Journey to the Center of the Earth (2)地心探險

By David Kushner

安第斯山脈的巨大山洞半個世紀以來吸引了無數探險家，包括登月太空人阿姆斯特朗。裡面隱藏著什麼秘密呢？等你來探險！

I’m here with a small team led by Eileen Hall, Stan Hall’s 34-year-old half-Scottish, half-Ecuadoran daughter, who continued her father’s quest (探索) to understand the true history and power of the cave after he died of prostate cancer (前列腺癌) in 2008. Eileen, who lives in London, is artistic and spiritual, a former architect who now conducts what she calls energy-healing (能量療法) work with private clients (客戶). Along with another architect, Tamsin Cunningham, she is also a cofounder of Tayos, a company that explores the cave through writing, music, and meditation (冥想). Today, with her long brown hair in a ponytail, she’s dressed in a black Ecuadorean shirt, long gray hiking pants, and blue rubber boots caked in mud (沾滿結塊的泥). This is her fourth expedition (探險) to the cave. When I ask her what I should expect, she tells me that Tayos is 「a psychedelic experience (魔幻經歷).」

After sipping (啜飲) from a wooden bowl of chicha (吉開酒), a chalky, alcoholic drink made from fermented yuca (發酵的木薯) (prepared by women who chew it and then spit into the bowl), we gather with the Shuar around a campfire. A shaman (薩滿巫師)—a stout (結實的), middle-aged woman with long, dark hair—leads us through the permission ceremony. We hold hands while in Spanish she thanks the stars, the moon, the earth. She removes a smoldering (悶燒的) log from the fire, waving its smoke behind each of us in a blessing. Finally, we take turns asking for permission from Arutam (幻影；力量，舒阿爾族人的神靈), the all-powerful force in the Shuar religion, to enter Tayos. After a few moments of silence, the shaman tells us that the spirit has allowed us inside what she calls 「the womb of the earth.」

「Morder la cabeza」—bite off the head—the street vendor says as he hands me a chontacuro, a plump white grubworm (蛆) fresh from a sizzling grill. As I struggle to distinguish the head from the body, Eileen says, in her Scottish brogue (口音), 「It’s that little black thing right there.」

It’s a few days before our descent (下降) into Tayos, and we』ve stopped for a break in Mera, a small gateway town to the Andes. A band plays drums and trumpets just off the town square where local merchants sell crafts and food. Eileen sways (搖擺) to the festive music and compliments (稱讚) a local craftswoman on her butterfly earrings. Though Eileen has been living in the UK since she was a young girl, she was born in Ecuador and feels deeply connected to the country. If it wasn’t for Tayos, which drew her father here decades before, she wouldn’t even exist.

Eileen’s father never dreamed of becoming a famous explorer. As a young married man in Dunbar, a seaside town near Edinburgh, he was a mild-mannered (溫和的) civil engineer with a bookish interest in science, history, and travel. 「He got interested in explorers,」 Eileen says. 「People like Lawrence of Arabia who would go off into the unknown.」 Reading about Tayos in The Gold of the Gods captured his imagination (激發了他的想像力) like nothing before. Von Däniken claimed that an Argentine-Hungarian explorer, Juan Moricz, had taken him to the cave, where they found the tablets that, he wrote, 「might contain a synopsis (概要) of the history of humanity, as well as an account of the origin of mankind on earth and information of a vanished civilization.」

The fantastical account gripped Hall, who on a whim (突發奇想) decided to write to Neil Armstrong and invite him to take a trip to the cave in 1976. Armstrong, recently world-famous from his moon walk, could draw enormous attention to the venture, and as Hall had learned, the astronaut had Scottish roots, so he just might consider the idea. To Hall’s shock, Armstrong wrote back saying he was interested. With that letter in hand, Hall approached both the British and Ecuadorean governments, which agreed to provide funding and helicopter transportation to the site. Within a year, Hall had organized one of the largest cave expeditions of his time.

Stan Hall assembled a team of scientists, cavers, military personnel, and, remarkably, astronaut Neil Armstrong, and led them into Tayos.

Neil Armstrong inside Tayos in 1976 (Photo: Tayos Archives)

Hall’s journey made him famous, inspiring him to quit his day job and move to Ecuador to keep exploring the cave. But it also ended his first marriage, which couldn’t endure the strain (承受壓力). In Quito, he met and married an Ecuadoran woman, Janeth Muñoz, who shared his passion for Ecuador’s history, and in 1986 she gave birth to their daughter. For Eileen, growing up as the child of a celebrated explorer felt like a fairy tale. But Muñoz, who still lives near Edinburgh, says that Hall struggled to get support for his research. He was consumed (耗盡) by his search for the legendary library, and the only money they had came from his occasional consulting jobs. When he wasn’t strategizing (制定策略) with treasure hunters over beers, he was off with the Shuar, who made him a blood brother of the tribe. 「Dad became obsessed (入迷), he called it the fever,」 Eileen recalls. With Hall so caught up in his work while Ecuador was on the verge of (處在……的邊緣) a deep financial crisis (經濟困頓), they were often unable to pay their rent.

Hall and Muñoz had a second daughter, and in the mid-1990s Muñoz insisted on moving the family to Scotland to have a safer and more stable existence. For ten-year-old Eileen, the relocation (搬家)—in the middle of the Scottish winter—was devastating. She was the only brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking child in her class. Bullied by other students, she became depressed and at times suicidal (有自殺傾向).

As she matured into adulthood (步入成年), Eileen took steps to find meaning in her life. She traveled around Europe and earned a degree in architecture. Meanwhile, her father continued to return to Ecuador, where his fruitless searches for the metal library grew increasingly frustrating. He was also, Eileen learned, dying of cancer.

Late one night in 2008, while holding vigil (祈禱) at his bedside in Scotland, she was struck with a new sense of purpose: she would keep his work alive. For her, Tayos was about more than the mysteries of the Shuar—it was also a connection to her origins. She would go back to Ecuador, she promised him, and continue the journey he had begun. 「I’m going to follow your spirit,」 she said just before he died.

Eileen’s decision left her mother with mixed emotions (百感交集). 「I feel proud of her,」 Muñoz says, 「but I suppose she is going to encounter the same kind of problems that he did,」 with trying to protect the cave.

After 2010, the Shuar began guiding small groups of tourists into Tayos. Then, in 2015, Eileen made her first trip into the cave with an Ecuadoran documentary filmmaker. She was excited, but the realities of the journey felt treacherous (危險的). It was the rainy season, which meant flooding streams and water coursing down muddy slopes along the approach hike (前往的路上). Entering Tayos begins with a rappel (繞繩下降) along a series of ropes, and on the descent Eileen was frightened by the screaming oilbirds lurking (潛伏) in the blackness. Once on the ground, she found the cave so overwhelmingly dusty and dark that she jumped at the first chance (迫不及待地) to leave before nightfall. 「It was all too much,」 she says.

 

（to be continued）