13
Island of Dreams
“That’s right, matey…Today’s Saturday so I’ll be open until six. Hello Missus! So what’s yer pleasure?”
“We would like to hire old number four, Joe.”
“Now that’s a good old tub. Steady as a rock and strong, too.”
“I know she sails well.”
“She sails well you say! Why, she’s a motor boat and swims is what she does.” Joe twisted his cap and screwed it ever so tightly on his head. “Where are you both off too?”
“We’ll motor up to the landing, today…and then slip across the channel to the island.”
“Sounds like a reasonable course and well charted. Youse two like going to that sand-fly infested patch of sand. What’s the attraction?”
“It’s just a very special place that we like to visit sometimes, Joe.” Helen joined the dialogue.
“Yes, it’s not all as bad as you think,” Lyndon added.
“I don’t know so much. I was over on the mud flats once, late at night, pickin’ up some yabbies for bait. I didn’t much like the feel of them flats…and them trees on that island of yer’s all rustling and such. I’ve told yer the stories before, but something ain’t right and I don’t exactly know what that is.”
“Just imagination, isn’t it, Joe?”
“So yer say, matey…So yer say!” Joe spat out a wad of green phlegm across the bow of the boat which hit the water and floated away on the tide. “Now about ‘number four’…she ain’t too well so I have to scrape barnacles off her bottom. I’ll try to not hurt her too much. Yo u can have the Resolution over there. She’s a good old girl and I know yer liked her before!”
“Yes, she is a good old girl. We’ll take her.”
“Well then, that’s good fir you! Get aboard, the both of yer…and I’ll push youse off.”
The Resolution slid as effortlessly into the flood as a hot knife through butter. One tug of the rope and the two-stroke engine spat as she fired into life.
“Goodbye, Joe.” Helen called out from the bow as Lyndon steered astern.
“Goodbye, Missus.”
Putt, putt, putt, putt, putt, miss, putt, putt, putt, away with the tide she motored. The world of the cove grew ever smaller as the little boat passed the village towards Gilwarren. On the shoreline Lyndon noticed a young girl waving at a boat which had crossed his bow. It was the only other boat on the river. It felt strange as if he had experienced this before. The girl had a recognizable familiarity about her, too. As the boats bobbed up and down from each other’s wash, both he and the other skipper focused on this elfin-looking girl who stood far to-landward.
How very strange?
“Did you see that?” Lyndon called out to Helen who was holding on for dear life.
“What did you say, Darling?”
“Did you see that girl on the shore?”
“Sorry, I can’t hear you.”
“Later…!”
As the small boats crossed bows, Lyndon noticed the other skipper was wearing a coloured floral-print shirt, so similar to the one he used to own. Although he could not clearly make out his face Lyndon instinctively knew that this was the same young man he had glimpsed the previous morning. Helen silently watched the passing parade but was unaffected by the spectacle. Eventually, the other boat faded into the distance of the river reach, chugging steadily in the direction of Rosie’s boat hire. In the meantime, Warburton’s landing loomed large out of the confluence, and to starboard the elusive Poseidon’s Grotto lay ahead.
“Is that where the inlet is?” Helen called astern.
“We’ll be there soon enough.”
“I’ve missed visiting our place.”
“Yeah, it feels like one’s home-coming, or some such thing.”
With a shallow thud, the small boat beached on the mangrove stand, close to the sandy path which led to the island’s interior. It seemed only a moment before the pair traversed the burning sand and reached the Cottontree Caves. Some intangible power directed them to this special place where they stood embracing one another, isolated from the busy human world.
All about them, the trees and birdlife whispered a sweet refrain which was caught on the faint easterly breeze blowing in from the open ocean. The shrill cry of a solitary gull now stilled the cove into silence. Something wonderful was happening. Time stood still under the copper sun as the eternal tide turned in the muted river. Two lovers kissed in this ethereal world, unaware that they had shared it with the other Lyndon and Helen who had first discovered this Eden a century before.
The languid summer heat was shielded and cooled by the heavy tangle of green that made up the island’s canopy. Within the blur that surrounded them, they remained in each other’s company, consummating their love as the cove gradually changed around them. Another century passed in the silence of a single embrace. Silence, that is, except for the drumming symphony of the ocean’s breakers which crashed heavily onto the boundless shore.
Such is the stuff of dreams.
In the radiant afterglow of love’s sweet refrain, Lyndon and Helen walked towards the pot holes. They did not notice a golden bracelet, resplendent and ostensibly divine, lying in a small open hole, or the two young lovers in the Cotton Tree Caves consecrating their bond to this enchanted place. A sea bird suddenly took flight as a rude, brutish youngster named Barnes, wearing a pathetic plastic helmet, threw a half-eaten apple at it. The bird’s flight excited the myriad living things into frenzied excitement.
Not too far ahead, two young explorers shared a chocolate bar whilst looking across the channel, contemplating providence as they approached adulthood.
“All for some and none for one,” a little boy shouted.
“Here’s to chocolate bars, and best mates,” a boyish Lyndon replied.
Beyond the river, these boys spied the cove in a different light and realized that they were on the brink of something astonishing. They laughed so loudly that a nearby flock of pelicans peered and snapping their beaks, joined with them in the hilarious mirth.
