CARE TO TRANCE?
Milton Schorr trips down a rock art trail — and enters a whole new universe
IN the mountains outside Clanwilliam, once the advertised hikes are done and only the silence and the heat remain, it’s easy for a city-slicker to be fooled into thinking that the place has been seen, and it’s time to move on. Luckily for Daniel and me, we were told about the Sevilla San Rock Art Trail, which changed everything.
We were camping at the De Pakhuys bouldering site and the trail begins very near there, just off the R364 towards Wupperthal. A sign at the coffee shop at the trail’s head said: “If we’re closed take the trail now, come and pay later” (roughly), and so we did. Without any information, we headed out, certain that what we’d find would be fine, that the mountains would provide. Not far in we met a German couple returning, who passed their map of the trail on to us. We saw that there were nine sites of San rock art ahead of us, on a round walk of about 4km. We went for it.
At site one, we read that we should look out for a strange, black image of a large group of people. We crowded around the rock wall and found it. Reading, we discovered that the paint itself was not black; in fact, it’s a certain lichen that grows on the paint, turning it that way. We read that these paintings were at least 1 600 to 2 000 years old, and that an age of 8 000 years was easily possible. Wow. Such a delicate thing. Such a tiny, defiant, beautiful thing.
We hurried on to site two, looking forward to what the map called the “Cave of the Monsters”. We found lizards, big as dinosaurs. It was easy to imagine them roaring as they pulled their great bodies through a different time.
“Why would they paint dinosaurs? Are they dinosaurs? What are they?”
Nearby, a diamond-shaped rock greeted us, balanced on its point beneath the clear Clanwilliam sky. In its overhang, into which we had to almost crawl, we found the hind quarters of more monsters, horse-like beings with the legs of men, clear and perfect, alone on an otherwise clear sweep of rock.
Scrambling down a ledge to site four we found zebras, or quaggas, or horses.
We kept walking, tripping along in the sunlight, anxious to see the next, and the next. Soon we saw the finely rendered silhouette of a foal, clearly newborn, standing on unsteady legs, and close by the unmistakable, massive and proud bulk of an eland.
Who? How? Why? We had to wonder. What do they mean?
Looking out into the mountains with their sea of rock and valley, with their ocean of hidden caves and quiet, shady places, the modern world began to fade. We were drifting. Suddenly a clock with seconds or minutes was far away. Instead, there was the slow growing of shadows beneath the sun and at night the brilliant, slow wheeling of the stars.
A picture of an archer at the sixth site captivated us. His drawn bow seemed to create a perfect, invisible circle, a kind of a halo around his upper body. His dash of a penis stuck straight out, at odds with his legs, which seemed to flicker in the mirage of a hot day. Who was watching when this was drawn? Who admired the work afterward? What conversations? And more questions. How much time has passed since? How many people from all sorts of places, and all sorts of times, have admired this same thing? How much has the world changed?
As we continued, etchings of strange, misshapen, giant people added to our imagined world. At the next site, they stood together in a cluster, their legs bulbous and tall beneath stretched torsos, strange, finger-like breasts and tiny heads. There were the “hookhead men”.
“Aliens,” we found ourselves thinking, beings from another place in the sky, their heads holding uncountable cosmic mysteries.
“Elephants!” yelped Daniel, pointing. Yes. There they were, giants among the other drawings, lumbering across history in a pale, faded yellow. We scrambled along the rock face, looking for more, and were startled to find the tiniest rendering of fingers, or the loneliest runner, forever sprinting across a plain. The more we looked, the more time telescoped.
In our reading, we discovered that many believe the paintings to be expressions of trance states, of worlds within worlds. We spoke about what a trance state would be. Out there, far from any manmade thing, the difference between the physical and the spiritual world seemed very small. Looking at the hook-head men, and the lizard men, suddenly the furthest star was as close as the tiniest thought. Suddenly nothing was as it seemed.
Later, back at our campsite, I went to wash the dishes. We’d bought these all-in-one moulded plastic trays that included a plate and a cup holder and cutlery and we wanted to eat two-minute noodles with last night’s braai leftovers.
Thys, the young farmer and owner of the place, was at the ablution block beneath the bluegums, dropping off wood for a big braai that night. I told him we’d been on the trail. He nodded and agreed that the paintings were very special. He told me he’d wandered all over these mountains. He said he’d seen human figures as tall as his chest painted in yellow, like those elephants. He’d seen pictures of lions and shapes he didn’t understand.
“One day,” he said, “I’d like to draw a proper map of where they are, take some time and find them. But it’s hard to find the days. The farm takes running.”
“Gee,” I thought, soaping our one yellow and one green tray with Sunlight, “that would be a thing.” I was thinking of walking in these mountains, off the trail, finding those old places, and letting the past wash on.