Chapter 4

Was it the secret desire to meet the savage warrior again that made me go back to the cave of skulls? Or was it the urge to confront my irrational fears — after all, I had begun to study archeology and anthropology at the University, and neither the sight of human bones nor of human artifacts should send me tumbling into a panic. Or maybe it was simply the prospect of the endless months that I would have to spend enwombed in a cave, with nothing to do but keeping the body alive by ingesting food and drink, that made me want to fill my mind with new sensations as long as it was possible, something for my thoughts and fantasies to dwell and feed upon in the upcoming time of loneliness and darkness.

Whatever it was that made me go back, go back I did. And this time I already knew what was there, and I was determined not to panic but to investigate the findings with a rational mind, drawing upon whatever scientific education I had received, determined not to succumb to delusional encounters of any kind again.

And one more thing was different this time: I had a lamp with me now!

The hike from the cave of cans to the cave of skulls I could do with bare feet, so I unwrapped my feet again, and the half of my former dress that had served as my left shoe I knotted into a satchel that I filled with a few cans of food and drink, and with an oil lamp and a few matches. When climbing down the rope I hung it around my neck, and so I arrived at the bay shortly after noon, feeling well prepared mentally and physically to investigate the place that had horrified me so much only the day before.

Despite my determination, in front of the narrow dark opening I hesitated, considering to take a little snack before entering the cave, but this attempt at delaying what I had come for failed due to the fact that I had forgotten to bring one of the can openers with me. So, I lit the lamp, braved myself, and entered the cave.

Even with the lamp, all I could see at first was darkness, but then my eyes adapted, and I took in the same scene that I had seen once before, only I saw it more clearly now: the skulls on the walls, the altar, the idol, but this time all this did not seem to be so frightful to me, and neither did I scream nor did I run.

I walked up to the altar — yes, I was sure that this was what it was — and had a closer look at it. It was an almost perfectly rectangular block of stone. Its sides were raw, but the top was smooth and carefully polished. The color of this surface was dark, darker than the original color of the rock from which the stone had been hewn, reddish-brown, irregular, as if blotched — blood, I thought with a shudder, as if the stone had been drenched in it. I touched it with my hand — it was dry, of course, but I could not say whether I touched stone or a coating of blood or of something else, and I do not think that I really wanted to know.

Near the four corners there were holes two or three inches of diameter that led across the vertical edges, close to the top, connecting the short and long side faces. I took in the altar's size, and another shudder ran down my spine — a vision appeared in my mind of a human sacrifice, a naked girl stretched out upon the stone, spread-eagled on her back, her strained ankles and wrists tied with ropes that were threaded through those holes, and a nude priest was approaching her with a knife in his hand, and then the voices of many men and women filled the cave, chanting, shouting, laughing, and then they were standing in front of me, crowding the altar, blocking my view of the stone and the tied girl, and then I heard a scream, and then, as suddenly as this vision had appeared, it was gone.

The scream had been my own, I realized.

And the priest — had it been him? In the flickering light of the oil lamp I had not seen his face clearly, and I could not say for sure.

I took a few deep breaths to quiet down, and then, staying where I was, I looked across the altar at the idol. It was a life-sized figure in a comfortable sitting position, made out of dark polished stone — black marble, it seemed to be, though I knew there was no such stone on this island. As I was not standing at the center of the altar I was looking at the idol slightly from the side, and so I could see how the body of the deity merged into the solid block of stone upon which it sat, or rather, how it seemed to grow out of it, a three-dimensional alto-relief, with a fully elaborated front side, from its head to its feet; the arms rested close to the upper body and thighs.

Most striking about the figure was that it was both female and male — it had full breasts, and it had a penis, a huge penis that was fully erect, proudly pointing upwards, and below the penis, visibly because the idol's legs were slightly spread, it had a scrotum that was divided, and in between the halves there was a vulva, the pubic lips open in arousal, and I saw the dark opening of a vagina.

And the face, that had scared me so much when I had seen it the first time, with its fiery stare — the eyes were indeed inlaid with a dark reddish stone, but there was neither life nor fire in them, and in the light of the lamp its expression seemed peaceful now, not threatening, but rather — how could I call it? Expectant. And alert.

I turned my head away from it, to look at the skulls — they were everywhere, on the left and right walls, there must be hundreds of them. I went and inspected some of the skulls closer. They all rested in niches that had been cut into the rock, and they were all undamaged, complete with lower jaws and teeth. From their sizes, they were all of grown-ups, and, to judge from the state of the teeth, of rather young ones — not past my own age, the unpleasant thought came. I was not an expert, but some of the skulls seemed to be rather new to me, while others seemed to be older, and some very old, maybe several hundred years.

Several hundred skulls — several hundred years ... another chilling thought forced itself upon my mind: was there a skull for each year? Something that had begun a long time ago, and maybe was still going on? Was there another skull due this year? Who would the unlucky victim be who would have to die for it, if he or she had not already died?

I stepped deeper into the cave, behind the altar and the idol, where the light from the cave's mouth did not reach. I had not been close to its back wall yet, assuming there even was one and the cave did not extend further and further into the mountain.

But yes, soon I saw that there was a back wall indeed — and by the light from my lamp I saw that it held a surprise!

The wall was smoother than the side walls, and, across its width of maybe thirty feet, it was covered with pictures. Simple drawings, no colors, only black — probably drawn with sticks dipped into soot — but clearly legible, and, if showing none of the artistry that the idol displayed, they were still done carefully and with attention to details. Arbitrarily I started to read the pictures from left to right, and this proved to be the right direction.

The first picture showed three boats out on the sea — open boats, outrigger canoes, each with one small triangular sail, and a crew of paddlers sitting in a row behind each other — I counted their tiny heads, there were exactly twelve in each boat.

The next picture (or was it still part of the first one?) showed an island — this island, this must be the silhouette it presented to someone approaching from the West. Then there came a diagram with lines and circles and half-circles that I did not understand, and then again a picture with the boats, and the crews pulling them ashore — yes, this was the bay in front of this cave! The sailors of the first boat could be seen clearly, they were of both sexes, and they were all nude; there was no reason to assume that with the two other boats it would be different.

I looked back at the diagram, and suddenly I realized that it was not difficult to read at all — there was the Sun, the Earth, different phases of the Moon, lines that indicated the Sun's and the Moon's paths — it was a calendar. This must be the summer solstice, this the first full moon to follow it, this the second, this the third ... and this was the rising Sun ... and this line led to the picture with the arriving boats — yes, this was the date and the time, the morning of the day of the third full moon after the summer solstice!