She waited for the oohs and ahhs to subside as the group imagined the potential wardrobe malfunctions. ‘It took those plucky cavers ten hours of clambering, and no doubt countless torn flounces, to crawl through the caves that now take you an hour to circumnavigate when you use the stairs and boardwalks of twentieth century safety.’
She smiled again and it was getting easier to ignore the man at the back. This was her spiel, her forte, sharing this passion. ‘In those days there were no pretty electric lights to backdrop the most magnificent of these natural wonders so far below the surface. Just lamps and candles.’ She straightened her helmet. ‘Okay. We’ll enjoy the views you get today when we return to the gentle paths. But first we’ll do some rough terrain ourselves and go deeper than the average tourist gets to see.
‘Ready?’ At their nods she moved forward to the entrance. ‘I’ll go first and point to where we’re exiting the boardwalk. We slip under the rail to seek out the more remote and unusual areas of the cave. When we return you can take your time once you’re back on the boardwalk and really savour the lighted areas of the larger caves.’
She looked around for the most nervous faces. ‘Anyone who’s feeling a little unsure—you should come up here next to me, with the most confident of you at the back.’ The quiet man moved diffidently forward and Faith smiled at him. ‘It’s worth the effort,’ she reassured him.
She noted Raimondo had stayed back and she felt the muscles in her shoulders relax a notch. Okay then. He wouldn’t be breathing down her neck. Just watching her the whole time. Not great but better.
She went on. ‘When you’re traversing the cave please remember to use three points of contact to give you balance. Safety is the most important part of stepping off the boardwalk. As you know, we’re heading for the dry riverbed which is more than forty metres below the surface and there’s no lights down there.’
A few murmurs greeted that. ‘If your heart does start to pound—’ she slowed so everyone could hear ‘—if you can feel yourself becoming anxious, take a couple of deep breaths and remember...’ They were all listening. She grinned. ‘This is fun and there are more of these tours every week and we haven’t lost one person yet.’
A ripple of relieved laughter eased the tension. ‘Let’s go.’ Faith ducked her head and stepped down onto the sloping boardwalk. The air temperature cooled as she moved ahead, not too fast, because she could still remember the first time she’d entered the cavern and her open-mouthed awe of the ceilings and floors, but fast enough to encourage people not to stop until she made the point where they left the wooden planks.
A few minutes later she counted eight adults. ‘Right then.’ She crouched down, slid under the rail and put her weight on the uneven rocks off the main path, the stones like familiar friends under her feet. Then she slid sideways through a crevice, down an incline, and stopped to point out a particularly wobbly rock and let everyone catch up. ‘Try to plant your weight on the big rocks—not into the holes.’ She heard the crack of a helmet behind her as someone bumped their forehead. Bless the helmets.
‘Now sit down on your bottom to slide off this small drop into the darkness below.’ A stifled gasp from right behind her suggested someone had sat down too quickly and hit the wet spot on the cavern floor.
She raised her voice a little. ‘It might be time to turn that headlamp on. Shine it on your feet, not into the eyes of the person in front, or into their faces behind you when you turn your head.’
This was all the fun stuff but she knew that most of the tourists behind her would be stamping down the claustrophobia of being in a small tunnel space underground with someone in front and someone following them.
It was lucky Raimondo was at the back because the others might forget how much space he took up. Not something Faith could forget, though for a different reason.
She paused at a fork in the path and waited for everyone to catch up, then pointed at a magnificent curtain of rock.
‘That veil of rock is where hundreds of years of dripping water have formed a bacon-rind-shaped rim of curved ice that divides the ceiling.’ She remembered enthusing about that to Raimondo all those years ago.
She shook the thought off. The beauty truly did make her astonished every time. Lifting her chin, she pulled her imaginary cloak of confidence tightly around her again. ‘Ahead are more joined stalactites to reach towards stalagmites and if you look over here there’s a magnificent column that stretches from floor to ceiling. What a gift of nature—that took thousands of years.’
The reverence was back in her own voice because, despite the man at the end of the line of tourists, every time she came down here she shook her head in wonder. Which was why she still marvelled that Dianne actually paid her to savour this subterranean cathedral she loved so much.
