Edited in Paint

This is about my second caving trip, from last November, way before the time of the previous text. I had also started writing this way before the previous article, but it didn't quite fit together, and I wanted to write about SRT while the memory was still reasonably fresh. Also a note - the above picture, apart from the editing, isn't mine, unfortunately I didn't take my camera to that caving trip. And as a final explanation - the last sentence of this text has no particular meaning apart from its sounding intriguing.

Sparks draw white, orange, and green space-time diagrams across the faces of the figures encircling the bonfire. With the twist of a wrist on a mouse, someone’s editing a brown, autumn photograph in Paint. He or she is using such warm colors that the heat of the subtly shaded flames dries the continuously pouring rain even as it reaches our jackets.

That day we had visited a cave popular in Victorian times. The floor, once caressed by hundreds of hands and feet, now slid away from us in cold, slippery disgust. We slide down on a huge slab called “the tombstone”, into the depths of the underworld, laughing as we go.

Presently it is time for the lamb. Roasted whole above the second, smaller fire – how can I adore these animals when they appear in the spring, so naive and beautiful, and adore the taste of that cold lamb burger? But oh, it is so good, so primitive; I rip it to shreds with my carnivorous teeth, the ritual of fat on fingers and succulent roughness between fangs. The ritual of fire.

The fire is something like twice my height. It hypnotizes. Like a television set, you can’t help but stare in its direction. Waves of heat hit me; behind me the rain pours in an endless wall of movement; I am standing on – or rather forming – a boundary between two opposing worlds; the flames fly up in an endless wall of movement.

The next day we went through a “duck”. My newly acquired understanding of the meaning of the word did nothing to lessen my wetness behind the ears in matters of caving – for a “duck” (a partially submerged passage) tends to get one’s ears completely wet (one ear on the way in and one on the way out)...

Some more ridiculously tight tunnels and an amusing spirally slide-staircase type thing. Then – someone edited a brown, caving photograph in Paint. He or she must have been dreaming of Christmas. White, glistening icicles, patches of crystalized snow carpeting the ground...

The world is so unreal that either it was edited in Paint or...?