The Cave
Travel Blogpost (Azores)
I always wanted to visit a cave. For me, the very first cave I ever saw - or rather experienced - was Plato’s cave, the one from Allegory of the Cave.
The one where people live, chained and facing a wall, watching shadows cast by a light behind them, and if one dares to turn around and go out, the others would praise or blame him.
That’s how I remember it, as our gracefully speaking professor of philosophy explained the Cave to us. After that lesson, I had the feeling that I had visited that cave. In fact, what I remember more is the sense of people breathing on my neck from behind... the feeling of scared people, whispers, shushing lips moving, their eyes flickering.
Yesterday, I visited a real cave on Pico Island. It was deep. That cave was formed after an eruption, so you see lava-like patterns everywhere - under your feet, on the ceiling. You have to watch where you step, or bend your neck under low stone... but then you go deeper, and there is a hall-like space. From above, there is light from the outside... and I had that shiver in my neck, as if I were afraid - not of the darkness around, but of the whispers of those imaginary heads behind me, the pressure of their words, the vibration of the air that made my hair rise.
I turned on a flashlight on my phone to look deeper. That light could cover only two meters in front of me. And the air was alive - droplets of water like a thick cloud of plankton.
I went down one hall after another, deeper and deeper. Several times I thought - here we go, it’s the wall, the end of the cave - but no, it was just the wall of darkness. I knew from experience that at some point, the deeper you go, if there is not enough light, the more you become afraid of yourself. Total darkness is not our friend. Yet at some point, it always looks back into you.
Suddenly, I heard whispers. I froze. They were real, not imaginary. It was hard to tell where they came from - from deep in the darkness or somewhere else. I looked around, using all my senses like a radar, trying to go beyond the acoustics... as if I were a bat in the cave. There were some guests coming into my cave - two of them, from the outside, loud, tactless... a mix of Toronto English and barely sensible Russian. It was better without them, I thought... in my cave. I said hello and kept heading deeper. Just three more meters made a difference - they decided to stop. “That’s enough,” one of them said in Russian. They left without even saying goodbye.
When I was going back and saw the light of the day - the arc of greenery over the exit, the stairs carved in stone leading upward to the azure brightness - I realized I had come out from another side of the cave. It was not the entrance I had used. It was that strange feeling that I had gone through time... sticky, glutinous, swampy, nonlinear time.
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