We moved to the panel which the Lama Mingyar Dondup had told me about previously, and at our approach it opened with a grating creak, so loud in the silence of the place that I think we all jumped with alarm. Inside was the darkness, profound, almost as if we had clouds of blackness swirling about us. Our feet were guided by shallow channels in the floor. We shuffled (subbet) along, and when the channels ended we sat. As we did so, there came a series of clicks, like metal scraping against metal, and almost imperceptibly light stole across the darkness and pushed it aside. We looked about us and saw more machines, strange machines. There were statues here, and pictures carved in metal. Before we had time to more than glance, the light drew in upon itself and formed a glowing globe in the centre of the Hail. Colours flickered aimlessly, and bands of light without apparent meaning swirled round the globe. Pictures formed, at first blurred and indistinct, then growing vivid and real and with three-dimensional effect. We watched intently…
This was the world of Long Long Ago. When the world was very young. Mountains stood where now there are seas, and the pleasant seaside resorts are now mountain tops. The weather was warmer and strange creatures roamed afield. This was a world of scientific progress. Strange machines rolled along, flew inches from the surface of the Earth, or flew miles up in the air. Great temples reared their pinnacles skywards, as if in challenge to the clouds. Animals and Man talked telepathically together. But all was not bliss; politicians fought against politicians. The world was a divided camp in which each side coveted the lands of the other. Suspicion and fear were the clouds under which the ordinary man lived. Priests of both sides proclaimed that they alone were the favoured of the gods. In the pictures before us we saw ranting priests – as now – purveying their own brand of salvation. At a price! Priests of each sect taught that it was a “holy duty” to kill the enemy. Almost in the same breath they preached that Mankind throughout the world were brothers. The illogicality of brother killing brother did not occur to them.
We saw great wars fought, with most of the casualties (sårede) being civilians. The armed forces, safe behind their armour, were mostly safe. The aged, the women and children, those who did not fight, were the ones to suffer. We saw glimpses of scientists working in laboratories, working to produce even deadlier weapons, working to produce bigger and better bugs to drop on the enemy. One sequence of pictures showed a group of thoughtful men planning what they termed a “Time Capsule” (tidskapsel)(what we called “The Cave of the Ancients”), wherein they could store for later generations working models of their machines and a complete, pictorial record of their culture and lack of it. Immense machines excavated the living rock. Hordes of men installed the models and the machines. We saw the cold light spheres hoisted in place, inert radio-active substances giving off light for millions of years. Inert in that it could not harm humans, active in that the light would continue almost until the end of Time itself.
We found that we could understand the language, then the explanation was shown, that we were obtaining the “speech” telepathically. Chambers such as this, or “Time Capsules”, were concealed beneath the sands of Egypt, beneath a pyramid in South America, and at a certain spot in Siberia. Each place was marked by the symbol of the times; the Sphinx. We saw the great statues of the Sphinx, which did not originate in Egypt, and we received an explanation of its form. Man and animals talked and worked together in those far-off days. The cat was the most perfect animal for power and intelligence. Man himself is an animal, so the Ancients made a figure of a large cat body to indicate power and endurance, and upon the body they put the breasts and head of a woman. The head was to indicate human intelligence and reason, while the breasts indicated that Man and Animal could draw spiritual and mental nourishment each from the other. That Symbol was then as common as is Statues of Buddha, or the Star of David, or the Crucifix at the present day.
We saw oceans with great floating cities, which moved from land to land. In the sky floated equally large craft which moved without sound. Which could hover, and almost instantly flash into stupendous speed. On the surface’ vehicles moved some inches above the ground itself, sup-ported in the air by some method which we could not determine. Bridges stretched across the cities carrying on slender cables what appeared to be roadways. As we watched we saw a vivid flash in the sky, and one of the largest bridges collapsed into a tangle of girders and cables. Another flash, and most of the city itself vanished into incandescent gas. Above the ruins towered a strangely evil-looking red cloud, roughly in the shape of a mushroom – miles high.
Our pictures faded, and we saw again the group of men who had planned the “Time Capsules”. They had decided that now was the time to seal them. We saw the ceremonies, we saw the “stored memories” being fitted into the machine. We heard the speech of farewell which told us – “The People of the Future, if there be any!” – that Mankind was about to destroy itself, or such seemed probable, “and within these vaults (hvelv) are stored such records of our achievements and follies (dårskap) as may benefit those of a future race who have the intelligence to discover it, and having discovered it, be able to understand it.”
The telepathic voice faded out, the picture screen turned black. We sat in silence, stupefied (forbløffet) by what we had seen. Later, as we sat, the light grew again and we saw that it was actually coming from the walls of that room.
We rose and looked about us. This Hall was also littered (ligge strødd utover i..) with machines and there were many models of cities and bridges, all formed of some kind of stone or of some type of metal – the nature of which we were unable to determine. Certain of the exhibits were protected by some quite transparent material which baffled us. It was not glass; we just did not know what the stuff was, all we knew was that it effectively prevented us from touching some of the models. Suddenly we all jumped; a baleful red eye was watching us, winking at us. I was prepared to run for it when my Guide the Lama Mingyar Dondup strode over to the machine with the red eye. He looked down at it and touched the handles. The red eye vanished. Instead on a small screen we saw a picture of another room leading from the Main Hall. Into our brains came a message, “As you leave, go to the room (???) where you will find materials with which to seal any opening through which you entered. If you have not reached the stage of evolution where you can work our machines, seal this place and leave it intact for those who will come later.”
