To Breach a Citadel

The camera was in remarkably good shape. When they nudged the power button, the display sprang to life and the first clip ran without waiting for permission. Amidst the carnage of splintered branches and sap-scented screams, six outlines huddled together around a tiny, shining rectangle in the swelling twilight.

“Hello everyone! So good to have you with me for this round of Discovery—it’s unreal already. So, just as promised, I’ve gone and made my way to a place that has rebuffed all attempts at taming it or diminishing it.”

A quick jiggle of the camera. “Gosh, I’m so excited, I can’t—it’s a good thing I brought my notebook. This is pure poetry. This is art—wild, wild art. I wish I had better equipment to show you, but, guys …welcome to Ubiet Downs.”

The camera panned out over the trees—trees that lay broken around the six men now, but which, in the video, still stood tall and majestic, lush green, with crowns swaying, mumbling in the wind.

“Giants. Look at them. There’s not even a path. Oh, I’m looking forward to this.” Footsteps, crunching. “Hold up, the edges of that gorge are too steep, I’ll need both hands.

“Right, I’m down the first slope. You’ve never seen a plunge like that, straight down into this axe wound of a valley, unbelievable. And look, just look.”

The light barely illuminated their faces now as the image crawled over emerald-black moss and rutted trunks, standing so close, fat roots so clenched around one another that nothing else grew in this dark cathedral but the trees, gripping the mountainsides and holding fast to one another.

“There’s no wind here, nothing at all.” A soft, breathy laugh. “I can hear them shift and bend up there, but down here, it’s …” Light dappled, flashing secret code over the forest floor with the dance of the branches. “No birds. No animals at all. Makes you kind of …not want to speak. Don’t want to intrude, like. Or be …you know that feeling in a church, the ones with those grim martyrs and their dead rock eyes, judging your soft, licentious little life?” Footsteps, thudding downwards on deep centuries of soil. “Like that. I’ll be quiet and just let you soak it all in for a bit, okay?”

Birds, chirping an erratic soundtrack for the unsteady blur smeared over the screen; wordless, slow sweeps across ancient columns and boulder-pews to both sides; breaths whooshing out with the occasional jump down a bigger rock.

“Did you see all this moss? It’s like a lake, flooding higher the deeper in I go.” A waver in the camera’s frame, an arm faltering. “And it’s warm down here, phew. Let me take off this jacket real quick.

“Now. So. Ubiet Downs, records say, is located in a spot so remote that even modern harvesters cannot breach it. I mean, you saw those cliffs I scrambled down. Let’s hear it for good shoes, eh? And every time they tried, stuff just …broke down. Tumbled into the valley. Lost transmission fluid, ran out of fuel, broke a blade. Like, it cost just so much that people eventually gave up. Guess this place just didn’t want to leave. The forest crawls back out of the ditch every few decades of course, and those trees get cut down because, well, but no one wants to go past the edges anymore. Maybe there’s just no insurance company left that’ll cover for it.”

The image tilted towards the forest floor and two hands untied the laces of a sturdy boot before the journey was jolted back upright.

“There are so many stories, but almost no actual footage of this place? I thought I’d have to crawl over bodies in here. Find single shots without people, you know? But look: it’s all beech husks and crumbly oak leaves, not a single cigarette butt or bottle or …what’s the word, pristine. You still kinda expect those little painted hiking signs on the trunks though. The path is really …I mean, these roots.” A bare foot landed on a swell of wood rolling like a thick snake from the litter-strewn ground. “You can just …like a stairwell. Right this way.” The angling, rattling camera caught the second boot as it tumbled ahead down the steepening slope, bouncing sluggishly from root to trunk to jagged boulder. Something else hit the floor with a heavy thump somewhere in the background.

“I love the taste of this place. Damp rot, stone, bark. They say there’s a river at the bottom. I’m so glad you get to see this. Ethereal. Look how dense those trunks are getting down here, tall and straight, not a one broken. Like a black cathedral; soot of a million lonely, guttering candles. Those fireflies. My notebook. I will get …” The image tumbled, rolling over and over, coming to a jarring stop a few seconds later.

A voice could still be heard in the swallowing silence of the video, far off, shambling closer over three or four agonising minutes while the camera tried to focus on a tree-trunk, a hunchbacked rock, a trunk, a rock. Then two feet passed through the frame, two naked legs shifting in the gloom. The voice moved on down the dizzying slope, weakening, fragmenting, silent. The image kept wavering from trunk to stone to the deep shadows between, making the lifeless things on screen shift softly down, down, down into the gorge. After several silent, grainy minutes, the display winked out.

The six foresters—much further up the slope than that trunk or that last, blurry rock—lifted their gazes from the screen to one another. They had forgotten time, and space, and place.  In the sepulchral silence that surrounded them, they knew they’d cut down every single whispering, swaying tree in a wide radius around the spot where they stood, covering the churned-up ground in splintered wood and dying leaves. And yet, as they watched, dappled shadows shifted gently across each man’s petrified eyes.

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Ⓒ Jeannie Marschall