Zakor
understood the stones; their fracture and tenacity, their hardness
and luster. She had memorized their mineral groups, their series,
species and variety. She had learned their common names and origins,
but more than this, she knew them as though they each spoke in a
different language. Each crystalline symmetry, every vitreous surface
gave whisper and sigh, and to these quiet yet discernible dialects
Zakor tuned her ear.
Singled
out as both deeply gifted and as an oddity in school, by her twelfth
year Zakor had still shown no interest in social interaction, and
remained contentedly solitary as often as possible. Her teachers were
awed by her knowledge, by her quiet, radiant poise, and by her
shining dark eyes that seemed to see far more than the bedazzling
inner sanctums of the geode.
Both
her father, an Environmental Biologist born in Nigeria, and her
mother, an Urban Ecologist born in Bangladesh, were cerebral and
well-meaning in their work, however, they were so absorbed in their
own interests that they rarely showed their daughter much attention.
Other than showering the girl with an endless stream of scientific,
collegiate-level materials, they left her largely to her own devices.
Thus,
Zakor had become part of a far more ancient family – a sweeping,
violent lineage synthesized by massive earthen systems. She embraced
and savored her companions by way of the Dana and Strunz
Classifications, through tectonic records and geological surveys,
and in seeking the company of the minerals themselves. Her little
room at home housed an enviable collection – of the 4,660 approved
mineral species, in her brief lifetime, and largely thanks to her
grandfather, a geologist in his own right, Zakor had acquired at
least one of nearly 3,500 specimens. She kept meticulous records of
each, and each day she found herself lured into the wonders of
another series of stones.
In
the quiet of her mind she often found herself delving into the
incomprehensible darknesses of earth, inquiring of a certain depth, a
particular geography, discerning the secrets of its unique population
of minerals and ores. She dreamed vividly of caverns and tunnels
beneath the world, of igneous intrusions, stirring magma chambers, or
cool, moist wombs of limestone blooming with gypsum. And in these
lonesome, ancient wombs, strange energies seemed to touch her,
permeate her, and then pass out of her again, just as sunlight moved
through air.
Specific
stones, when she handled them, or when she reached into their
countenance with her mind, seemed to ring with discernible notes, or
hummed in low but distinctly pulsing frequencies. Labradorite, in its
shifting pearlescent layers, seemed to stir with mysterious runes.
And yet, looking into the face of the stone the meaning pulled away,
became vaporous, and then wafted into sky-like depths.
Zakor
found that crystals of any kind had high, fragile voices, their notes
faint and threadlike, as if faceting from a matrix of light, time and
heat. Igneous rocks echoed with darker, more sinuous voices, arriving
so low on the register as if to crevasse into a staggering silence of
unimaginable layer and pressure. Pumice, featherlight, pale and
porous, was difficult to listen to for very long – it's airy voice
was a whittling scream born of volatile ejection from the bowels of
an upsurging volcano.
Sedimentary
rocks, cleaved from the walls of a deep gorge or pried up from the
floor of an extinct ocean, whispered in many small and papery voices,
each rosy, cream and ocher layer playing like the strings of a
geological harp stretched over the eons. Such stones also absorbed
the deep, thundering drone of the waters that had pressed them down
and whittled them away, and fossils found within chimed like little
bells, echoes of life and exhales of death wheeling through a
staggering earthen cycle.
In
their academic pursuits, Zakor's parents had moved her from one place
to another many times in her youngest years, passing through South
Africa, the UK and Australia, but at last her father's post-doctorate
work had led him to the Pacific Northwest, where he had found a
faculty position at a reputable University. The region was of
particular interest to Zakor because of its relatively recent
volcanic history, and for the fascinating minerals common to the area
as a result.
Long
before settling in the Northwest, Zakor had made considerable effort
to acquire agates, crystals, breccia, sulfates, tuffs, cherts,
basalts and tephra from all the major volcanoes of the world, and in
doing so she had come to deeply understand the distinct signatures of
great geological forces such as Mount St. Helens, Yellowstone,
Pinatubo, Krakatoa, Tambora, Laki, Huayanputina, Mount Tarawera,
Vesuvius and Lake Toba.
