Nearer to the Light

"And it's here, above me, that once in five or ten years, these huge Dipterocarp trees burst forth and turn the billowing rainforest of Sumatra into a riot of colour as one species after another comes into flower..."

He took a breath and waited without moving. He could almost hear the forest exhale in a sigh.

Palm resting on smooth bark, he peered upward as daylight filtered through a latticework of foliage two hundred feet above. Every vertebrae in his neck creaked. There was no dusk here to play with; the forest would plunge to inky black in minutes this close to the Equator. It was his last piece to camera on the final day at the end of a long long fortnight in Indonesia. He was bone-tired but he didn't want to risk losing the sequence. Any sequence. But this one particularly. He tried not to think about the futility of the show. Knowledge is power, he told himself. Even if the knowledge comes too late.

Kamila, his producer, squinted at the footage, came over and stood next to him. "Thank you, Michael, nicely done," adding "you smashed it! I knew you would." She squeezed his arm. "And the show will be worth it. Even if..." she followed his sightline and the words died on her lips. "It's a wrap," she said with false cheeriness. "We should get going before dark, get you safely back to civilisation," and moved away to chat to the cameramen packing up their kit.

Michael sank down on the thick knotted roots that made up the vast trunk of the tree behind him and accepted a mug of earthy local coffee offered by the new production assistant, an earnest girl of around twenty-three.

He smiled his thanks at her and she bounded away easily over roots and TV paraphernalia littering the forest floor, her silky ponytail swinging. But her name, what was it now - Maisie, Daisy - something old-fashioned that wouldn't have been out-of-place when he was a boy - eluded him like the iridescent flash of a freshwater fish in a fast-moving stream. A sweet girl with big fawn eyes that gazed at him with the awed reverence of a disciple, tempered with the benevolent concern of a favourite grand-daughter. He felt guilty about her name; he set great store by not being precious, just one of the team and so forth, but at his age - for crying out loud - he had to admit it was probably to be expected?

Ironically - perhaps understandably - he had no such difficulty in front of the camera. Even doing his pieces on the hoof, from the depths of his increasingly uncooperative memory he could still summon up - with scarcely a moment's hesitation - a litany of botanical and scientifically correct descriptors for any flora and fauna that might come into shot unexpectedly, appear through a thicket or turn out to be sitting motionless next to him on a branch. The small tree-climbing Helarctos malayanus or Sun Bear, fond of sunbathing aloft. Or the weirdly-humanoid Proboscis Monkey, Nasalis larvatus of Borneo, Panthera tigris sumatrae, a name embued with the supple fluidity of its owner, the rare and endangered Sumatran Tiger or even Dipterocarpus elongatus, the original host of the hollow monster trunk he stood next to now.

A quote popped into his head. 'One cannot undo what has happened but the inexorable march of time offers the wise opportunities for redemption'.

It flashed across his mind that he couldn't remember being twenty-three. He was glad Kamila had convinced him that he could do this trip, but God, he was shattered. He closed his eyes.

..."I am five hundred years old... Reaching for the sky... Nearer ever nearer to the light..." Michael's eyes flicked open and he glanced around but everything was still the same. The voice was resonant, ageless but the few words he'd been able to make out had faded as he opened his eyes. It was like tuning in to a recalcitrant radio station.

He shut his eyes again and listened. There were the usual chirrups and calls from the canopy of leaves above, whirring and stirrings all about him of the hidden life in the undergrowth. A little way off, the murmurings of his colleagues, an occasional burst of laughter... and further still, the roar of heavy machinery and the ear-splitting screech of huge chainsaws; an ominous reminder that the the loggers' road was moving inexorably forward into the forest. Nearer.

"He could not help but destroy that which he loved most of all... but he must face annihilation alone for he has starved all those who could save him." This voice was soft, thin like a cobweb, intangible like a fleeting thought. More whisper than voice, but the words were distinct if only for a moment, then faded away into the battery of surrounding sound.

Michael sat up, fatigue falling from his shoulders. This time he had a good look around but there was no-one. He got to his feet and walked the entire circumference of the enormous tree trunk. Still no-one. But circumnavigating the tree had sparked his curiosity and he studied it more closely.

To the untrained eye, it was a single giant fig; its roots so enmeshed as to form a vast but hollow latticed trunk, the bushy branches rising up into the canopy to collect as much light as it was able. Truly, a magnificent forest giant. It was the perfect example not of one, but more likely two or three Strangler Figs - Ficus Aurea - knitted together over centuries. This specimen could indeed be five hundred years old!

But Michael's elation was tinged with sadness. He felt powerless. The ancient giant had run out of time. By tomorrow, the advance party of loggers would have reached this spot and all would be laid waste around him. It would not be long before the road opened up access to shifting cultivators bent on turning yet more rainforest into palm oil plantations and then the villagers would come.

* * * *

It was so long ago, it's hard to imagine. We have many names but here in the cloud-forest they call us Keruing. I come from a family of emergents and we are almost always tall. And it was clear early on that I would be one of the tallest.

I always loved the forest, there's so much to glory in; the tangled stories snaking back in time like rhizomes to the origins of creation, the nobility of our forbears, the circus of the canopy, the circular way of things.

The shape of a silvered leaf-monkey squeezing a pulpy fig, a fiery bird perched motionless, watching for movement with its quick black eye, a viper in the leaves. Each living thing with a purpose for the common good: to carry the un-winged seed to safety, to feed, fruit, protect and harbour, even aid that final journey towards death and decomposition in order that the forest might burst forth and live again. I suspect your kind might call it religion - yet every form of life here plays its part from the eagle floating in the misty firmament above the canopy to the insect toiling feverishly underground.