They’d come to one of the tricky spots. ‘This opening’s narrow—be careful not to scrape yourself here.’ This was the point she had wondered if Raimondo would have difficulty with sliding through.
He seemed even bigger than when she’d met him before. Hard to imagine but true. More wedge-shaped. Toughened and toned. Muscled and honed. Hopefully not so broad that he’d jam in the crevice like a cork in a bottle—but she had a contingency plan for the others if he did. Not so much for him. She stifled an evil grin. Tsk, Faith, she admonished herself.
Still, there was another, less accessible exit for emergencies, and nobody had ever really been stuck.
Yet.
She waited.
Tried not to hold her breath.
Her heart rate picked up as she heard the subtle crunch of rock fragments in a long agonising squeeze, then he pushed through into the small cavern they were all standing in with a slight rush. Close fit.
Her breath puffed out.
He was fine. Bet that made the sweat stand out on his manly brow though. She smiled.
Then frowned at herself.
Another tsk. Not nice, Faith.
This was unlike her and a measure of how much that grim visage of his had affected her equilibrium.
Stop thinking about him.
‘We’ll edge down this rock face now. The path narrows so please don’t touch that glistening rock there,’ She shone her headlamp at the shimmering silver wall. ‘It has beautiful fragile crystals so you can take photos and admire it, but it will become disfigured if you accidentally touch it.’ She watched them and saw with satisfaction how they all leaned the other way to protect the wall.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured. ‘Almost there.’ There were a few Hail Marys behind her and she stifled a laugh. The shy quiet man had turned out to be a Catholic comedian. You had to love him.
Finally, after another ten minutes of winding and uneven descent, she stepped into an opening with a sloping floor. It spread out into a wide cavern and she heard the sighs of relief to be able to spread out a little. The distance narrowed between roof and floor and she resisted the urge to duck her head. Enough of that soon enough.
‘If you shine your lights down towards your shoes you’ll see you’re standing on red sandy soil.’
All lights tilted downwards and there were some comments of, ‘All the way down here. Wow.’
‘So, we’re here. You’re standing on the bed of a river from thousands of years ago, stretching away in two directions.’
She let that statement sit in the silence as the others thought about that and shone their headlamps around. ‘As you can see with your lights...’ and that was all they could see with, as no other light could penetrate this far into the cave ‘...there’s a line of white rocks marking off a section of the cave. Also, in front of us, a circle of the same stones to protect an area of new stalactite formation.’
She crouched down and even now she could feel the excitement as her heart rate sped up with the wonder of all this subterranean world so far below the surface. ‘See this—’ She pointed out t
he new holes burrowing into the dirt in the centre of the circle.
‘Every drop is making the hole larger and eventually it will form a pencil of creation.’
She breathed out and those standing next to her murmured their own awe. This was why she loved these tours. When she felt the connection from others at the opportunity to see something so few people had.
‘If you look across from us—’ she angled her head and the light shone on the roof ‘—hanging from the low roof like eyelashes, those are thin tendrils of tree roots that are searching for the water that left eons ago, but the moisture remains and even though the roots don’t touch any water the filaments absorb moisture from the air.’
Someone said, ‘Amazing.’ She smiled in their direction.
‘There’s no natural light—the creatures who live here are small, without eyes, their bodies are see-through, almost like albino slaters.’ She crouched down and drew an example the size of a cat in the red dirt with her finger.
Her comedian said in the darkness, ‘That looks too big for comfort,’ and laughed nervously. Several other voices murmured.
Faith grinned. ‘Not drawn to scale.’ She pointed out a tiny white beetle-like creature on a tree root. ‘But if you see one of them in front of you when you’re crawling, please scoop up a handful of dirt and shift him aside.’
The young woman next to Faith who’d changed into jeans said in a small voice, ‘You say we are crawling?’
‘Yep, we’re sliding under that overhang on our stomachs, using our elbows, for about thirty metres, but it opens into a small cavern after that.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said in her lilting accent, ‘I can stay here and mind the bags?’
