the trees at the top of the cliff, casting their free ends out over the edge. With a shorter length of rope, he fashioned a harness about his body. "Watch," he said, as he tied the knots. "Now, you." He slapped at my hands. "No. Like this. Pholo will make forest of you, Bahktur, if you do this wrong." When the harness was complete, he showed me how to loop one of the main lines secured to the tree through the harness and around my waist. He showed me how to brace my hands. One in front. The other back against my hip. "Like this," he said, showing me how to brake the rope. "Walk down side of mountain. Easy."

"I think I'll just hang out here."

He shook his head. "Farmer Bahktur, then. That is what I call you."

Then he took the basket and, lowering it behind him, backed over the edge of the cliff and disappeared. For a moment, I was alone. The only sound was the wind and the snickering leaves.

"Fuck."

So long as I didn't look down, it wasn't all that bad. I focused on the face of the rock just a few feet away, pretending it was the ground, hiding the truth that the ground was some 400 feet behind me. Nanda saw me coming and laughed softly.

"Are you sure these ropes are safe?" I asked. They were quite obviously handmade. Nothing but bamboo fibers. Sri Mani had the ladder, which seemed much safer, distributing his weight across two lines and all those bamboo cross-pieces. Why he got to use the ladder, while Nanda and I had to rappel ...

"Tree," said Nanda, pointing. "There. Tie a second rope. Make you feel safer. Ropes only break once in a while."

"Once in a while?"

He merely smiled.

I side-stepped over to the tree. It was a stunted, twisted thing, the sort of tree one finds in a desert, but its roots were firmly anchored in the cracks of the cliff face. There seemed little chance it would come loose soon, even if tested with my weight. I took a second line from those I'd looped over my shoulder and made a safety line some thirty feet long, tying one end securely to the tree and the other to my harness, looping it again around my waist just in case the harness broke, too. If my main rope snapped, I'd fall, but not as far as the bottom of the ravine. I might snap my spine at the end of the rope, but I'd live to talk about it afterward. This became my standard practice on all such hunts, hanging safety lines as I made my decent. Safety first, as they say. It seemed absurd when considering what I'd come through to get there.

My fear somewhat checked, I became aware of a loud droning noise. I dared to look down, and there was Sri Mani, sitting on the ladder, his hands occupied with those two bamboo poles. He was prodding at something back up under an overhang. The noise came from whatever hung up under there and from the cloud that swarmed all around him, enveloping him in a black, shifting mass of sound. Fighting my terror at the drop waiting on the other side of Sri Mani, fighting to focus my eyes only on him and not on the terrifying open space beyond him, the cloud took shape. The individual layers of movement segregated, took form, came into focus ... became black, bulbous bodies swirling around Sri Mani, lighting on his flesh, coating his back and shoulders and head.

They were bees. The largest bees I had ever seen, each as big as my thumb.