(154) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

“They have come—the foresters from the far slope, unknown to us, strangers to our ways, rebels against our customs…”*

René Char, The Inventors

Don Carotte's Notebook

Sang Chaud and I moved forward in silence, slowly, every sense alert, moved by so much order concealed beneath apparent chaos. We were fascinated by that millennial machinery of slow decomposition... no less than by the simultaneous growth of struggle and organic equilibrium.
But this forest, which at first I had contemplated with the detachment of the scholar and the faith of the seeker, soon closed around us like a great green maw. From our very first steps beneath the canopy, something essential changed: direction itself.
Where we believed we were walking straight ahead, we were turning. Visible paths vanished as quickly as they appeared. Every trunk resembled the last; every clearing proved to be an illusion... Most unsettling of all were those moments when the murmur of the wind became the forewarning of a trap. I knew those traps of the mind, yet that did not prevent the forest from organizing itself against us... or perhaps it was doing nothing at all... but even its inertia had already become a form of hostility. Every movement demanded a struggle: to shift or cut a liana, to crawl beneath a root, to climb over fallen branches. Sweat ran down my back as a mountain stream flees the heights.

And there was that slow, heavy feeling, shared by Sang Chaud and me, that we were not alone. Not because some animal was stalking nearby—that was not it—but because the forest itself was watching us. It seemed endowed with a vast and silent gaze, scattered among a thousand vegetal eyes. It did not tolerate our presence; it merely endured it, waiting for us to surrender, to lose our way, to yield to its slow embrace.
The ground was a yielding web, the roots were snares, the branches dead arms stretched out to delay us. To move forward became an abstraction: every step gained was paid for with doubt. An hour... a day... I no longer knew. Time had lost its bearings, swallowed by the dampness, the sap, the murmuring. And the deeper we penetrated, the more we understood that this forest was not a place.
It was a world.
And that world had no need of us...
...and Sang Chaud had disappeared.

* It is worth recalling that the French word forêt (“forest”) derives from the Latin foris, meaning “outside,” “beyond,” “away,” or “strange,” from which also comes foraneus (“foreign,” “belonging outside”).