Faith looked at her and noted her pinched nostrils and darting eyes. ‘Perfectly fine. We’ll only be about ten minutes’ crawl away, though you mightn’t hear us because the riverbed bends a little. Then it opens into another cavern where we can sit up. We’ll be gone for about thirty minutes by the time we spend ten minutes there as well as crawling there and back. Will you be fine with that?’
She laughed nervously. ‘I find it very peaceful here.’
‘I’ll stay with her,’ one of the teenage boys offered with pretended resignation. It was so obviously what he wanted to do that everyone laughed.
Faith nodded. ‘The rest of us can drop all our extra stuff, like cameras and jumpers, here. Too hard to crawl on your belly dragging a drink bottle or camera.’
There was a small wave of tense laughter as people dropped surplus bits and crouched down. The black semi-circular opening above the red sandy floor looked about three feet high and maybe ten feet wide, based with the red sand of the ancient river. A little too much like a mouth that would eat them, Faith had thought the first time, and she guessed a few of the others now thought the same.
‘I’ll go belly down into the damp dirt first so you know I’m ahead, but I need a volunteer to go last. Someone needs to make sure we all keep going.’
‘I will go last.’ Raimondo spoke quietly, his thick accent rolling calmly around the tiny space. When the others expelled breaths of relief he said, ‘I have been on this tour before and have no concerns.’
Faith knew this last stretch tested the first timers’ resolve as they slithered forward in the dark, seeing the backside and feet of the person in front, the circle of light from the person behind washing over them, the roof closing in over their helmeted head. She’d had the occasional talk down of a panicked group member at this part but in the end they all agreed the challenge was worth it.
Faith knelt down until she was lying on the damp sand and glanced at Raimondo, looming above her. He nodded calmly and with a last flashing grin at the rest of the group she propelled herself forward along the riverbed, the circle of her headlamp piercing the darkness ahead with its warm glow.
She heard them behind her and the flicker of the others’ lights occasionally shone past until she’d crawled all the way to the cavern.
She sat up and waited, watching the circles of light approach one by one as each crawled out of the hole and into the circle of the cavern.
‘You can sit up now. There’s a good foot over your head.’
‘Gee, thanks,’ the first arrival, the other of the solid woman’s sons, muttered mock complainingly, and she grinned in his direction.
‘Just shimmy around so the next person can sit up and move next to you until we have a circle.’ It didn’t take long for all of them to arrive and she wasn’t sure how Raimondo ended up sitting next to her, but she doubted it was by accident.
Faith cleared her throat. She couldn’t change the next bit and he probably knew it. ‘We’re going to turn out all our lights and just sit here, in the belly of Mother Earth, in the dark, and soak in the wonder of what we are experiencing.’
The same smart alec said, ‘Why not?’ But everyone laughed. Except Raimondo.
There was a murmur of further surprise and then slowly, as they all began to feel the magic of the space, she could feel the agreement.
She pushed on. ‘And we’ll sit in silence for a minute or two just to soak it in—where we are, how long this cavern has been here, and how amazing you all are to do this and still be having fun.’
A few murmurs of pride.
‘After the silence I’ll share an Aboriginal legend I was told about a good spirit from the ocean and a bad spirit from the cave, and how these caves were formed.’
Like good children, one by one they turned out the lights until the darkness fell like a blindfold over them.
Faith closed her eyes. She always found this moment, this silence, incredibly peaceful. The air she breathed felt moist on her nose and throat as she inhaled and she dug her fingers into the damp earth and collected two handfuls of the sleeping riverbed and held them with her eyes shut tight—not that it made any difference, open or shut, in the total dark.
She always felt blessed to have been given this moment in time to embrace the idea of being a part of this river under the earth. Breathing in and out quietly as the silence stretched for several minutes. Nobody fidgeted or spoke until she judged enough time had passed. Then she began to tell the story of the battle of the ancients.
Copyright © 2019 by Fiona McArthur
ISBN-13: 9781488066139
Rescued by the Single Dad Doc
Copyright © 2019 by Marion Lennox
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