Adding
local granites and rhyolites, cinnabar, selenite, jasper and
obsidian, Zakor found these to be among the most vocal minerals in
her collection. Many of these specimens spoke in a tangling of voices
that metamorphosed, folded, faulted and sheared, and at times seemed
to pour over and through one another like the roiling, busy magmas
they had once been.
The
home in which Zakor lived was as expansive as it was old, an academic
palette of browns, reds and burgundies with heavy drapes
constricting much of the light that attempted to creep in at the
windows. The house was sparsely furnished, mostly with bookshelves
upholding stern, heavy texts.
A
giant, vintage and rotating globe of the earth, set on a dusty
mahogany stand, dominated the front hallway, and as she passed it,
Zakor often gave it a spin with the fingertips of one hand. At times,
when her parents were away or absorbed in their studies, Zakor would
sit in the shadows with the globe for company, and would name at
least one mineral for each country, for each string of islands, and
for each icy Pole. She would pinpoint all the hotspots on each
continent and in every oceanic depth. And when she tired of this
game, she would hobble to the heavy wooden doors leading to into the
wild, green openness of the world beyond.
A
deep and wandering wood of some age was only steps away from her back
door, and into this soaring and leafy mystery Zakor had begun to
disappear. Being slightly unsteady on misshapen feet, she moved more
slowly than girls her age, but she lived in relative denial of her
predicament, and where she lacked strength and agility in her legs
she had the spirit of twenty – her face was never sour, and her
eyes were always bright, searching the way ahead for the secrets that
the earth might yet whisper from within.
Of
course her interest, as she stole away into the trees, lay in the
stones she could discern within the creek bed, or in the mottled
erratics that had, with time, been overgrown with moss and with root.
Having only recently moved into the house, much of the countryside
was yet to be discovered.
Passing
into the wood, through the wavering depths of green and up-reaching
branches, Zakor could see a house nearby, the only one within view,
in fact, before the forest enveloped everything but the sky. This
home was larger by far than her own, laid by hand in stone and
masonry with a soft, thatched roof and precariously leaning chimneys.
It was green at all its edges, gamboling with vine and moss, lichen,
fern, bamboo, shrub and a plethora of flowers. In shades of brown,
ocher and emerald, and rising up through such a presence of trees,
the house itself reminded Zakor of a toadstool, a rotund, organic and
comical thing that might readily and purposefully retreat back into
the earth.
For
all its immensity, the house seemed only to shelter two people, a
stout, strong little woman with a nest of white hair and keen blue
eyes, and a fragile-looking lady, perhaps a girl who, during the day,
always seemed to be propped up with pillows and blankets in a chaise
on the porch. Both women had openly spied Zakor – the older of the
two had indeed waved to her while turning over the earth in a wild,
grassy and rambling garden near the woods. While the girl confined to
the chaise did not seem to have the strength to raise a hand, her
gaze had followed as Zakor went along into the woods, and the touch
of this woman's eyes was nothing but gentle.
In
her time spent in the wilds, Zakor had come to follow a specific
path, one the girl felt had been laid out plainly for her to follow.
First, at the foyer of the trees there stood two staggering firs,
with such girth and height that their crowns seemed to bask in
cloud. They flanked what was surely an entrance, and past their mossy
trunks a little soft dell sank away into a host of ferns so large
that the tips of their fronds brushed over Zakor's shoulders. These
ferns sprung from the softening carcasses of three enormous conifers,
which, as they had come to rest on the earth, compassed down a gentle
slope to a happy, trickling little creek amok with stones.
Ankle
deep and busy with clear, chilly water, the creek laughed through
dense grasses and fiddle- and maidenhair ferns. Its banks were
teeming with bees at work in the angelica, and dappled with shade and
little falling coins of golden sunlight.
