The thing I like best about science is the fact of its humility. Sometimes it tells you things: big things, small things, medium things, and then, when pressed for explanation, it says, “But no one knows why this is so.”
My favourite manifestation of this is that trivia about ducks. Apparently, according to that magazine I read as an 8 year old, ducks quacks don’t echo, and no one knows why.
—
I was inside the cave, darkness surrounding me. I turned the lights off, you see. It was pitch black, and I could not have been able to tell you the difference between having my eyes closed and opened even if I tried.
If you asked me what total blackness must feel like, I will tell you this — limestones smoothed by centuries of flowing water, the intermittant pitter-patter of bat droppings, the current of the river defeaning, the smell of the lone insect reminding you of its presence long before it perches on your nose, and you think to yourself, “How did it know where exactly to land?” Perhaps it was more accustomed to the dark than you.
You lower your head to the water, submerging your ears until all you hear is its soft gurgle. The bats will see you and be reminded of alligators in swamps. Perhaps they will think of nothing.
It takes all the effort you can muster for you to decide if your eyes are to remain open or not. It will not matter anyway.
The imperceptible then subtly perceptible bat droppings are gone now, but the other senses are more nimble. In the farthest corner of the underground river where you lay, where the waters are the stillest they can be, you cannot be fully certain, but you think you feel the ripple of the water when the droppings break the surface.
You stay for a while. And then a while longer.
Finally, you emerge out of the surface. Your feet barely touching the cave floor. You think, perhaps things vanish in the darkness. Your mind deviates to the Big Bang and the black holes and gravity, perhaps gravity is at work.
You wade, further or toward the rocks, you do not know. But you wade anyway. It is not a large pool, and you know sooner or later you will find a stepping stone. And you do. You inch to your left, slowly, slowly, and you think maybe you have suddenly emerged above the wrong pool (darkness makes everything possible) when you grasp the familiar straps of your cheaply made flip flops, the headlamp haphazardly strewn about.
You clamber up the rocks, trusting your limbs in the process. Darkness makes everything possible, you repeat to yourself. You tell yourself that every rock you climb onto was darkness materialized, because darkness heard your silent thoughts.
You lay on the rocks, willing yourself to dry, although the moisture in the air will not allow that to happen so easily. The water splashing the rocks simultaneously feel so close and so far away.
You remember yourself as an 8 year old, eagerly reading the Tuesday weekly you would buy with your dad on the way home from school.
Without warning, you utter a “quack!”
The room reverberates of your proclamation.
You smile, satisfied. Then you get on your feet, unsteadily at first. It may have only been a few minutes, but it could have been millennia in the darkness.
You turn on your headlamp and fumble for the switch, your adept hands remembering things they have memorized through continuous practice. You turn it on again, off again, your hands quickly adjusting. You were taught, as a young adventurer, that your headlamp was an extension of who you were. You have not forgotten.
Finally, you put the headlamp on and you stoop down to gather your belongings. From where you stand, there is a faint trace of wind.
You sling your bag across one shoulder and massage the crook in your neck. You have a long way to go, you think to yourself.
But the darkness, it will be a quiet companion.
—
I am 22 and a month now, more than double the age I was when my brain first encountered the peculiar fact.
Maybe now, science has the answer.
Of perpetual finds 