There is a meadow on Yr Aran, a meadow which may only be found by taking one too many wrong turns off the Watkin path. I first heard of this place from a good friend of mine; a friend of a friend, I suppose, since Lou has previously never been there himself. The fancier rumours say those who find it do so in a fashion different from the last person. I never felt inclined to believe this, although our voyage through the cave before finding the meadow never came up in any of the legends either of us heard about the place. The qualities prescribed to the meadow vary greatly, from cursing one's dreams to demonic possession. You would have known of this place as Leuad Chlun.
Yr Aran's dirty white slopes exerted an unexplainable force of attraction on me from the first time I saw them while visiting my aunt in Wales. The idyllic lakesides dotted with beautifully restored Welsh huts and enclaved by the lush grasslands stood in stark contrast to the malformed, hunchbacked peak of the Aran. A perpetual cloud shadows the place, as if God wished to hide the blasphemous crest forever from His sight. In this way, I suppose, my infatuation with the mountain could be compared to one's instinctually curious ogling of an invalid; it only grew when I heard of the curses and secrets that the Aran's treacherous slopes kept. As if to urge me, fate threw a particularly boring succession of weeks my way, tiring me with the prosaics of everyday life. Finally, when Yr Aran surfaced in a conversation and Lou mentioned Leuad Chlun, I knew: I must ascend the shadowed peak.
At some point or another, perhaps infected with my obsession of the mountain (or perhaps sick of Arkford's oily smog and smothering crowds), Lou asked me an odd question: "Are you sure you want to know what's there?" The answer should have been obvious. I already told him that I will be going to Rhyd Ddu, the village nearest to the Aran; having heard me re-iterate this, he asked to come along.
Naturally, I had no problems with this: my trip was not one of spiritual edification nor self-enlightenment, but rather of curiosity. While I doubted being bored there as it was, having my best friend come along did not seem at all to be an impedement. A good thing, even, as his parents left for two weeks to the Dominican, allowing us to make liberal use of their van.
The several hours' drive felt like an instant to me. Wales had a certain kind of rustic beauty about it - a rarity in the civilized world - beholding which enchanted me. Even Lou, whom I always knew to be a bookworm entombed in his flat, hardly kept his eyes on the road. The occasional house rarely intruded the green vistas of great forests and grassy fields, and there were few cars to be seen at any point during the trip. Only edge-bitten pavement marked with vanishing paint told us that this place had ever endured the visit of man.
We arrived as the final rays of the sun took leave. The Betws-y-coed - the hotel where I had reserved a room - proved to be a tourist-hardened place, with few of its hosts' speech seasoned with the local accent. After spending the evening at the bar and listening to the locals' ineffective pleas at changing our destination to one of the friendlier mountains, we decided to retire for the night. It was already designed that our ascent will take place during the evening, but the exhaustion from the trip made itself known at the first step into the hotel.
The next day we spent browsing the inanities at the local tourist shops. It seems that their content grew more and more insipid (and less and less locally manufactured, in favour of Indonesia and China) as we went north in the direction of Snowdon, Aran's tourist-infested parent mountain. The scruffiest of these establishments had, to its credit, a curious plaque installed: "Grwydryn, aros ennyd; ystyra ryfeddol waith Duw a'th daith fer ar y ddaear hon." - "Wanderer, wait a moment; consider God's wondrous work and your short journey on this earth." Upon reading the translation, the atheist Lou just smiled.
It was nearing dusk when we set foot on the Watkin path - the closest of the two that passed near Yr Aran. We found no paths on the map, and extracted little information from the locals about the cursed mound other than to stay away from it. Only by bribing the town drunkard with Lou's emergency supply of whiskey (the chap had a bit of a tooth for alcohol himself) did we find out that one could detour from the Watkin trail through a sparse patch of wood to find oneself at Aran.
The ascent proved uneventful, yet specific in its character: contrary to laws of physics, the atmosphere appeared to thicken as we climbed. Similarly, the snow lay in a uniform sheet of dust-sized, silken snowflakes at first, but at a higher altitude, we only found mangy chunks of snow and dirt strewn about the path. Winds wailed woefully every step of the way up, and louder near the summit. We quickly arrived at the point where standing anywhere near the edge threatened a fall of such a distance that merely thinking of the number sent shivers down my spine. But, as it happened, respite let itself be known in the form of the fateful cave.
An unusual place for such a geological formation, I thought, but the biting chill brought about by the all-penetrating winds ensured that this inconsistency did not bother me at the time. Agreement was unspoken; both of us dragged ourselves into the inky blackness of the cave without saying anything. Winds blew here, too - but not like outside. Here, a lukewarm breeze seemed to be coming from the bowels of the mountain. We debated going deeper at first, but a flash followed by a pounding thunder quickly reinforced the favour for the idea.
A few years ago, I traveled to Kentucky to see the famous Mammoth Cave system. Of course, this doesn't automatically make me the expert on caves, but it gave me enough of an idea of the concept to know that this cave on the Aran could not be natural. There were no stalactites or stalagmites; no familiar layers of limestone; no tiny crevices too small to climb through. I would be more correct in saying that it looked like it was burned through the rock - the dry walls appeared to have been molten at some point. Studying their texture and structure proved difficult for the lack of light, but this situation remedied itself as we neared the steeply ascending end of the passage. The light above shone brightly, creating weird patterns on the walls, which inexplicably glistened with moisture near the exit. All my interest to the walls vanished in favour of reaching the other end. Grasping at the edges and feeling grass beneath my palm, I pulled myself up, and helped Lou.