The
little waterway widened to a bold stream cutting through a soaring
church of trees, and along one side ambled a narrow, earthen trail,
most likely cut by deer, and perhaps in an earlier time also by
forest people, tribes who had whispered through these trees long
before foreign loggers and traders had ventured in great number into
the west.
Zakor,
with her sharp eye and imaginative mind, liked to discern who had
passed on the banks before her, and she paused to read the sign of
those who had set foot along
the water. Often she found the rambling paths made by little snakes,
and also pressed into the damp earth were the footprints of small
birds, rabbits and voles. Here and there were the hoof prints of
deer, elk, and even the paw prints of coyotes. Zakor delighted in the
pictures that passed through her mind, seeing each of these creatures
as they visited for a drink, or perhaps as they prowled on the hunt.
Looking at herself in the mirror of the water with the great green
canopy as backdrop above, Zakor saw not a little girl, not a greater
or a lesser being than any who had passed before, but as one living
thing among many. Looking past her reflection and reaching in
carefully, so as not to disturb the silt, she touched bits of granite and
rhyolite, both children born of a fire that had stirred long ago.
At
its broadest point the stream giggled down the first of two little
falls created by outcroppings of rock and fallen logs, and then, as
the landscape planed away to a deep valley thick with pines to the
left, the stream veered hard right, and fell away into the roots and
snarls of more green, lacy boughs. It was here in the soft, fertile
earth, among the snail trails, leaves and decay, that a great dark
rib of extrusive rock, obsidian to be precise, thrust up at an angle
from the soil. Such obsidian formed only above ground, in the
presence of volatile earthly activity, so perhaps, many ages ago a
broad, lazy lava flow had crept through this valley.
When
first she found the mysterious shelf of rock, she settled onto it
with her back against its breadth. Closing her eyes, she let her mind
wheel backward through unimaginable eons, into the fiery reaches of
history where vapors stung and mud pits bubbled. Opening the eyes of
her mind, she found herself at the center of a landscape as
featureless and bleak as the surface of the moon, with hot plumes of
gas rising from blanketing magmatic floes inching thick and slow
along the ground. She spun time forward, and the surface cooled. A
lone figure crouched on this shimmering ridge of black silicate,
Zakor sat for a moment, taking in the vastness of the sky, the harsh
and inhospitable lands. Then she spun geological time forward faster
still, watching the valley sink and fault. She watched it flood,
dry, fold, flood, and sink yet again, and gradually the dark rock
disappeared beneath layers of ash, scrub and sediment. Around its
edges, and then up through it, sprung great leafing trees, and the
obsidian bled deeper and deeper into the ground as plant, animal and
season spun through the cycle of life and death above it.
Each
time she had visited the wall, Zakor always found that she did not
wish to go any further. Though the wood itself rambled on in every
direction, and though there were surely other mysteries to be
discovered, the lands beyond seemed not to invite her. Something
whispered there at the great black rib of stone, and in the stillness
Zakor strained to hear the words it was speaking.
As
she had on many days in recent times, Zakor awkwardly descended the
steps at the rear of her home, paused at the bottom to find her
bearings, and turned a curious gaze to the whimsical house in the
neighboring trees. On this day, no one could be seen working in its
rambling gardens, and the chaise on the porch was vacant, its
blankets neatly folded and its cozy pillows arranged with care.
However, on the high bough of a wizened maple at the borders of the
house, a large and curious raven perched, seeming to look down
intently upon the little girl. He cocked his head at an odd angle,
and scissored his beak as though he might be speaking softly to
himself.
Zakor
regarded the bird with interest, and he ruffled his wings, hopping
closer to her on the branch.
“And
who are you?” she giggled softly.
The
raven retreated a bit on the bough and flicked his tail as his gaze
held for a moment with Zakor's. She thought, as she looked at him,
that he resembled black volcanic glass, with the same shimmer and
irridescence in his layerings of feather, and in the bright flash of
his eye.
Hobbling
slowly past the sentries at the entrance, Zakor wandered down through
the ferns, and behind her she heard a rustling in the leaves. Looking
up, again she spied the raven, and he peeped at her through a spray
of fern spilling from a lush layer of moss grown upon a branch above.
