Not Without Pain
John R. Barker.
Metaphysical Fiction.
Paperback, Audio Tape
212 pg., ISBN 1890711128.
Published 2-14-98. Not currently available,

Except for free online version: Click here!

Book Description:
A world traveler tells the story of two young musicians and a great spiritual discovery in the mountains of Mexico. This is perhaps the first musical novel: first written in 1968, it introduces 50 minutes of songs on a tape included with the written work. Trace the adventures of Valerie Kristen and her companion Donald Armand as they refine their musical talent under the tutelage of the enigmatic Mr. Burntree, seek the remnants of a lost civilization in the Eastern Sierra Madres, and bring back spiritual teachings of suprising clarity meant to transform the world. Valerie gives birth to the avatar of the age, the reincarnation of a sage in the form of a masterful swan.

Review:
"A fast-moving adventure with a surprise around every turn. a magical 'tour de force' of epic proportion." Philip James, author.

Abbey Reviews 05/02/98:
"Not Without Pain traces the adventures of Valerie Kristin and Donald Armand, musicians fresh out of high school, who befriend an enigmatic piano teacher known laconically as Mr. Burntree. He initiates them into a panoply of spiritual adventures, which result in their unveiling a spiritual teaching purveyed to them in a 'mind meld' with an ancient spiritual sage from the continent of Lemuria.

"His mother, when alive, had the power to reshape physical objects. Burntree teaches Valerie piano on an instrument she shaped in the image the Tibetan god of the mastery of death, Yamantaka. 'Mastery of death' turns out to be a key theme in this rollicking millenial adventure. It happens that Valerie has the opportunity to bring in a child with knowledge of the dark side he can use for good. This is only possible if she were to sacrifice her own life.

"We sense a momentous destiny for Valerie from the beginning. The purity of her spirit and depth of her feeling stir us to wonder what it is. After a brief encounter with the drug culture, both Don and Valerie drop the haze and take up Tibetan Buddhism under the behest of Burntree. He reveals the existence of a 'Cave Of the Ancients' in the Eastern Sierra Madres of Mexico. Their mentor failed to find it in a previous trip. They head off to look for it without Burntree, as feels he might poison their attempt.

"They discover an intricate system of man-made caves which lead them to a conch shell which searingly communicates the desire of an ancient sage, Rongay, to have them publicize a teaching he had burned into a set mica-like wheels.

"The stones bear the oldest recorded story of creation (like none you have ever heard of), and provide them with chants and techniques for transforming war into peace. They utilize their quickly attained musical skills to bring these teachings to a worldwide audience. The sage, Rongay, guides their every move, telepathically communicating with Valerie through a swan.

"The swan dies and Valerie, with child, learns she is to reincarnate Rongay. Circumstances require her to lay down her life in birth. In a mesmerizing scene involving a sandstorm in the Arizona desert, Donald hatches a plan to save her life.

"NOT WITHOUT PAIN captivates the spirit, enchants the imagination, and has a way of making the fantastic believable. Barker has penned a classic of esoteric fiction which adds to the lore of ancient civilizations and emblazons a new spiritual path into the millenium. The accompanying musical tape features compositions which tell the story all by themselves: mysterious, soul stirring melodies you can imagine came from the likes of Valerie and Donald Armand."
Copyright 1998 Abbey Reviews, all rights reserved.

Publishers Comment:
John Barker has a knack for the adventure novel. This one is tragic, and yet sacrificial. The music is woven into the narrative, and brings the story to life. Mr. Burntree is one of my favorite characters in all of fiction.

Author's Comment:
This work was inspired by my experiences in the mountains of Mexico. Many of the scenes are taken from my own adventures. The spiritual message has remained relevant to me for thirty years. I hope you find this book entertaining.

Excerpt

They lowered the rope ladder into the pit, and anchored it to a tree near the opening. It was just long enough. Typing a rope around her middle, Don let Valerie climb down first paying out the rope as she went.

"It's sandy down here," she remarked, stepping to the bottom. "Looks like a crawl-hole," she added, looking down into the hole leading from the back of the pit.