Silently we filed out into the third room, the door of which opened at our approach. It contained many carefully sealed canisters and a “picture-thought” machine, which described for us how we might open the canisters and seal the Cave entrance. We sat upon the floor and discussed that which we had seen and experienced. “Wonderful! Wonderful!” said a lama. “Don’t see anything wonderful in it,” said I, brashiy. “We could have seen all that by looking at the Akashic Record. Why should we not look at those time-stream pictures and see what happened after this place was sealed up?” The others turned enquiringly to the senior of the party, the Lama Mingyar Dondup. He nodded slightly and remarked, “Sometimes our Lobsang shows glimmerings of intelligence! Let us compose ourselves and see what happened, for I am as curious as you.” We sat in a rough circle, each facing in, and with our fingers interlocked in the appropriate pattern. My Guide started the necessary breathing rhythm and we all followed his lead. Slowly We lost our Earth identities and became as one floating in the Sea of Time. All that has ever happened can be seen by those who have the ability to consciously go into the astral and return – conscious – with the knowledge gained. Any scene in history, from an age no matter how remote, can be seen as if one were actually there.
I remembered the first time I had experienced. the “Akashic Record.” My Guide had been telling me about such things, and I had replied, “Yes, but what is it? How does it work? How can one get in touch with things that have passed, that are finished and gone?” “Lobsang!” he had replied, “you will agree that you have a memory. You can remember what happened yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. With a little training you can remember everything that has happened in your life, you can, with training remember even the process of being born. You can have what we term ‘total recall’ and that will take your memory back to before you were born. The Akashic Record is merely the ‘memory’ of the whole world. Everything that has ever happened on this Earth can be ‘recalled’ in just the same way as you can remember past events in your life. There is no magic involved, but we will deal with that and hypnotism – a closely related subject at a later date.”
With our training it was easy indeed to select the point at which the Machine had faded out its pictures. We saw the procession of men and women, notables of that time no doubt, file out of the Cave. Machines with vast arms slid (skjøv)what appeared to be half a mountain over the entrance. The cracks and crevices (sprekkene..) where surfaces met were carefully sealed, and the group of people and the workmen went away. Machines rolled into the distance and for a time, some months, the scene was quiet. We saw a high priest standing on the steps of an immense Pyramid, exhorting (formanende) his listeners to war. The pictures impressed upon the Scrolls of Time rolled on, changed, and we saw the opposing camp. Saw the leaders ranting and raving. Time moved on. We saw streaks of white vapour in the blue of the skies, and then those skies turned red. The whole world trembled and shook. We, watching, experienced vertigo. The darkness of the night fell over the world. Black clouds, shot with vivid flames, rolled around the whole globe. Cities flamed briefly and were gone.
Across the land surged the raging seas. Sweeping all before it, a giant wave, taller than the tallest building had been, roared across the land, its crest bearing aloft the flotsam of a dying civilization. The Earth shook and thundered in agony (pine), great chasms (kløfter) appeared and closed again like the gaping maws of a giant. The mountains waved like willow twigs in a storm, waved, and sank beneath the seas. Land masses rose from the waters and became mountains. The whole surface of the world was in a state of change, of continuous motion. A few scattered survivors, out of millions, fled shrieking to the newly risen mountains. Others, afloat in ships that somehow survived the upheaval, reached the high ground and fled into any hiding place they could find. The Earth itself stood still, stopped its direction of rotation, and then turned in the opposite direction. Forests flashed from trees to scattered ash in the twinkling of an eye. The surface of the Earth was desolate (øde; ødslig; fortapt; ensom og forlatt), ruined, charred to a black crisp. Deep in holes, or in the lava tunnels of extinct volcanoes, a scattered handful of Earth’s population, driven insane by the catastrophe, cowered and gibbered in their terror. From the black skies fell a whitish substance, sweet to the taste, sustaining of life.
In the course of centuries the Earth changed again; the seas were now land, and the lands that had becn were now seas. A low lying plain had its rocky walls cracked and sundered, and the waters rushed in to form the Sea now known as the Mediterranean. Another sea nearby sank through a gap in the sea bed, and as the waters left and the bed dried, the Sahara Desert was formed. Over the face of the Earth wandered wild tribes who, by the light of their camp fires, told of the old legends, told of the Flood, of Lemuria, and Atlantis. They told, too, of the day the Sun Stood Still.
The Cave of the Ancients lay buried in the silt (slam) of a halfdrowned world. Safe from intruders, it rested far beneath the surface of the land. In course of time, fast-running streams would wash away the silt, the debris, and allow the rocks to stand forth in the sunlight once more. At last, heated by the sun and cooled by a sudden icy shower, the rock face would split with thunderous noise and we would be able to enter.
We shook ourselves, stretched our cramped limbs, and rose wearily to our feet. The experience had been a shattering one. Now we had to eat, to sleep, and on the morrow we would look about us again so that we might perhaps learn something. Then, our mission accomplished, we would wall up the entrance as directed. The Cave would sleep again in peace until men of goodwill and high intelligence would come again. I wandered to the Cave mouth and looked down upon the desolation, upon the riven rocks, and I wondered what a man of the Old Times would think if he could rise from his grave to stand beside me, here.
As I turned in to the interior I marvelled at the contrast; a lama was lighting a fire with flint and tinder, igniting some dried yak dung which we had brought for that purpose. Around us were the machines and artifacts of a bygone age. We – modern men – were heating water over a dung fire, surrounded by such marvellous machines that they were beyond our comprehension. I sighed, and turned my thoughts to that of mixing tea and tsampa.
The story continues in part 8: Link to part 8
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