Part 15
When Alice in Wonderland immortalized the expression, “Down the rabbit hole!” it led to me exploring a fantastic new world of surprises and mysterious happenings.
Many years ago, I was commissioned to make a documentary film on Speleology – caving, to the uninitiated. The area around Johannesburg, South Africa, and for some hundreds of miles north of it has an abundance of caves due to the huge limestone formations in the region.
My first visit to a cave took place much earlier, though, in the 1960s. I spent a week on a farm in the tiny nation of Swaziland between South Africa and Mozambique. The owner, Tommy Spencer, had spent the previous thirty years in Swaziland and was a good friend of my parents. When Tommy heard I was in the film and television industry, he asked me if I knew who had previously lived on that farm. I had no idea.
“It was the writer, Sir Henry Rider Haggard,” he replied. “He wrote King Solomon’s Mines here. Furthermore, the underground river that’s featured in the story runs under this farm.”
The following day, Tommy took me caving. The entrance to the cave lay a few hundred yards from the farmhouse. Armed with strong battery-powered lamps and a length of rope, we descended into the cave, which took us steadily downwards hundreds of feet until we finally came across the underground river that ran strongly down into the valley below the farm. This was clearly part of the inspiration for Haggard’s novel. Tommy also told me it was rumoured that the cave continued for another twenty-five miles, finally emerging at the Royal Swazi burial ground. He admitted he had never tried to make the journey, adding that the burial ground was fiercely guarded on the surface and no non-Swazi’s were allowed to visit it.
When I was later asked to write and produce the film on caving, I felt I had at least some idea of what lay ahead. However, the caving team we were filming were serious students of Speleology. Strangely enough all of these cavers worked in the IT industry!
My first experience was almost my last. I was the biggest person in the team, and on our first practice cave I got wedged between some rocks on my way down. I wriggled and pulled and finally broke free, heading further downwards. Trying to hide my nervousness, I continued the journey as our guides talked about caves and caving techniques. However, when it was time to return, I asked if there was perhaps another way out? Their leader looked doubtful but agreed we could go another way. He warned me that there was a narrow piece we would have to get through. Yikes, had I known!
The cave became smaller and smaller, and finally I was crawling on my belly up to a rocky archway which forced me to put my head sideways and expel all the air from my chest in order to force my way through. And that was only the first cave!
After that it was (relatively) a piece of cake. It was also a magical experience with extraordinarily beautiful stalactites and stalagmites glistening in our lights. Strange spiders and other insects lived down there, as well as thousands of bats. In one cave, we even swam under water into an underground stream to emerge in a stunningly beautiful cavern inaccessible any other way.
All in all, it was an incredible experience. A whole new and wondrous world unknown to most people. So, that was my first rabbit hole.
My second was in the world of computers…and if you’ve read my earlier blogs, you’ll know some of the adventures (and misadventures) I’ve had in that area. What I’ve learned is that sometimes rabbit holes, though problematic and chaotic, can prompt a need for change and set you on an adventure of exploring and discovering the wonders of magnificent things!
In the world of computers, I ended up finding ExoTechnology. I can already see that ExoBrain opens up entirely new horizons and a world of uber-communication that some might think impossible. But they obviously haven’t gone far enough to see the advantages at the end of the rabbit hole. So to them I repeat the famous words of Alice, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.