Page 39 - NOMADS_NO2_2015

Now, on the wrong mountain, I began playing with the situation. Never far from words I started tearing up some pages of my paperback, scattering pieces of it behind me to leave a trail, and giggling as I went. I stopped giggling when I rounded the right side of the slope. The drop was thousands of feet straight down to a river gorge, and I was on the rocky edge.
One wrong step and I was dead. No one would know what became of me if I fell into oblivion. I started to shake. I didn’t dare climb off the slope while panicked. To calm myself, I sat where I was and began to read my book of Pablo Neruda’s Machu Picchu poems:
.. I climbed through the barbed jungle’s thicket until I reached you...
Tall city of stepped stones...
High reef of the human dawn
My hands trembled the pages. I couldn’t focus. Instead I snatched at random lines. I was jolted back into my fear when I came to his words about the Incas who, ”from perforated rocks...plummeted like an autumn into a single death.”
Quickly, I switched the page. For an hour I read Neruda, joined my curiosity to his about the people who long ago.”found rest at night near eagle’s talons.” It gave me an emotional escape from my precarious present and lulled my nerves enough for me to risk backing slowly down the mountain.
There were a couple of foot slips. Some boulders I had to grab. Some stops to read Neruda again, when fright overpowered.
Scratched and sweaty, I finally reached the plateau. I was full of gratitude to the poet who saved my life. I gave a second nod to the Inca gods.
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