"Wait for me!" Don yelled, and clambered down the ladder.

Both on the cave floor, they knelt and examined the crawl-way in front of them. It was short and they could see some kind of reflected light at its end.

The passage was too narrow for them to manage with their packs, so they took them off and went in feel first, dragging their provisions behind them. Progress was slow, but foot by foot they wiggled themselves backward toward the mysterious light.

Once through the narrow oval tube, they stood in a large natural room.

"Big enough for an elephant," Don said.

"Maybe two or three," Valerie added.

Prayer candles burned all around them, some in little alcoves containing sacred mementos of saints, some just lighting the hall from the floor. The room had a bend which prevented viewing it all at once, so they walked around the bend. At the other end was a life-size gold-plated crucified Christ. His eyes alone were painted--a deep green--shining out from the well-formed gilded body. The cross was formed from an unplaned tree trunk with a similarly natural armrest. The expression on the face was one of realization of a great weight, a burdening that seemed to drag the form downward more than gravity demanded. The choir of candles reminded Valerie of her first experience at the Gates Mansion. Her stomach twitched.

The cross was up against a smooth stone wall. No signs of exits could be seen anywhere in the chamber. Don recited the door-opening mantra Burntree gave them, intoning each syllable with theatrical efflorescence as he wandered through the hall. He tried it all throughout the chamber, with no success.

"Let me try," Valerie offered, starting to chant, making her way from the front of the room to the crucifix in the back. Within a few strides of the cross, the room began to shake and the stone behind the Christ parted from left to right, a slab retreating in the wall. Behind a pair of stone doors was a passage of a about twice a man's height.

Numerous lights suddenly lit the tunnel before them.

They stepped around the crucifix, and into the passage. The light emanated from circular buttons at eye level on either side, providing enough illumination to make their headlamps superfluous. They snuffed them.

"Maybe we should try to close the doors behind us," Don said. "If the tunnel is dangerous we wouldn't want any of the natives to wander in. Besides I'd always be turning to see if anyone was behind us. Valerie said the magic words once more, and the panel slid shut.

The walls of the passage were perfectly smooth, but not glossy. In a few places the surface was fissured or cracked. The tunnel was a perfect cylinder, and as they walked further into the mountain, they realized it was perfectly straight, sloping at a constant angle downhill. It was as if an enormous bullet had been fired into the mountain.

"Why didn't the mantra work for me?" Don asked.

"Maybe it just takes a woman's voice," Valerie replied.

"I guess that's why Burntree had no success," he added.

"But certainly he didn't try it in this cave?"

"It does match his description of a typical worship cave. He could have missed the llama."

Don tripped on some bones lying helter-skelter on the curved floor of the tunnel.

"It's human!" he howled, examining the unbleached skull.

"And it's not all here," Valerie observed. "Missing a thighbone."

"Wouldn't the cave have preserved some of the flesh?"

"Probably not," she observed, but noted no trace of dust on the smooth rock floor.

Don got a sudden chill and took off his pack to get at a sweater. Valerie did the same. A slight breeze fanned them from ahead.

They continued, and the angle of the descent steepened. They were headed right into the heart of the mountain, and through into the valley Burntree had crossed on the other side of the ridge. Perhaps they were underneath its far slope, paralleling the surface. They walked for several miles before Don spotted something.

"Looks like water ahead," he said. A glimmer of reflected button lights could be seen in the distance. A few moments found them at the edge of a small underground lake.

Water had eaten away the rock, which looked like limestone at this point, producing a large football-shaped chamber in which the lake had formed. They could hear the sound of rushing water coming from the darkened end of the room. When they looked hard across the lake, they saw the continuing tunnel at a distance of several hundred yards.

"I'd say we're under the river now," Val theorized, "the one Burntree had to cross on his way to the other cave. Perhaps the water from the stream seeped down into the limestone through a fissure and ate away this chamber."

"Reasonable," Don responded, "but it still doesn't give us any clues about the purpose of the tunnel."