Like most of my kind, I'm not one to make a spectacle or fuss. Once in a while we will simultaneously adorn a million limbs with fragrance and beauty and the whole forest exults. On the whole, the Keruing need simple things. Clean air, space to reach towards the clouds, cool steady earth to ground us. The promise of light and the billowing canopy stretching as far as the eagle flies.

But the moment I felt that first tiny bud cradled in my arms and begin to swell, I felt my destiny stir.

Others warned me. But how could I turn them out? I was always happy enough to reach upwards without thought of the consequences, extend a hand to my neighbour, watch the gibbons leap and the squirrels fly. So I urged my children to put down roots and grow strong and tall,

They were all different. The eldest was a lazybones, slow and sleepy, head in the clouds without his feet 0n the ground. I did my best but he was small, solemn, a pale and sickly mite, always lagging behind the others. He lacked purpose and longed for it all the same. He was the lost soul I failed to save and it broke my heart.

The middle one was quicker off the mark, with smooth limbs and a generous nature. He was too gentle though, sought to see the best in everyone and no match for the youngest.

I always suspected from his first germination in a high sunlit hollow that the youngest would be the one who would go furthest and cause me the most heartache.

I felt it in the breathless air, the droplets pooled in my nooks and notches but I knew also that the same gossamer wings guided him to me in the same way as it leads the tiger to the safe stones and the old Red Man of the Forest to trees that are heavy with fruit.

He was always desperate to be first, highest, quickest, strongest. I'd catch him with his vines wrapped around the neck of one of his brothers, squeezing the life from him. As he gained vigour he turned ruthless, took everything for himself. But for all that he stole, he gave back in figs a hundredfold. All this I could sense in the pale green of his first curling leaves and the grateful music of the nocturnal shaggy-haired Binturong devouring those figs. Ours was a fragile relationship. There would be sacrifice. It was inevitable.

He frightened me so deep was his desire for eternal power and knowledge. I tried to tell him that nothing comes without a price but so profound was his conviction of eternal might he wouldn't listen and even now is deaf to my whisperings.

By the second cloud-forest flowering of his lifetime, I knew it wouldn't be long before I would be nothing more than a dried husk.

Unnatural sounds have been heard and the eagle and the rhinoceros recount fearful stories of wastelands not far distant and tell of a Dry Serpent River snaking across the land. The monkeys have always been too silly to believe in the Slash and Burn Change but if you sniff the air you would smell it. The Red Man of the Forest believes the end is coming and even the Little People who used to come sometimes and blow their death-pipes at the monkeys and parrots have all run away.

Perhaps you can help my son, for although you are one of Them, I feel you understand our pain as if it were your own?

* * * *

My limbs are stiff. I am old now and hollowed out, anchored in the sweet odour of decay. Five hundred years is a heartbeat in the lifetime of a rainforest but an eternity to be alone with the guilt of what I am and what I've done. And yet even now, I find I can't fight my instinct for survival in this twilight world.

I was the youngest of three. Despite being born last and up near the canopy, I enjoyed my tree-top youth, capturing easy nutrients from the sun, rain, mist and dust. Our mother was like Mother Nature, tall and statuesque. She gave us sustenance and protection gladly. I was clever and ambitious and although she had enough love for us all I wanted it all for myself.

I grew fast. My young shoots reached the ground long before my brothers. I laughed off my mother's concerns and sent coils of roots fanning out underground. Once I got a foothold in the earth, nothing could stop me; Young sap surged through my veins and I delighted at the competition, sending out thicker, ever stronger shoots reaching for the sky, nearer to the light.

One of my brothers died early on - nothing to do with me - but I didn't give him a second thought. My remaining brother worried about squeezing the lifeblood from Mother, it's true, but I am a survivor and knew how it must be. As we grew, she diminished. As we ate, she starved. As we climbed upward, she was left behind. Gradually we became fused around her, of one thought and one mind. Only now, there is a hollowed shell inside me where there should be a beating heart.

* * * *

I know that I am great! I carry trembling dreams in every league I travel. Before me stretches the untrammelled way and in my wake I leave the purity of order. Beneath my dusty surface lie the dried-up tears of those whose land I've taken, the silence of the forests I've opened to civilisation and the turmoil of the inhabitants I turned out. But I cannot rest here for I must press forward. To my critics I say this: I have done everything asked of me. I have taken the Small Man with nothing but a mouthful of words and made him all-powerful.

* * * *

Chucca... chucca... the helicopter blades gathered speed and the shiny metallic body lurched forward and upward like an ungainly beetle.

Michael gazed out of the window as they rose above the clearing, through the lower strata until the dense leafy canopy fell away. Below him, twisting away to the south-west lay the brown scar of the road, a startling injurious gash in the undulating swell of the Dipterocarp canopy. Columns of smoke emerging from rippling green indicated a wider devastation.

The thing that had guided his entire career had evaporated. His desire to change perceptions, his need to search and find hope in the petals of an opening flower or the unblinking stare of a tiger in the underbrush had been like food to him and now it was gone. The emptiness within gave him an aching sense of unparalleled sorrow. And shame.

Within him was a deeper knowledge that he could never articulate. It was too late! He'd heard the voices and ignored them. "I'm an observer," he'd reasoned. "It's not my role to influence the direction of the road. I can't change the world. All I can do is to show people the magic of the natural world, to educate and inspire. To bring them nearer to the light of understanding."

As he'd stumbled his way towards the rootless clearing to the helicopter with Kamila and Maisie on either side, his nose prickled with the twin odours of acrid smoke mixed with waterlogged wood, floating downriver to the timber yard. Through the shriek of the chainsaws behind them and the roar of the bulldozers, in the crashing of the falling jungle, he'd heard a long single scream of agony.