Briefing for a Descent Into Hell by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online

last I scrambled up on to a narrow ledge against the final glassy wall. Looking down, it was a scene of magnificent forests through which the river went in a shining green streak, and beyond the forests, the circling white rim of sand, and beyond that, a horizon of sea. Up here all the air was filled with the sharp smell of river spray and the flowering scents from the forests below. The evil-smelling cleft I had come through now seemed to have had no real part in my journey, for its dark and constriction seemed foreign to the vast clear space of the way I had been—but that had not been so, and I made myself remember it. Without the painful climb through the cleft I would not be standing where I was—and where I was had no way on and up, or so it seemed. I had to go up, since there was nothing else to do, but I could not go up. The ledge I stood on, about a yard wide, dwindled away into air very soon, as I saw, when I explored it to its end on either side. In front of my face was this smooth dark rock like glass, intowhich I peered as I had into the sides of glossy waves in the sea. Only here there were no fish staring out at me, only a faint reflection of a face shaggy with many weeks’ growth of beard. And now I did not know what to do. It was not possible to climb up that glassy rock. It was twenty, thirty feet high, and it had no crack or rough place in it. I sat down, looking East into the morning sun, back over the way I had come, and thought that I might as well die in this place as in any other. Then there was a movement in the cleft, and I saw the head of the yellow beast come cautiously up, for it was a tricky climb even for him—it must have been as much too narrow for him as it had been too wide for me. After him came his friend, or his mate. I moved well over to give the big animals room to stand on the ledge, but they did not remain beside me. First one and then the other turned to give me a long steady stare from its green eyes. Their great square tufted yellow heads were outlined against the deep blue of the sky beyond—and then first one and then the other went on up the precipitous glassy rock, in a couple of big easy bounds. I saw the two heads, still outlined against the blue sky, peering down at me over the rocks thirty feet above. I got up and moved to the place on the ledge from where these two had just bounded, unable to believe what I had seen, and then I noticed that on the smooth glassy surface was a roughened streak, like a path, which was only visible when the light struck it at a certain angle. This was not as rough as the trunk of a thick-barked tree, but it was as rough as weatherworn granite. Without the example of the two beasts I would never have even thought of attempting to climb like a flyup this ribbon of rough across the smooth, but now I stood as high as I could, reaching up and up with my palms, and I found that by not thinking of how terrible and dangerous a thing it was I was doing, my hands and feet clung to this rough breathing rock face, and I found I had come to the top of the impassable mirrorlike rock, and I fell forward among rocks on the edge of the plateau for which I had been aiming. It was at once evident that this height, the summit of my aims since I had landed on the beach far below the day before, was the lowland plain to mountains that rose far ahead, to the West, on a distant horizon, probably fifty miles away. Looking down over the frightful path I had ascended, it now seemed nothing very much, and the sharp glass summit that I had thought it impossible to surmount was no more alarming than—anything that one has done, and apparently done easily. The broad river was a shining silver streak. The lower falls ten or twelve miles away where the whole land with its burden of forest slid sharply down was no more than a shadowy line across tree-tops, and a white cloud low over the forest was the miles-long cataract. The high falls, close under the escarpment, whose