“Are
you following me?” she smiled. Again he retreated a little. Zakor
stood beneath him on the soft earth for a moment, and a breeze pulled
through the forest that moved the dark falls of her braided hair, and
lifted the feathers of his little black back. She turned her face
into the arriving wind, and breathed in the sweet, faint tannin that
came with it. Looking up at the bird again, it seemed to her that he
had leaned into the moving air as well, his little breast raised in a
kind of indescribable gladness that she also felt.
Saying
no more, Zakor turned and went, in her slow and ungainly way, and
picked careful footsteps down the embankment toward the creek. She
paused at the water, found the imprints left by others, and looking
into the stream she saw herself. Peering past the moving flesh of the
creek into the bones that lay strewn beneath, she saw the fractured
bits of rock, and found joy in their names, in their shapes and
colors. Shifting her focus to the leafy canopy reflected on the
surface, the dark blotch of the raven's body appeared in the image,
and she spun to look at him, feeling a tiny pang of guilt.
This
time she had gone to visit the obsidian with a specific purpose. it
had seemed irreverent to take away any specimen from this place until
now. While in most instances, Zakor was hardly shy about pocketing a
sample to add to her collection, inwardly, she felt that some places
needed to become familiar with her before she could ask anything of
them. The raven, as he followed her on this day, seemed like a little
guardian of the wood, and she wondered, for a moment, if he could
perceive her intention.
Staying
at a certain distance, but remaining spritely and inquisitive, the
raven went with her all the way to the wall, and huddled high in the
rafters of the trees, his little black head easily visible within the
shimmering emerald of the place. The sky beyond him was a deep
summer's blue, laced with faint wisps of cirrostratus.
Putting
both hands in the pockets of her little apron dress, Zakor stood
awkwardly for a moment, feeling she should address the little bird
again. “If you are the one looking after this place,” she said,
“I see that it is kind. And I promise you, I will be kind to it.”
The
raven listened intently, and flew down to be closer to her this time,
which made her heart flutter inside her. She puzzled at him as he
hopped along a nearer branch, and to herself she said, “I wonder
what your name is.”
She
knelt awkwardly at the base of the obsidian wall, and as she did with
every stone of any size she put her palms to it; this was her way of
speaking to the place, and telling it she was there. She let her
weight sink against it, and felt the volcanic rock singing beneath
her, softly, like a glass of water struck by a tine. The vibration of
it gently, subtly permeated not only her skin, but her muscles and
bones. Her toes tingled with it. Looking at the fractures and
vitreous swirls within the rock, she saw long, sweeping and elegant
shapes, iridescent, like a layering of feathers, and her mind
sparked. Looking up for the raven, she discovered that he had winged
down to a bough directly overhead. As her eyes found him he did not
recoil this time, but peered unblinking at the little girl with a
fearlessness, and also with what seemed to be a hope.
“I
shall call you Obsidian,” she smiled.
And
seeing a piece of the wall which had broken off and fallen to the
ground beside her, she picked it up and held it in both hands. It was
small enough that it would fit in her pocket, but large enough that
she could feel the voice of the place speaking clearly in it. This
she would take back with her, so that she could listen to the stone
and discern better what it was saying.
The
raven dropped to the ground, and picked his way over the earth,
staying close but not being so bold as to come directly to her. He
was immensely curious, bobbing his head and flicking his tail, his
little feet moving light and quick upon the soil. Zakor saw, now that
he was close enough, that one of his eye sockets was hollowed and
eyeless, and a crack fissured through her spirit for him. She
regarded her own crippled legs, splayed out on the ground beneath
her. Walking was painful, always, though rarely would she admit this
to be true.
She
looked up at the raven again, and said, “We each have something
broken. And yet,” she added, pocketing the stone, “we can still
find a way to fly.”
The
bird listened, and seemed to understand. And as Zakor rose and
hobbled homeward the raven followed, flitting from branch to branch,
and soaring in little happy figure eights in the breeze that laced
through the trees as he went.
*
* *
