Last Chants by Lia Matera

Author:Lia Matera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

We recounted Pan’s story—with far less aplomb—to Edward over canned beans and toast.

His reaction was, “He saw Syrinx here? Holding a knife over a rabbit hole?”

“I thought he said slingshot.” But I wasn’t sure.

“No no—unmistakably not,” Arthur contradicted me. “It leaped out of the narrative—why a knife, you see? It should have been a slingshot, and yet it was a knife.” Arthur pushed his beans away. He’d hardly eaten.

I wanted to urge him to have more, but Edward had already laughed at my “Jewish mothering” once this meal.

“Well,” I conceded, “you’re more used to oral histories than I am.”

Edward stopped crunching his toast. “It’s probably a waste of time, but let’s take this Welsh guy at his word. Say he saw some woman with a knife. Who? Where?”

“Over a rabbit hole,” Arthur mused. “I don’t know if one could characterize Bowl Rock as a rabbit hole.”

“It’s a kind of hole,” Edward said. “For the sake of argument, say a woman with a knife was poised over the rock’s opening. Could this guy have seen her? There are hills above the clearing, but I doubt you can see Bowl Rock from any of them.”

“You can,” Arthur disagreed. “From one of them. But it’s not simply that the rock is visible from Forty-eight Degree Point—”

“Forty-eight Degree Point?”

“I don’t know what local name it might have. But it’s roughly forty-eight degrees north, northwest of Bowl Rock, less than a quarter-mile distant. It has an excellent view of the rock.”

“This is something people around here know about?” Edward sounded skeptical.

“Oh, I wouldn’t think so. Billy and I were at great pains to map and document it.”

“Document it? Why?” Edward sat back, picking up his bottle of beer.

“Because the rock was clearly placed in that spot. It could not possibly have occurred there naturally.”

“I’ve seen big rocks on the mountain,” Edward objected.

“But what you call the mountain is actually a few neighboring mountains. And there are vast geological differences from one to another. Boulder Creek is part of Ben Lomond Mountain, which is within the so-called Salinian block, a sliver of land bounded by two fault lines. The Salinian is comprised of rocks completely different from the melange surrounding it, completely different from Santa Cruz Mountain to the east and the marine terraces to the west. In fact, the Salinian block, Ben Lomond Mountain, is utterly exotic to California. That’s what lends credence to the myth that it was suddenly thrust up from some mystical distance.”

“Like Olympus?”

He smiled at me. “The geologists don’t offer that hypothesis. But the fact is, they don’t know why Ben Lomond Mountain rose out of the sea or why its composition is unlike that of the terraces beneath it or the mountain beside it. And with Bowl Rock, you have an isolated tufa—an unusual rock formation—in a part of the mountains where no other tafoni occur.”

“A tufa?”

He nodded. “Have you been to Castle Rock?”

“No.”

“It’s about fifteen miles away, on Santa Cruz Mountain, atop the San Andreas fault. You see dozens of huge boulders there, honeycombed with nooks and caves.

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