Listen—I’m going to tell you about Kerinci, and if you’re
smart, you’ll pay attention. Because this isn’t just some mountain in Sumatra.
This is the kind of place that holds onto things. Old things. The kind of
things that don’t want to be forgotten.
Kerinci stands 3,805 meters high, which is pretty damn
impressive if you ask me, but height isn’t what makes it special. What makes it
special—what makes it different—is what’s buried up there. Not just
bones and pottery shards, though Christ knows there’s plenty of that. No, I’m
talking about memory. The kind that seeps into the soil like
groundwater, dark and cold and older than you can imagine.
The Malay people knew it. They called it their ancestral
land, and maybe they understood something the rest of us have forgotten: that
some places are alive in ways we can’t quite put our finger on. Some places remember.
Dominik Bonatz went up there in 2015—brave son of a
bitch—and started digging around. He wrote about it later, talked about how
people had been living on that mountain for seven thousand years. Seven
thousand. Think about that for a minute. Think about all those lives, all
those people who loved and hated and feared and died on that volcanic rock.
Where do you suppose all that goes? Does it just evaporate like morning mist?
I don’t think so.
Bonatz found pottery at a place called Bukit Arat. Lots of
it. They tested it—thermoluminescence dating, if you want to get technical—and
the results came back 1400 to 900 BCE. Neolithic period, they said. Farm
settlements, they said.
But here’s what gets me: who were those people? What did
they plant in that dark mountain soil? And what else grew there, in the shadows
between their huts?
The Metal Age Dreams
Van Heekeren was the first to really dig into the bronze
stuff, back in 1958. He found drums and vessels and jewelry—little figurines
that looked like they might start moving if you turned your back. The kind of
things that make you wonder what the hell people were thinking when they
made them.
In 1922, somebody found the first bronze vessel at Mendapo
Lolo. Fifty centimeters by thirty-seven, covered in patterns that made your
eyes hurt if you stared too long. Triangles on the rim. J-shapes on the
neck—like hooks, I always thought. Like something reaching. Serrated
rectangles. Spirals that seemed to turn even when they didn’t.
Some egghead named Suliensyar wrote about it in 2017, tried
to make sense of all those decorations. Said the triangles were early textile
patterns. Said the J-shapes were ferns. Said the squares represented the four
members of some old council.
Maybe he was right. Probably he was right.
But when I look at those patterns—and I’ve seen the
photographs, studied them late at night when the house is quiet—I think about
other things. I think about how some symbols are older than memory. How some
shapes reach back to when we were still half-ape, still dreaming in caves. The
kind of dreams you don’t want to remember when you wake up.
The Guardian at the Gate
Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz found something in Benik that made my
skin crawl the first time I read about it. A relief carved into stone: a human
figure, sword and shield, standing guard. She called it a Dwarapala—a
guardian of sacred gates, borrowed from Hindu mythology.
But here’s the thing: it wasn’t like the others. Most Dwarapala
statues are squat, fierce, kneeling. Warriors frozen in stone, ready to tear
apart anyone who shouldn’t pass through.
The one in Kerinci? It was dancing.
Dancing.
What kind of guardian dances? What does it mean when the
thing that’s supposed to keep evil out looks like it’s celebrating? Or—and this
is what wakes me up sometimes, three in the morning, heart pounding—what if it’s
not dancing at all? What if it’s the way something moves when it doesn’t
have bones like we do?
The Name That Wasn’t
De Casparis had a theory about the name. Said outsiders
called it Kerinci, but the locals—the ones who knew—called it Kurinci.
Said it came from Tamil, meant a flower that bloomed once a year in the
highlands.
Once a year.
Think about that. A flower that only shows itself when the
time is right. What kind of flower would that be? And what would it look like?
Would you want to smell it? Would you want to touch it?
In Tamil mythology, Kurinci was one of five ecological
divisions of the world. One of five ways of living, five ways of being.
I’ve never been entirely comfortable with that idea—that there are other ways
of being, pressed up against ours like pages in a book. Sometimes I think about
those pages bleeding through, the ink of one reality staining another.
The Law Written on Bark
The last thing—and maybe the most important—is the Tanjung
Tanah Legal Code. Uli Kozok wrote about it in 2006, but the manuscript
itself is from the 14th or 15th century. Written on bark paper—daluang,
they called it—in Old Malay using Kawi script.
It was a legal code. Laws for the people of Kurinci, written
by a man named Dipati Kuja Ali. Rules about theft, environmental damage, public
disorder. The kinds of things any civilization needs to hold itself together,
to keep the darkness at bay.
But here’s what interests me: at the end, after all the laws
and penalties and procedures, there’s a Sanskrit hymn. A prayer to the gods,
followed by a translation into Old Malay.
Why would you do that? Why would you end a legal code with a
prayer?
Unless you understood something. Unless you knew that laws
alone wouldn’t be enough. Unless you realized that some things can’t be
controlled by human rules, and you needed to call on something else—something
older and more powerful—to help you keep the darkness where it belonged.
The Mountain Still Stands
Kerinci is still there, of course. Still standing, still
holding its secrets the way a closed fist holds a razor blade. The Malay
scriptorium, they call it. A place of preserved knowledge and worldview.
But I think it’s more than that.
I think it’s a place that remembers. A place where
seven thousand years of human fear and hope and desperation have seeped into
the volcanic rock like blood into cloth. A place where bronze guardians dance
in the shadows and flowers bloom only when they choose.
And sometimes, late at night, I wonder if that mountain is
waiting for something. If all those centuries of memory are building toward
something. If one day, when conditions are just right—when the flower blooms
and the guardian stops dancing and the old laws are finally forgotten—something
will wake up.
Something that’s been sleeping for a very long time.
But hey, that’s just me talking. Probably I’ve read too many
old archaeology papers and spent too much time alone with my thoughts.
Probably.
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