Had it happened in his waking life or his dreaming one, but, at a given moment, perhaps on a hike in winter, he had stepped down into a sunken musty cave.  Through the opening, he had had to jump down to the cave’s floor.  When he then looked up, the cave opening was a full moon in a dark sky.  He sat where he landed to give his eyes time to adjust.  He started to see near-to human shapes sitting against half the surrounding wall.  He distinctly remembered that he had said, Hello?, and heard back, low low low, his own echo.  The shapes were squatting.  He began to wonder if they weren’t in fact peeing or defecating.  That mustiness he had smelled at the cave’s opening, which he had taken to be the natural smell of rotted time, became suddenly, down on the floor, the overwhelming stench of human waste.  It had been so all these moments, but only now did he clench his nose, which then, in turn, seemed to magnify his sight.  Those squatting shapes were in fact figures of cave art, and wanderers over the ages must have felt compelled to bring art to life so literally that he was now fighting suffocation by stench.  This stench stuck to him.  He could sometimes still smell it on him back in the world.  He would have liked to have better understood why he had so casually jumped into the cave, but settled on a notion that no one can know from the top what is true way down below — even if the look is directed within.