Secrets of Liberty Mountain (Final)

"Gather around my children, it is time to dream," Sheila said as she loaded a massive pinch of peyote into a yard long peace pipe. She touched a burning taper to the bowl.

She took a long drag and blew a smoke ring into the air over my head as she placed the pipe in my hands.

"Don't let it go out, take some and move it along," Starshine whispered.

As I took a toke of the bitter vapor, Sheila's nude body appeared to shimmer and glow. My god, she was beautiful. Star kissed my lips as she slipped the smoking stick from my fingers.

To my right, a drum began a slow and steady beat. A moment later another answered in kind. Then another and another until the warm moist air of the cavern throbbed with the thunder of a beating heart.

With the second hit from the passing pipe, the notes of Brenda's bugle floated like butterflies in the air as Frosty's flute made love to the night.

By the next toke, I was listening to the tones of the colors reflecting from Belinda's chest. Starshine's nipples chirped like canaries and the beads of sweat gleaming on her skin sparkled like sleigh bells with the fire's reflected light. The heartbeat of the drums filled the void with dazzling bright pulses of paisley patterns in primary shades, no pastels allowed.

'"Our DNA is the diary of our soul's journey from the first moment of life. We carry inside us the genetic memory of every yesterday which has brought us to where we are today." Sheila's words glowed like a beacon as she guided me through an infinite kaleidoscope of previous incarnations. Moving ever rearward in time, I traced the double helix's pathway into the past.

As I took my seventh deep drag of the earthy and nasty mescaline smoke the brilliant blackness of the cavern's eternal night dissolved into a dense jungle. My sisters are preparing sleeping nests high in the canopy of leafy foliage as I wrap my furry tail around a green branch and grasp it for balance. My nostrils flare wide as I sniff and peer into the twilight. The evening air is rich with the earthy scent of danger, decay, and growing things. The rainforest renews itself in an endless cycle of life feeding upon death.

The big cats like panthers and leopards are as bad as snakes, but the eagles are the worst. Without warning, they snatch the young from our midst and take them into the clouds. We are small, but we are many. My thread is unbroken.

Mountains rise and crumble around our wandering band. We have left our tails in the trees and now walk upright. Fortune favors the tall who better see the dangers lurking in the lush grasslands of the Serengeti plain.

As we wander about, my tribe and I invent language as we assign meaning to the sounds our mouths make.

"All life arises from the first mother," Sheila sings in honor and thanksgiving of some nameless single-cell creature: the seed from which all life has evolved. Sheila's words blaze across the cavern's perpetual night as elders convene in tribal councils to ponder the wisdom of their eras.

Lifetimes flicker past too quickly to recall and too vivid to forget as I skip across the waters of eternity like a stone.

The helix's highway bends north across and around the great sea rising between my African home and the distant shore. My beautiful black skin is becoming lighter as we venture into the freezing realm of the long nights.

Pale and fair, my kin and I stand before a great white wall at the northern edge of the world. We can go no further. The gods are kind. Below the glaciers, game and mammoth are plentiful.

While we hunt, we encounter others almost exactly like us except they are different. The small stocky strangers have adapted to life in the frosty shadows. Their angled cheekbones, prominent brow ridges and wide noses mark them as the other. Our clan mingles and we trade with the artists who adorn their cave dwellings with beautiful paintings. Sometimes we get naked and make babies together.

Even though they do not speak as we do, our new friends seemed to be thoughtful and kind. They have compassion for their old and ill, and they care for those who can no longer tend to themselves. From them, we learn to bury our dead and new methods to manufacture stone tools including fine flint blades and razor-sharp scrapers.

They, like us, have also have mastered the art of fire and they bestow upon us their knowledge of crafting deadly hunting spears by attaching sharp stone points to polished wooden shafts. We have made friends with the wolves

Eons pass as one life blends into another and the mile-high mountains of winter gradually retreat before the southern winds of a changing climate. The age of ice is over and the Earth grows warmer. Our new friends have vanished with the glaciers. The oceans rise.

"Gather unto me my darling mind-travelers," Sheila said as she knelt and applied a flame to a handful of wood shavings at the base of a small teepee of tinder. A few seconds later the fuel beneath the firewood burned with defiance as it pushed the darkness away. The night was strong and the circle small as she called us into the light.

For a moment, I paused between lives and warmed my hands before the fire and tried to remember. I felt as though I was awakening from a sleep where I had been dreaming I was another man dreaming he was another man's dream. As I attempt to remember the stories of my past lives, the details retreat before me into the mist of the forgotten.

"My darlings, in the beginning, we were one," Sheila said as she moved about the circle, and caressed her breasts. She smiled and stroked her belly as she slowly turned to connect her gaze with each set of eyes.

"We have been together since the dawn of the first day. The threads of our lives are woven together and are thus so entwined," she said as she interlocked her fingers and crossed her legs, and coiled about herself like ivy on the vine.

The part of my mescaline soaked brain that thought it could still think pondered in amused amazement at the Commander's set of leadership skills.

As a youth, I had dabbled in psychedelics. Set and setting is everything. I was standing far enough back that I could see what she was doing. Mescaline illustrated her story of time as her hypnotic voice and carefully scripted words transformed the cave's sunless world into a playground for my mind.

"My fellow time-trekkers," Sheila said as she put a fresh log on the embers, "Within the flames, our mother's primal truth resides. We are family. None of us live our lives alone. We, you and I, are our sisters' and brothers' keepers, whether we want to be or not."

"One more toke for the road, our next stop is the day before tomorrow," Sheila said as she packed the pipe with peyote and passed it around.

Within my mind, as I stared into the flames, I can feel time-bending back upon itself as I trace my ribbon of life backward and ever deeper into the maze of memories.

In the beginning, humanity is spread thin across the land, and our roaming band of hunters and gathers travels months without encountering others of our kind.

Each existence is much like the one before, until we learn to grow plants and raise animals. Farming ties my group to the land and we settle near our fields and tend our flocks. The bounty is fruitful and our settlements grow as our numbers multiply.

High ramparts rise around my city as war ravages the land. We no longer gather with the old and wise about the evening campfires to learn from them the holy ways of nature. I am compelled to pay homage to the deity of the day. My labor belongs to an endless stream of lords and ladies, priests and priestess.

My trail through time is littered with carnage and unspeakable atrocities as uncounted millions are slaughtered at the hands of invading hordes, conquering armies, or the righteous of one faith or another. I was there when thousands of men, women, and children were tied to stakes and cremated alive in town squares across Europe.

As age after age of fleeting empires rose, I stepped to the side of my mind. Me, and the little guy in my head watched in despair as one dreary life after another trudged toward tomorrow.

"Congratulations! I didn't think you could do it, but you did," a voice from behind me called. Mindful that talking to myself isn't a bad thing as long as I knew who was speaking, I turned to confront the stranger in my dream.

"Congratulations for what?" I asked cautiously as I shook his extended hand.

"Look around you," the other me said as he gestured toward the circle of naked women meditating around the fire.

"Everyone except you is under her spell. You've transcended the trance and completed your quest. Tell me, what was your vision?"

Thus endeth the first book.