Meanwhile, Lyndon and Helen were oblivious to what was happening around them. But then how could they know? The mind’s eye can be as obtuse as it is acute and reviewed the world as they perceived it, in the here and now. All eternity is but a moment spent within the endless continuum of time. How could these souls be aware of the infinite realities that were so integral to their being?
Only at Poseidon’s pools could the pair witness the wonders of the Flux. It is there that the cusp between multiple realities and time itself can be crossed within the parameters of the mind. Poseidon’s wondrous pools all at once represented both everything and nothing, existing concurrently in the past and present, and future, in a state of being and non-being.
For now however, Lyndon and Helen remained oblivious to the power of the pools. The only reality is the certainty of the moment. For them, there could be no other possibility.
All else is simply too unfeasible to contemplate.
The pot holes (Poseidon’s pools) were exposed and isolated from the channel by the low tide which was turning with the flood. Within the largest of the shimmering pots, the lovers witnessed a bull shark swimming amongst a hundred other fish. All about an essence emanating from the warm water encapsulated the island in a broad salty haze.
The couple peered ever deeper into this unearthly pool of dreams. Beyond it, the ebbing river emitted a gentle murmur as soft as a moonbeam. The liquid crystal of the pool became, as if through a glass and darkly, a mirror reflecting past and future, a portal to what things were and what they may become. The present and the past blurred incomprehensively as the passage of time ceased all understanding. The couple reviewed the marvel before them, cognisant that something wonderful and beyond earthly comprehension was about to happen.
There remained no further impediment as they unhesitatingly immersed their minds with the mysteries of the enchanting pool. Surreally, the lovers dove, plunging and sinking ever deeper into the confines to another world that neither could grasp.
Deeper…deeper…inexorably moving closer to the truth as consciousness sank into the depths of the grotto, to the very beginning of their being. Their perception slowly submerged amidst the watery shroud, ever nearer to the commencement of their wheel of destiny…to a time when everything for them was new…
All about them the present world of the cove beyond Poseidon’s Grotto became superfluous.
Through the mist and fog, between reality and darkness, sublime memories of another point in time were awakened. Together the couple’s spirits swam blissfully in the pool’s enchanting waters, like dolphins, free in an ocean of love and happiness. Their awareness became a part of some much greater thing…something at once indescribable, divine, omnipotent, and just a little frightening. It was as if they had engaged in some understanding of the greatest of life’s mysteries.
The leaves of the trees, fallen to the ground undisturbed, commenced to rustle as the winds of time long-past commenced to blow. The leaves turned brown, then withered to dust and were swept across the waters. Lyndon spied a flight of gulls flying in formation and observed them disappear, one by one, across the sky until only the blue void remained. Time passed slowly. White clouds then formed and swirled aimlessly above them, forming images in Lyndon’s mind. Great stone citadels and dusty roads appeared from the blur of the void as well as green groves of trees and patches of farmland. Serfs worked the great estates of warlike aristocrats.
It was unimaginably hot, as hot as the cove during the hottest summer but there were no refreshing breezes blowing in from the sea. Away in the distance, snow capped mountains jutted out of the dry, red earth.
This place on eternity’s boundary was a land of strong contrasts.
Lyndon turned to spy Helen as she hypnotically studied the magical waters of the pond. A fragment within his memory now realized something that he had always known. He understood that throughout time, Helen had always been by his side. Her face remained familiar although myriad changes surrounded him…but she appeared to be much younger. Strange sounds of a dead language re-emerged. Words from an ancient Indo-European dialect unimaginably recognizable began to fill his head. Familiar faces, hard and strong, re-emerged in his memory from so long ago.
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead
And the bridge is love, the only survival,
The only meaning.
—Thornton Wilder
Beautiful Helen vanished into the silver haze that encircled them. Lyndon called for her, but there was no answer, and before he could commence searching, the mist covered him too. It was then he instinctively began to re-live a previous existence. Somewhere, at this place and in this time, he knew that he would meet his Helen again. Whatever their souls were made of, it was the same primal stuff.
Before him, but out of reach, a golden bracelet shimmered resplendent and otherworldly. Its inscription beguiled him. Where had he seen this before?
TAKE ME OPEN MY HEART AND YOU ARE MINE FOREVER
Here before him begged an eternal enigma.
Lyndon’s body was changing but the essence of his un-conquering soul would always remain so. As the mist cleared, the cry of a new born infant reawakened him. It was his cry. This was not the first time that he had revisited this world where he had so long ago lived and died.
This was however, the first time that he remained conscious of it…
MYCENAEAN SPARTA
For them the sun shines at full strength.
The plains around their city are red with roses
And shaded by incense trees, heavy with golden fruit.
And some enjoy horses and wrestling, or table games and the lyre
And near them blossoms a flower of perfect joy.
Perfumes always hover above the land
From the frankincense strewn in deep-shining fire of the god’s altars.
Ancient Sparta on a balmy afternoon, or Elysium?
—Pindar Trans W. Barnstone (1962)
Mycenaean Greece—The Homeland of Jason and Amymone