In a striking contrast to the outside, this place we emerged at remained completely stormless and snowless. We stood upon a circular, fairly elevated rock platform, surrounded by green trees in every direction. Trees, as far as the eye can see (to our discredit, this was not very far: after all, we left late, and reached this place at right around night-time), of which we saw no trace during the conquest of the Aran's unwelcoming slope. Seven stone pillars with curious inscriptions on them surrounded us. Yet even these faded in importance as we raised our heads skyward.
The moon appeared to take up a quarter of the sky right above us. So large, so vivid, so detailed was Earth's companion, that we could see the cracks in the larger crater walls. Breathless, we stood in silence, intently studying the great sphere. So stunning was the sight that I barely noticed a soft pale glow emanating from the strange, unreadable glyphs inscribed in the stone of the pillars around us.
It was the purity and the atmosphere of it all - a feeling of infinity, stranded upon an island in the green arboreal ocean with only the giant Moon for a companion - but more importantly, a lack of desire to go back to the windy, stormy, and snowy Aran - that contributed to our decision to spend the night there. I propped myself against one of the obelisks, whose sigil-light I dismissed as reflective dust craftily deposited in the etched fissures making up the writing, and spied Lou contemplatively viewing the infinity of the forest. I wanted to inquire as to what fascinated him so, but the heavy gaze of the moon hypnotized me, and I swiftly slipped into a dreamless bliss.
In retrospect, even after wrongly dismissing the nature of the glowing stone monoliths, I should have known that something was wrong. We reached a world which could not exist, and waved it off as a remote possibility. All of this dawned upon me as I woke up - alone - near the featureless wall on the familiar Aranian snow, whereat we stumbled upon the cave the day prior. No lightnings slashed the sky, no perpetual cloud hung above me like a dark omen, and no dirty snow rolled about, being replaced by the delicate white veil we saw only at the bottom of the mountain. Gradually, I found feeling of my limbs, still asleep due to the awkward pose in which I woke up. I slowly arose, shielding myself from the blinding rays of the sun by a barely-obeying arm.
A group of rock-climbers made themselves known, coming out from the same direction from which we came originally. Noticing me, one of them said something to the group, whereupon they stopped and sent over a delegate.
"You alright there, chap? You look like you'd a-spent the night here. The Aran gets angry at sleepers, it does; gets cold enough to freeze the balls off the brass monkey when the moon rises."
Tourists? At the cursed Aran? The warmth of movement must've finally thawed my neurons, for I just then began to grasp the gravity of the situation. At length, I told them of our journey into Leuad Chlun and asked them whether they caught sight of a tall blonde man during the course of their ascent. They stared at me with mixed looks of fascination, fear, and caution, as if beholding an escaped madman.
"It's alright, bud," another one said to me after telling me he hadn't seen Lou. "You two stayed at Betws-y-coed, you say? Let's get you back there."
During our descent, I overheard them discussing the recent trend of "hitting up the Mary J" in celebration of reaching a mountain peak by teenagers. Despite the cold dagger of dread in my gut and the knut of the insulting drug accusation whipping away at my ego, I resolved to keep my silence. Whatever remained of my reasoning told me not to further worsen the situation with ramblings they would be unlikely to believe in any case.
The Watkin path swiftly took us down to Rhyd Ddu. As we trekked the streets inundated with tourists, I regained my composure somewhat, and started a discussion of Prime Minister Wentworth's recent victory. My companions, whose appearance hinted at Hindu roots, quickly picked up the conversation and particularly praised the new liberal immigration laws. I loosely kept track of the resulting stream of appreciative chatter, and made sure to nod and grunt at the right places.
At last, I saw the hotel. Waving goodbye to my supposed rescuers and yelling apologies for disrupting their vacation, I turned to the door. The blade of anxiety eased off when I saw Lou's van. I entered the front hall, and asked the receptionist of his arrival.
"Mr. Louis Christian Pfer? There is no one in our book by that name. I'm sorry, sir," she said after a pause. "You must have confused him with someone else. You arrived here yesterday, and you were alone. Your car is still in the driveway."
The words struck me like a cannonball. Saying no more, I charged upstairs to our suite. The door was locked; I rattled the knob in futility until remembering of a key in the back pocket of my jeans. Shaking hands did little to aid my frantic attempts to fit the key into the hole. I stopped for a second, inhaled a breastful of air, and let it out with quaking lungs. The key went in easier this time, and I swung the door open.
My things lay undisturbed, and the other half of the room was empty. Only a piece of paper lay on Lou's bed.
"Grwydryn, aros ennyd; ystyra ryfeddol waith Duw a'th daith fer ar y ddaear hon." Beneath: "Wanderer, wait a moment; consider God's wondrous work and your short journey on this earth."
Two perpendicular lines struck out the word "God", and below that, there was a correction.
"
MY.
Enjoy yourself.
Lou C. Pfer"
-----------------
Bit of an exercise with this: I used a real location in this story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yr_Aran
