The House of Glass Ornaments

I have embarked upon a long journey to the deep jungle for an expedition. It’s three planes in total.

The third plane lands at a small airport at a remote village, where I am to meet a driver who will take me on to the next outpost along the river, which is my final point of departure for the jungle.

When I disembark from the plane, a serious-looking native man arrives in an old beat-up cream-coloured buggy with insect screens for windows and an unhealthy rattle in the engine. We exchange introductions and he informs me in broken English that he will drive me to the village.

As we drive, I am dismayed to see a military guard and many labourers with heavy machinery clearing away vast swathes of ancient rainforest in order to build up the town. Thus far they have constructed a manor house, a town hall, a walled garden, and most of a promenade.

I interrogate my driver about theit work, but his response is one of frightening apathy. He shrugs, and makes a poorly-articulated reference to the wealth of the growing economy. I try to engage him in argument over this, and to articulate why I feel that what they’re doing is so wrong, but he does not acknowledge my concerns.

We arrive at the manor house which sits at the approximate centre of the village. It is disproportionately large for the other buildings in the area, and its style and opulence are almost an act of slander against the rest of the village. The thing is entirely out of place, standing on a sore of naked earth, yet framed by the lush, steaming mountains.

From there we turn onto a rough and winding road which leads through a tract of thick rainforest for another hour at least.

Some way on, in the thick air of the jungle, the pressing undergrowth opens out into a small clearing by the edge of the river, where a single small wooden shack stands half hidden under the hanging branches. In the water stands a degraded-looking pier with a single mooring post.

My driver says that this is as far as he can take me, the rest of my journey will have to be on foot. Thanking him, I gather my supplies and set out.

His engine fades into the mist, and I am suddenly alone, surrounded by the exotic sounds of foreign wildlife. I head along the track, which for its first leg runs parallel to the river which flows on the right, with my compass, roughly following the path I have plotted on my map.

Soon enough I am deep in the midst of the jungle, far from any sign of civilisation. After several hours have passed, I find that the track I have been following has all but vanished beneath me. I go on pushing through the pristine undergrowth of the jungle, following map and compass, but with a gnawing sense of concern.

That’s is what this is about, I remind myself. I’m not here to find anything except my own mental boundaries. I’m throwing myself into a challenging situation in order to encounter myself. I’m leaving my comfort zone. This is exactly what I wanted to happen. The concern and unease I feel is what I would expect in a situation like this. It reminds me that I’m alive.

I relocate the river, except that now it’s on my left, instead of my right, which is strange, but looking on the map, I see that this is the place where the river loops back upon itself several times, like a snake. More problematic than this is that in the direction I wish to go, the forest is impassable, flooded.

Later, I find a narrow ridge leading uphill between two thick screens of towering arboreal growth. To the left, the bank of the ridge descends steeply and out of sight, into the raging river. The ridge brow is wildly overgrown with all sorts of strange and unfamiliar vegetation. I am no botanist, and I cannot tell which plants may be unsafe to touch, but I climb atop the ridge anyway, and run along its length. For hours I run along the ridge, careful not to fall into the river, and watching my compass carefully, aware that I am travelling in the wrong direction, and will have to correct my course later.

Suddenly I see something looming out of the trees ahead, on my right.

I draw closer and see that it is a house. But it’s much more than that. It’s an enormous mansion, of a size like which I’ve never seen in my life. There are hundreds of windows arrayed just along the one of its sides that is visible to me, which is built directly in line with the ridge on which I’m running.

I come closer to the wall. It looks as though it was built very recently, and with an exceptionally careful standard of construction. The wood is all carved and painted, and does not look to have weathered a day.

The windows are all at head height, and so I peer inside one of them. Inside, I am astonished to see that the room within is filled with glass objects.

There are some simple items of furniture, beautiful wallpaper, and intricately detailed fixtures carved over the doorways and in the skirts of the ceiling. But of residents, of any people at all, there are none.

Overwhelmed with curiosity, I climb, extremely delicately, into the window.

Inside the house, it is even more beautiful and strange than I had thought. I look around me. There is not a single empty surface in view- not a square inch anywhere to be seen that is unoccupied by some delicate, fragile glass ornament. They cover the tables, the shelves, the chairs, and the floor, into the hallway, and out of sight.

The ornaments are varied and eclectic, and no two are the same. They are of every size, shape, subject, and colour. In just a brief glance, I see a white horse, a red-breasted robin, a box with ribbons, an iridescent black spider, a pink and green python, and a chimpanzee weilding a banana.

I wish to explore the house, but if I take even a single step, I risk crushing some of the beautiful ornaments. Indeed, I fear that making even the slightest motion may cause a chain reaction that could destroy the entire contents of the house, and also kill or wound me in the process. It is all I can do to breathe without knocking anything, so delicate is the glass, and so densely and particularly arranged.

I decide the best thing to do is to go back out of the window again, and carry on with my journey, so this I do.

I follow the ridge to its end, where it emerges from the forest, and finally sinks, burying itself into the waters at the point where two rivers meet.

Both are wide, raging torrents. I don’t remember seeing this on the map.

The one on the right is a river of fresh water, in colour murky brown, for the silt it carries down from the mountains.

The one on the left is a river of salt water, in colour deep blue, and clear, as it flows from the ocean, flushed by the tides.

There is a clear frontier where the waters meet and mix, creating beautiful and dynamic patterns of brown and blue, curling into each-other.

I gaze into those waters, with my feet in the shallows, at the place where they meet. The rivers are so wide, and so deep. I wonder with great trepidation what great and fearsome creatures may lurk below the turbulent surface.