(163) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

 
"There was a forest there... an immense forest, an inextricable tangle of trunks, lianas, shadows, and silence... It seemed motionless, yet filled with a hostile gaze. It was impossible to cross it without losing one's reason, so completely did it swallow everything into its green, humid darkness."

After Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)

Where Don Carotte inwardly experiences what is scarcely visible from without, and what, by its immense magnitude, gives him the uncanny feeling of being listened to...

From Don Carotte's Journal

The insects came next. At first they were discreet... exceedingly discreet. We believed we could make out the beating of their wings, their mandibles, their persistence. A continuous humming, which I imagined to be that of those invisible insects, insinuated itself even into my thoughts. The presence of that hum was more than physical: it crept in, it irritated the mind. And always there remained the impression that, behind the green curtain, something was listening.
I no longer knew how long we had been walking. Daylight scarcely changed anymore beneath that canopy so dense that it seemed to filter even time itself. My body grew heavy. I felt as though I were being drawn toward the earth by a force greater than gravity. And the trees—those great silent guardians—began to change. Their long, slender branches clawed at our passage like dry fingers. Some fell soundlessly beside us; others brushed against our faces like coarse feathers.
At times we would stop and suddenly turn around. A sound too near, one crack too many. But there was nothing.
Never anything.
Only trees.
Too many trees.
Too much verticality, too many similar forms within the relative stillness of the shade.
We had the feeling that we could no longer distinguish above from below.
Then, replacing the humming, came the auditory hallucinations. Distorted voices, far away—perhaps my own... perhaps those of the forest. Words that did not exist, and yet which I heard with perfect clarity. At times I believed I recognized footsteps, even behind me. My own breathing came back to me as an echo, but altered, as though it had passed through another mouth.
Every trunk became a threat.
Every rustling crown of leaves concealed an intention.
I dreamed while awake.
My mind wandered within another logic, a mental forest darker still than the one outside.
I was no longer an observer.
I had been taken.
And in one last moment of lucidity, I understood that it was not the forest that was labyrinthine.
It was I who had become formless within it.

Then, without my being able to say how, or at what moment, the ground beneath our feet had changed, we were no longer in the forest.
We were standing at the centre of a clearing.
Suddenly.
Not that we had seen it appear, nor felt it opening around us. There had been neither transition nor abrupt break, neither any gradual thinning of the foliage: we simply found ourselves there, as though space itself had quietly shifted around us without our noticing.
And the clearing was growing before our very eyes.