A stream of smoke blurred in sinewy patterns through the air from a burning stub of sage gripped in the shaman's left hand. He moved it from palm to palm while reciting some incantations, and eventually dropped it on the packed wet sand we each sat upon cross-legged, while the surf washed in curved ridges of foam drunk up by the thirsty granules belying our foundation.
My thoughts on substrata drifted to the abstract, and in so doing, settled on the idea that this firm beach we sat upon was itself supported on an even more substantial platform, and my thoughts fell away in between the cracks of this imagined spatial webwork, until I swooned with vertigo.
The shaman's vocalization once again drifted back in to my awareness, this time in the sibilant tones of a trance-like song. Strikingly onomatopoeic ululations arose from his lungs and throat, carried on sussurating vibrations not unlike that of a chorus of crickets chirping at a much lower octave. One small constellation amid the many sprawled overhead appeared to be twinkling in time with the venerable man's song.
When he ceased his curious chanting, that one portion of the night sky continued scintillating at a rate randomly corresponding with all the remaining stellar configurations; but when he resumed his soliloquy, oddly that one cluster of sprinkled spots stood momentarily fixed, almost as if burning brighter while frozen above, as all the remaining heavens sparkled and reeled about it.
The longer his song went on, the more evidently did this small grouping of stars continue to brighten and focus with each subsequent stanza warbling from his windpipe. I looked over to my young guide, but he was nowhere to be seen. I was left alone on the beach with this old croaking man. Eventually I joined in with his vocal intonations, at first timidly mimicking the rising and falling timbres, until after several measures, when I could feel precisely where the microtones focused on the lone star system beyond, that I began weaving in earnest my own computational elegy to the firmament sprawled out ahead of us.
At last my canticle reached an apotheosis of crescendos while all the surrounding stars blurred out along whirling arcs like the spinning grooves of a vinyl record, and my pin-pointed little constellation froze dead center before me while steadily growing larger. I detached myself from my still-harmonizing bodily framework and managed to turn a ghost mirror echo of my head to look at the ancient gray shaman, only he was no longer there either, just the hard packed glossy beach reflecting astral twilight, until it was no longer sand I sat upon but rather a smooth warm bright and highly polished obsidian reflecting colors of an unknown spectrum. Suddenly my resounding voice, which had been issuing mercurial from my larynx, warbled into an erratic repeated pattern of insistently stitched-together cacophonies, as if a myriad different articulations had melded into one singular chorus, which after somehow escaping from my esophagus, came to an abrupt end.
I lurched up onto all fours, gasping for air as it gradually entered my lungs with a newfound purity reminiscent of undiluted oxygen from scuba tanks. My head swam for a minute and then clarified while I slowly came to my senses. There was something different about the way the stars were configured about me now, but I didn't fully realize what it was until I observed that the small familiar constellation that I had been serenading was no longer anywhere to be seen in the perfectly still multitude of stars sprawled out in front of me.
Feeling a bit unnerved, I looked up and down the beach I was on, failing to note any difference in the layout or along the treeline of jungle flanking it. It wasn't until I arose on both feet to firmly stand upon the lustrous volcanic surface that I first noticed the difference. Instead of the glimmering night sky meeting the distant ocean horizon as before, there was now an imposing dark rugged mountain range merging into the cerulean darkness out across a gently undulating sea. It was a coastal landscape that had not been there previously. And there was something else, nearly inaudible yet quite distinct in the distance. It was a humming drone-like sound steadily becoming louder, as if a swarm of winged insects were approaching.
As I turned my head in the direction of the buzzing escalation, I realized my night vision had become superb. Where the impending throng of insects should be located, there was nothing at all. An intensifying scent I couldn't quite place became evident. Soon enough the ambient resonance dissipated entirely as if soughed away on an indiscernible wind. Looking down at my feet I saw the glossy groundswell fading away like an afterimage to be replaced by an unusual form of purplish fractured crabgrass crawling with infinitesimal bioluminescent organisms.
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