Photo by Aleksandra Denic
I reach the summit, which is completely shrouded in dirty white smoke. It’s obvious I am standing on the crater’s edge. I can see the thin ridgeline disappearing into the mist and below, though completely filled with smoke, I sense the gaping void of the massive caldera. Yellow-white smoke swirls up and out in a constant flow, filling and refilling the basin with its sulphur stink of noxious poison.
Although it’s forbidden for visitors to descend into the crater, I take the small goat path that leads steeply down into the belly of the volcano. With each step that takes me lower, the heat, the humidity and poisonous stink becomes more intense. Near the bottom the smoke begins to thin out into patches, clears itself, and then I see it. There it is. There is the moon ocean, a lake of the most exquisite turquoise color placed perfectly in an unimaginable setting. The colossal scale and beauty of it all makes me feel tiny, unimportant, like a flea on the shoulder of a great craggy-backed giant. I am in a place where the order of nature is made clear again. Where our insignificant lives could be brushed out of existence instantly by one shrug of the mountain’s shoulder. On the other side of the toxic water I can see the ant-like workers of the sulphur quarry, miners of yellow stink gold.
I take off my shirt and wrap it around my head and face, a pathetic defense against the heat and fumes. Another climber has already set up his equipment, filming everything around him hungrily. I just sit and watch. Sometimes, most times, the best pictures are to be taken with the mind, filmed in the Technicolor of memory.
The miners are all thin and small, almost emaciated, but they are not miserable. In fact they are smiling and chatting, as if it were just another day at the office. I ask them if the work is hard and they shake their heads with a grin. “No, not hard.”
I take one of their rattan baskets full of sulphur blocks and try and heave it onto my shoulder. The weight is unbelievable. My body protests at a heaviness it has never felt and drops the basket to the ground. I sit down and just watch again, overcome with sadness. If a man has never deeply experienced the suffering of others, then perhaps he has not truly seen the world.
There are no more people in sight, nothing on the horizon. My brain switches to a mode of tranquility, my mind slowing down. I can barely think. Now my soul surrenders completely.
Twilight shows me the way. I arrive just in time to look up one more time. To lay my eyes on the top of the volcano. This is a true perspective. It puts me in the right place in the hierarchy of existence, deep down at the bottom of it all.
Ijen has rewarded me with more than I expected. This volcano is powerful and magnificent, but in a quiet way. Its strength is projected into the material world with an eternally shining, peaceful aura. Here I feel high as though on drugs, my mind unaware of moments in time, suffering is left behind in another dimension.
Text by Berislav Loncarevic
(Edited by Tiara Mahardika)
