Cloud Forest

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Beyond the haunted hills of a region without name lie Cloud Forests traversed by skywalks that disappear into a dense bosky nebulosity of floating vapors; beneath these precarious spans into nowhere the atmosphere is permanently dim and airless, charged with confused perfumes of rotting vegetation, incense-fogged.

Pockets of ferns and trunks of great sunken mahogany trees rise out of the flooded forest floor. Lost children pick their way blind and bewildered among the wooded depths of this place beyond all maps, outside all human ken.

Large blue thunderheads gather every forenoon, looming up as vast bruises upon a forever menacing sky. Numb prisoners in irons trudging through the undergrowth mutter what may be worksongs, or mad oaths, or invectives against gods who have ceased to exist many centuries before.

Birds resembling some kind of prehistoric geese wheel toward the north one minute, then the next execute long sweeping turns and wing back toward the south, their arcs writing enormous looping diagrams upon the thick aerial medium, as if cancelling time out of history.

In the night something ends, in the morning something begins all over again, the division between these phases is not clearly demarcated, the details of what may have happened or may be about to happen remain anybody's guess, and it is questionable at any given point whether anyone is still sufficiently alive to do the guessing.

Asking a passerby for the time of day is an invitation to possession by obscure forebodings, for chances are good the passerby is merely a phantasm seeded into one's mind by languid salamandrine beings from another dimension who rule over this terrain as a pastime, an interlude between chapters of a more important work.

Suspension bridge of the "Skywalk" north of Santa Elena, Costa Rica: photo by Dirk van der Made, 2004
Cloud forest, Mount Kinabalu, Borneo: photo by NepGrower, 2006