"You're right. How can we cross the lake?"

"I guess we'll just have to go to Mexico City, and buy a raft."

"Oh no!" Valerie groaned. "Maybe we could wade across."

They removed their shoes and rolled up their pantlegs, lifting their packs above their heads as they entered the water.

"Cold," Valerie said as she stepped in.

They went slowly on balancing on a labyrinth of stones on the bottom. About a quarter of the way out, the water had risen to their thighs and was getting their pants wet.

"At this rate we'll be over our heads in the middle," Don complained.

"Wait," she said, "don't we have air mattresses?"

They trudged back to the shore and pulled them out of the bottom of their packs.

Blowing them up made them winded and dizzy. They pushed the mattresses ahead of them, the packs in front. A third of the way out the bottom receded sharply. The subsurface current was strong, and Valerie started to drift. Don caught her hand, pulling her to higher ground. They knew they had to reach the small circle on the far shore somehow, but swift waters made it difficult. In desperation, they grabbed an end of their 'boats' in a lovers clench and kicked furiously for the other side. Valerie got there first, aiming slightly upstream to reach her goal. Still a ways from the shore, but standing, she found Don drifting toward the narrow end of the lake. Coasting with the current, she swam to him easily, and they kicked toward their destination together. It wasn't working. They redoubled their efforts, reaching stable bottom at last. Wading to shore, they sat on the shore utterly exhausted, eating after a short rest. They had some rice wafers, shouldered their packs and moved on.

The tunnel, now on a sharp upgrade, loomed endlessly before them. The climb depleted their fresh energy quickly, and they stopped frequently. After what seemed like hours of ascent, the cave leveled off. They needed to rest again in a few minutes, so they sat on a large anvil-shaped rock, fallen from the ceiling. They tried to get up and go on, but couldn't.

For the first time, Val looked at her watch. Nine o'clock. Eight hours in the cave!

They unrolled their sleeping bags, and fell into slumber.

Their rest was interrupted by what Don thought were gunshots. He leapt to his feet, and found it hard to stand. The lights flickered on and off and the tunnel shook in waves, building in intensity. The cave gave a colossal 'crack', and the lights went off for good. Minor tremors continued for a few moments.

"What was that?" Valerie asked.

"An earthquake?" Don replied. "We lost the lights."

Don groped for a flashlight and lit one of the lantern helmets. "Let's check around,"

he said, "I don't feel safe without lights."

"Why don't we go on," Val suggested, "I feel rested enough."

They lit another carbide lamp and packed up to continue their trek. In about a hundred yards they encountered a vast chasm cutting them off from the rest of the cave. Whether it was formed in the quake was immaterial--they had to cross it.

Don leaned over the edge on all fours to see if he could climb down and then up the other side, but his light couldn't penetrate the darkness below. He decided to measure the width of the gap. He tied a metal piton on the end of a rope, and threw it to the other side. He carefully pulled the steel spike toward him until it reached the edge of the abyss. Marking the edge by holding the rope, he pulled it back and paced off about seventeen feet.

He began to think he could clear it with a well timed jump. He was a state track long jump champion at twenty feet, but not under these conditions. Val told him not to try it.

He went ahead, against her pleadings. He felt confident of success. Anchoring a piton to the floor of the passage and tying the rope to it, he attached another piton to the other end. He tossed it over the gap. He chipped out several notches in the tunnel and put light candles in them, moved the packs back, and paced off his approach. He had to make stride.

Valerie watched him race for the gap, his shoes clomping on the stone floor. His

last footing was inches from the edge. His leading foot just missed the other side, knocking loose rock into the abyss. Reaching for his life, he stretched out an arm and caught the rim of the far side. His body dangled pendulum-like over the bottomless gorge. Adrenalin surging, he pulled himself up on one elbow and then the other. Raising up on his hands, he dragged his weight over the brink.

Valerie sighed, and said nothing.

"Throw me a hammer," he said.

