Monday 1 June 2008
Big waves are moving mountains, but the 670 foot abseil at Maletsunyane waterfall is a static (and sadistic) twist to the concept of taking off on a big one, discovers Spike.
There is a mind-blowing bigness here, trillions of cubic feet of nothingness. The Maletsunyane gorge is a giant chasm in the earth, kilometres wide. Standing on the edge evokes exponential emotions. It is fear squared, and foreboding to the power of four. Ex equals why?
A deep gouge has been cleaved in one fell swoop by the monster God's axe - a dribble-jowled giant born in a story told to a child in the darkness. When the myth began, the winds of icy winter must have keened outside, while inside soft flames cast flickering shadows that danced on cracked walls of wattle and daub.
The shaggy cliffs, rock-slabbed and silent, are 800 foot sheer. Your eyes glaze with dizziness looking down from so high. Distant crags ooze quiet movement. Like a slow vice closing in. Your mind loops in a contorted jumble of vertigo and warbled thought.
Here you will find the Maletsunyane waterfall, home to the longest commercially operated single-drop abseil on earth, says that Guinness book. An hour’s walk from Semonkong, a small settlement deep in Lesotho, lies this place. What a place. So vast. So big. So OLD.
A thick misty malice from the dawn of time seems to leak a stomach-spinning emptiness from this hole in the world. Perhaps it is because a serpent, Noa, lives in the black lake below. Slippery with ancient slime, Noa comes out to feed, entwining the blurred roar of white water, floating luminescent in surging waves of spray. Noa uses this glittering chalice as bait to lure goats and terrified kids. Noa renders death by sucking the life, the blood and the guts, from his prey. Noa coughs up the pale wet carcasses. You sometimes see them washed up on the black boulder shores of the dark river, damned to a falling death by a simple mistake. It is a myth borne of giddiness and vertigenous terror, fearful warnings heeded by herd boys who faked a muted inscrutability.
Then there is the rope. It loops from the apex of three straps secured by three bolts screwed tight into the rock. It snakes along the granite to the precipice, then stops. Optical trickery makes it look cut, but you know it continues in another place - a shadow world vastly and vertically different to this sunny horizontal slab on the summit of the world.
The rope is your life line. But thin. So thin. The diameter of a R1 coin. And yet, try lift it. Ug. It's heavy. Abseil guide Felix, Sotho handsome and mountain elite, says 670 feet of rope weighs 35 kgs. You must lift it up between your legs, and stagger back two metres. You must haul each hand-fed loop through your gear, small step by wobbly step. A horrible irony starts hammer blows in your head when you realise how hard it will be to push yourself off the edge. Your back is to the drop. You must force yourself to the end of the world. Backwards. You're pushing as hard as you can with your legs, sweating to lift the rope. You body is succumbing to survival instinct. Your brain crushes the revolt, but the casualties are high: crazy contusions to your mental state. Your head is spinning with fear.
You will start on a rock shelf 80 feet above the foaming frontier between water and air where the river falls through the door into Hades. Leaning into the void at a 45 degree angle, attached by a rope pulling at your midriff, time suspends itself in sympathy. For a minute perhaps you shuffle sideways to straddle a metal drum bolted into the rock. Once your legs are planted on either side, you must squat over the drum and push out from the edge even harder to get the rope resting on the polished steel.
It's like you're giving birth to your guts. The mountain is the midwife pulling on your shit string - an umbilical chord reaching deep into your squirming innards.
The shiny metal drum will allow for a much smoother surface for the rope to loop around. No sharp rocks to turn your worst fears into reality.
Ready? Felix smiles. Head nods. Wait. Look up. Click. Click. Felix takes your picture. You step out from the bright sun and drop into instant shadow.
Each nerve ending emits a sudden hysterical signal. Synapses sputter. Electrical systems trip. Shutdown.
The backup generator in your brain is providing just enough power to lock your eyes on the metal drum like your life depends on it. You look at nothing else. The drum. Look at the drum. Keep looking at the drum. The drum. Wait a minute. There is a rope. Sliding from your fore-vision, there is a rope that narrows up to the drum. Look at the drum. The drum. The rope? No! The drum. Look at the drum. The rope? Drum. Rope? Drum. What is behind the rope? Rocks. Rocks?
Oh my gg ah ... what have I done?
Somewhere between your legs, disparate leather-gloved hands are feeding the rope furiously through your gear, but who is doing that? I haven't told any limbs to do anything.
After 75 feet of vertical rock you suddenly slip off an overhang and dangle. It is empty. There is nothing. Nothing. Everything is nothing. Nothing is empty. Nothingness and emptiness doing the fandango.
Null and void, except for a dull muffled thud coming from your chest.
Next to you, not 15 metres away, tons of water roar into the abyss. And yet, you cannot hear anything. It is not sound that reverberates through your bones. It is vibration. But that sensation goes in a flash as a terrifying dance move starts. It is not the fandango. It is the spin-dangle. You are dangling. You are turning. Slowly at first. Faster as momentum grips.
You are circled by a vacuum-packed kaleidoscope of nothingness, a gaping misty void. A blurry movie screen - split in half by the rope in front of your nose - oscillates between frames at each 360 degree revolution.
At first, your focus on the rope is too intense to make out the far distance, which remains a smudge. Ha ha, but you can't blot it out completely, that view of
roaring water, left cliff, far cliff, right cliff, rock
roaring water, left cliff, far cliff, right cliff, rock
roaring water, left cliff, far cliff, right cliff, rock.
G … g … giddy.
You still haven't looked down. Wait for spinning to stop. Will it stop? Where will I stop?
After four or five cycles, you stop. You quietly discover that one eye is so tightly shut, muscles in your eye socket are burning with fatigue. The other eye urgently requests permission to do the same. All the more reason because you have lost the tenuous security of the cliff in front of your eyes, which has kept the horror at bay beyond your back.
Now you are looking into the void, forced to face your fear. Why must life have to be so brutally literal?
But at least a seed is sown for that noble human faculty called reason to begin evolutionary mind games. After a brief but lively mental debate involving logic, reason, the heart and the stomach (with input from senses touch, hearing and sight), consensus is reached.
You slow down, on purpose, by closing up the bars of your gear to create more friction on the rope. You open both eyes, firmly. You look around. You look down. You swallow. The pool below is black. The waterfall is louder now, a deafening roar. The sound comes in waves as your Eskom mind comes back online.
A misty spray hangs in the air. It cools you. Soothes you. Sensation is creeping back. Now human will can be brought to bear in a bid to calm the thumping heart. Senses open up the sluice gates to suck in the unbelievable suspension sensation.
For the next 200 feet you slide down with back to the rock face looking out at the 800 ft cliffs opposite, watching kites soar at your height. Every once in a while, your ass bumps a sharp outcrop, but no pain is signalled to a brain still euphoric on endorphin overload.
Every 20 feet or so, you wriggle and scratch the rock with the tip of a boot, trying to gain purchase to turn back towards the face.
After another 200 feet or so, you manage it. You see weird little plants and bugs. You don't notice them. Some messages are still not coming through. A few suburbs still have load shedding.
It's kind of dreamy.
At the bottom, on rocks slippery from perpetual spray over thousands of years, I am told it took me 23 minutes to get down, about the average. I didn't notice time. It was inconsequential.
What a gobstopping experience.
As someone said in the guest book at Semonkong Lodge who operate the abseil: "Now I know what lies on the other side of fear. A rainbow."
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
