The Heart of the Mountain

The entrance to the underground tunnel was hidden, patiently waiting behind a large silver-spike bush that had probably sprouted up earlier that spring. Darkness reached to the very edge of the opening, ruling out any hope I had of surveying the inside landscape before entering. It had taken five days, once summiting the mountain, to find this first important piece. The small inconsistency at the base of the wall had initially not presented as anything of importance, but after a time of failed searching, my mind brought itself back to that staunchly white shrub.

A cool rush of relief from finding the entrance spread quickly over my body, pushing out a small nagging feeling from an inner part of myself that wished for anything but the darkness that beckoned. This same feeling of relief was not being felt by my companion. My guide, a small man with wiry hair held back by a cloth, was staring at me with a very strange look, too strange to describe in detail here.

“That's the entrance you have brought me all this way to find,” he stated or asked. I could not tell which, either from his tone or my general lack of care for any comment this man-made. I gave no response, focusing instead on this new encouraging discovery.

When I lay on my stomach, the opening was only five inches taller than the height of my body. I pulled my headlamp from my tightly packed bag and shined it into the opening. The light, even as strong as it was, did not hit any back wall. It seemed that this small hole cut into the mountain led into a larger open space, possibly a cave. Directing light over the tight inside walls, my heartbeat caught, then pounded. I was staring at a clear manifestation of the first line of my translated treasure map.

Behind clenched teeth …

“This really is it,” I whispered.

“What!”, my guide responded, not realizing I was not speaking to him. Again, I gave no response.

The entrance walls were completely covered in sharp-looking stalactites. The cave was baring its teeth at me. I had not expected the riddle I had translated from the ancient Tsongol engravings to be so literal. The late nights I spent meticulously translating each line of text was finally coming to fruition. My old university colleagues had long lost respect for my research into this Mongolian myth. Little did I know, the end game to my colleagues’ loss of faith was expulsion from the university. (I will not include the university’s name in this account, they deserve no credit.) But my recent unemployment allowed me to focus more, so I bear no hard feelings.

“I’ll climb into the opening,” I told my guide. “Prepare the harness.”

“You want to go in there?” my guide asked. I was becoming very tired of his questions. “Why don’t we come back tomorrow miss, the sun will be setting soon. There is no fun cave crawling in the night.”

I grabbed the rope from his hands and started knotting. I clicked myself into the leather harness that had been my companion through many digs. My harness never asked me any questions. The guide was still monologuing as I attached my cord to the wall, got on my stomach, and began navigating around all the sharp stone protrusions. The light of my headlamp barely penetrated the darkness in front of me. I lost track of time, but I could tell crawling without cutting myself was slow work. I knew that my guide would be annoyed at this point, waiting for me. His annoyance meant nothing to me though.

Emerging from the edge of the cave’s teeth, I came onto another cliff. Surveying this new room with my headlamp, I saw it was not a room at all but a circular pit that seemed to have no bottom. The next step …

Descend without Fear …

The descending walls were much drier than the climate surrounding the mountain. I tied my hair in a loose knot at the beginning of our climb to avoid that moist feeling on my neck that I despised, now the feeling was gone.

“What’s in there?” my guide called from outside. I felt a world away from him.

“I found a vertical tunnel. I am going to belay down into it. It follows the riddle,” I responded.

“The night will soon be our third expedition member. Let’s come back tomorrow, it’ll be safer.”

“No, I am going into the pit now. Send through my gear.”

The guide did not like my opinion, which he confirmed with, “I don’t care that this jewel totem you are searching for is worth twenty-thousand dollars, and the darkness of night wouldn’t care if it was worth twenty million. I will not search through the night in an unsurveyed cave for a treasure no one has seen for hundreds of years!”

“THEN GO! You guided me to this spot. I consider the job I have retained you for to be completed. You already have your commission. Send through my gear, and leave,” I commanded.

He remained quiet. I could only see the very bottom of his shoes from inside the cave, but I could hear his sigh of relinquishment. He attached my gear to the cord so I could pull it to where I was, then his boots turned and walked away. I was grateful he did not commemorate our short shallow partnership with parting words; his silence would serve as the best memory of our encounter.

I secured myself to the inside ledge and began my descent. The silence calmed me, quieting a rumble in my gut that cried out to escape this pit. I was not going back.