She catapulted a piton hammer past Don into the dark cave, and it clattered raucously against the granite walls. He picked it up, and pounded the piton on the other end of the rope firmly into the stone. Retying the rope so it was taut, he asked Valerie to loop the packs over the rope bridge and give them a shove. Soon they had the packs on his side of the pit.

"Now you do it," he said.

Repressing her fear of heights, she lowered herself into the hole, hanging by her arms. She crossed reluctantly, hand-over-hand. Don helped her into the tunnel on the other side. They knocked the piton hammer over the edge. Hearing no sound of it hitting bottom made them feel a strange fear in the pit of their stomachs.

"I guess we'll leave our monkey bridge. We may need it again." Don was energized by his success.

They put on their packs, relit their caps, and moved on. Stopping for breakfast, they were too fired up to stop for their morning rituals, and the ache of too little sleep settled in their marrow.

Their progress was on the level until about five in the afternoon, when the ground started to rise again. This was their steepest ascent. After about an hour of half-crawling, half walking, the tunnel ended in a blank stone wall. No cracks betrayed a doorway.

"Is this it?" Don said.

Valerie repeated the words of the mantra. The edges of the wall crumbled as if they were a seal, and the stone barrier pulled to one side, revealing a dark, unfathomably large room.

Before they could investigate, a large white cat-like creature leaped at Don's throat, toppling him. He and the beast struggled a moment, each standing his ground.

Valerie remembered her knife. She quickly unbuckled it from her waist. The panther had its claws in Don's chest. She ran up, and in one smooth motion ran the blade through the neck of the white beast. With a spasm, it succumbed on the cave floor.

Don was not seriously wounded, and a few taped compresses on his chest had him in better spirits. He lay in the darkness. "Where would an animal like that have come from?" He asked, still short of breath.

"Maybe it bred in the cave," she said. "You know, like cave fish--turning white over successive generations."

"Fine, but where would these 'panthers' find food in a closed cave?" Before long, Don recovered enough to look around. He relit his lamp, blown out in the scuffle. They were excited about the new room they had entered.

The chamber was in the shape of a teardrop, and they were in the narrow portion of the drop. The cavern was natural, in contrast to the tunnel. Stalactites and stalagmites were abundant, sometimes growing together into large columns several feet in diameter, indicating the great age of the room.

As they walked to the far end, the floor descended evenly. Reaching a pile of sharp -edged boulders, they stopped and stared into the blackness ahead. Their narrow beams were like lasers cutting the vast dark. Suddenly Val's caught the glint of gold

from an object a hundred yards ahead. As they moved toward the object it seemed to change from a rough saucer shape to a glowing rectangle. Up close, they realized they had seen the reflection from the pitted surface of a golden cube about four feet on an edge.

Resting on the center of the top face was an ordinary conch shell. Valerie sighed,

and picked it up to examine it. It was large as conchs go, and was graced by a silver -pink streak which ran from the focus of its spiral to the apex of the opening. It was as large as a loaf of bread, and considerably heavier.

"Nothing unusual," she said. "I've seen shells like this on the gulf in Florida. Except for its weight and this funny silver streak, it wouldn't surprise me if it came from the same body of water." They were less than a hundred miles from the Gulf of Mexico.

"What do you think of the cube?" she asked.

He rapped his knuckles on the surface. "Solid!" he exclaimed. "It's in the center of the cave--seems to made to draw attention to the conch."

Valerie continued to scrutinize the shell, but her biological acumen found nothing extraordinary. She handed it to Don.

He turned the shell carefully between his palms, and shook his head. He put it down and examined the large triangular impression which covered the cube. "Looks like giants stood around with hammers and belted it," he said. "If it's hollow, it's a pretty thick shell." Frustrated, Don began to speak to the conch. "I command you to speak to me!" he trumpeted in a mocking tone, rubbing his hand over the surface as if it were Alladin's lamp.

Don immediately felt a flashing pinpoint of flame in the center of his brain. It accompanied the sound of his own voice."Did you address me?" he heard himself ask from within. He gave a perplexed glance at Valerie.