Unknown

I myself am not an anthropologist, but there exists within me a fascination with humanity. I remember once, having traveled farther than my map prescribed—into that realm of foreboding dragons—when I saw a procession: fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, old, young, and even with them their animals, all trodding their way through a grassy valley. I wonder now if they saw me; I was some ways away seeing them through binoculars. They were carrying a dead man, or woman, shrouded in a black cloth stretching from the body’s head to its toes. There were four pallbearers, and of what association they had with this dead man before his death I know not. Were they the man’s friend? Brothers? Sons? Or were these men chosen for the task because of their holiness? They might be priests. Or worse, if in that country they had some superstition leading such a way, those four might be conscripted to the duty, and themselves accursed for such conscription.

I watched, ignorant but captivated. There was—and I had photographed this already—a great chasm in that place. The feature had stopped my further progress into the unknown, and it was on my journey back, pausing to gaze again upon a land I would never revisit, that I first noticed this ceremony. They all walked up to that chasm out of which billows of fog slowly erupted. Through those rising clouds, no eye could perceive what lay beyond. It was, in experience, in man’s imperfect sight, the very edge of the world, a dropping point beyond which something was which was unknown.

And in that place beyond my map, where those strange people live, where there is some village I’m sure, a life and story I’ll never know, it is in that place, and moving toward the very edge of reality, these people give up their dead. I wonder what stories they tell of beyond the chasm. Do they fear it, or love it, or is it some mixture unspeakable, some desire and dread together? I know not. I saw them, myself wet in the grassy dew watching them through binoculars, and I saw how the fog rolled in thickly over them. I was too far to see, but I waited. The fog moved again, and where the body was it was no longer. Those people left that place for other places I have never seen. They know what happened in the fog, I’m sure, whether they threw the dead over the edge, which all reason tells me they did, or if some miracle happened beyond my sight within the fog. For me, all I can say is that the body was there, and then obscured, and then gone. How it went, I’ll never know.