Roughly twenty feet into the tunnel, etchings began to appear on the walls surrounding me along with cracks in the rock as big as the pen I am now using to document them. The cracks seemed to be some crystalline inconsistency; the etchings were much more unsettling. They were not in any language I could identify. I would have thought they were scratch marks of someone trying to escape had they not been so consistent from one patch of carvings to the next. The characters were incredibly scattered as if the writer was frenzied. Where the etchings started, they were widely separated, sparse. Descending further the etchings only increased, in both size and number. Hours into my tedious climb, I was now completely surrounded. The etchings were as tall as me; the cracks were taller. Climbing for so long and getting nowhere was taking a toll. I trembled as I tried to record some of the etchings into my field notebook. A single finger slip and my notebook would plunge into the never-ending darkness. Maybe that's where my little black expedition log belonged.

Regret for sending away my guide grew. No one would be waiting above for my return, not that being alone was a new feeling to me but it was more acute while dangling inside this mountain.

I knew I was missing something. Closing my eyes I recited the riddle that had brought me all this way.

Behind clenched teeth

Descend without fear

No light nor blade saves here

Cast out all tremblings

Let the heart lead the way

Only the righteous will prosper, the rest decay

“What's next?” I thought, “I can’t keep going down.”

The third line sounded like tips for a battle but who was there to battle here. “Light, No Light”, I repeated. Since the one who made the etchings, this tunnel must have existed in complete darkness until my headlamp and I appeared. So I turned my headlamp off, an attempt to see without light. For a moment, everything was black but light returned. A faint glow was coming from all the cracks around me which had not been perceptible before. Sticking my head a little ways into the crack nearest me, I realized these cracks were not like any other natural crack in the earth I had encountered before. This splinter in the earth deepened. The light within grew brighter further in, flickering a little. Attempting to push farther in, I was stopped by my harness and pack. I’d have to discard them to go deeper. Firmly planting my foot, I removed my notebook and secured it in the waistband of my pants. I connected my backpack to my now-removed harness. It swung on the rope in the place I had been just a moment before. Then, into the crack, I went.

A person any bigger than me would not have been able to complete this trail, squeezing between these great stone slabs. The thought of being unable to move, dying from exposure here in the mountain turned my stomach. But I thought of the prize and pushed forward. It took a second for me to realize the trembling I was experiencing was coming from the mountain, not my heart. Finally reaching the end of my squirm, I pushed out into another larger room that had been surrounding the tunnel, an even bigger shaft into the earth. There was a stone spiral staircase cut into the wall I was peering out from. I was lucky enough to come through a crack that was only a two-foot jump down onto the stairs. The light I had seen coming from the crack was much brighter now. Looking down, the color of the light increased to a burning red. The trembling in the mountain nearly took my feet out from under me. I would have to be careful in my descent.

After some time, I had nearly reached the bottom of the stairs. Trembling in the mountain had been replaced by a shuddering which made my teeth clatter, the light waiting at the bottom was close to blinding. My heart raced when my foot touched the bottom landing, revealing a small room with a stone podium in the middle. The light illuminating this entire cavernous mountain was coming from a red stone about the size of an ostrich egg. Somehow the stone floated above the podium and was incased by red flame. This was the heart of the mountain, a culmination of my life’s work. In a trance, I was pulled within inches of this glowing orb. Was the stone speaking to me?

Not thinking I reached out my hand, wrapping my fingers around its brilliance. The flames overtook my fingers and my hand glowed a matching red. My scream came out before my mind could process the shattering pain I felt.

“Let go. Let go!!”

Flames shot up my arm but I was unable to detach myself. Pushing past pain I brought to mind the riddles final warning.

Only the righteous will prosper, the rest decay

I was being tested; the final test. Wrenching my arm from the heart, the flames dissipated on my limb causing a color change from red to charred black. I’d have felt pain if I had been able to feel anything at all. Even now, on this final morning, as I record the full account with my non-dominant hand my shriveled right-hand means nothing to me. It had to be this way. I regret nothing.

I will try again to take the mountain’s heart as mine. I attempted sleep but everytime my eyes close the heart appears behind my eyelids, calling to me. The riddle’s final line tells me to prove myself, prove my purpose is righteous, my intentions are pure. I am not sure why I have detailed my journey since no part of me believes I will perish in this quest, but I recorded it in full anyways. Maybe some other lost soul will come along to read it.

The heart calls me and I will go. I will have the heart or it will have me.

I may never go home.

That is all.