My brain was filled with but one clear emphatic thought, "Don't do this." Emblazoned from the very beginning, to the very end of the horizons of my mental landscape was one firm belief. It was written large and printed in a bold font. There was no nook or cranny for any other idea to grasp a tenuous nibbling hold. I could examine the foundation upon which it was firmly embedded. It was straight up rock solid common sense. It would be both foolish, and dangerous to attempt such a thing. I had calculated and examined all the possible outcomes, none of them would lead to anything other than failure. It was unequivocally a doomed plan, with absolutely zero chance of a positive outcome.
Padyatra spent perhaps 10 seconds or less peering over the precipice and simply said, "Oh, come on," and hopped over the stone wall. In a moment he was skidding down the nearly vertical muddy trail. One with no steps, no stone ledges to pause, just slippery mud with a meager selection of hardy vines or branches to latch on to for safety, if you were lucky. For a while I could hear him sliding, bounding, and letting out the occasional 'whoop' as he slithered out of sight. I really had no idea how he could physically do it. In one hand he was carrying a $3,000 dollar camera and in the other a large tripod.
I looked down at the sandals on my feet. I was quite certain that it wouldn't take long for them to mangle my feet to shreds, long before I hit the bottom. I had equipment as well, but not nearly so expensive and burdensome. Than suddenly, like a traffic light, that just blinks from red to green, I found myself clambering over the wall and beginning my own foolish descent.
Cursing silently, and perhaps more often, with a great deal of vocal vigor, almost every slippery yard. It was treacherous going down and around, each and every tangled sliding step and turn. Why I committed to such foolishness I am not quite sure. In an instant I seemed to suddenly have no options, other than to go. I had said goodbye to logic, leaving it parked tidily and alone on the ledge above me, where I had been so certain and so content just moments earlier.
It was bad from the very first moment of my descent and than quickly escalated to very bad. If I hadn't been such a wimp I would have taken pictures on the way down to prove this point. You will have to take me at my word, and if you ever run into Padyatra do not believe anything he has to say about it.
He had somehow enticed or convinced me to do this crazy thing by saying, that the sound, screaming out of the deep gorge below us was probably coming from an archeological excavation team. Certainly you could just see some men, working under a cliff on the far side of the river. I found this observation to be just completely impossible to believe. To my ear it sounded just too much like the nasty screech, my own 2 stroke gardening machines make, when they attack the urban landscape in Queens. What it sounded like to me was the interminable and relentless racket of men cutting stone.
