I was suddenly full of confidence then. The blow hole was more like a rising gallery, but even so it would only be a moment or two before I surfaced in the upper cavern where Bert had seen the rope hanging. And it was in that moment that I nearly drowned. I suppose I had knocked my mask scraping through the fissure. At any rate, there was water in it, and suddenly it was over my nose and I panicked. I forgot that it was my mouth I was breathing through, that the nose didn't matter. Desperate, I held my breath, stationary, alone, only the torch beam stabbing at impenetrable darkness. And then I tried to suck in air through my nostrils, got sea water instead and tore at the mask, driving with my flippers for the
surface. But there was no surface, only rock. A rock prison like a huge tombstone holding me in a watery grave. It was the thought that this was a grave that brought me to my senses, made me remember the drill for clearing a mask that Bert had taught me sitting on bright sunlit sand in six feet of water. Lean the head back, hold the top of the mask against the forehead, tilting it, and blow through the nose. I did it, my head hard up against the rock ceiling, emptying my lungs in one despairing snort. Bubbles poured past my face, my head no longer bumping rock as I began to sink; with absolute concentration I forced myself to breathe in through my mouth. The hiss of air as I cracked the demand valve, the feel of life in my lungs again—and miraculously my mask was clear. I felt suddenly drained, utterly exhausted, and yet at the same time wondrously exhilarated as though I had surmounted some great obstacle.
Feeling more confident than at any time during the dive, I relocated the entrance to the blow hole and flippered my way into it, head first. It was circular in shape and about four feet across at the entrance. Inside, it proved very irregular. There were places where it narrowed to little more than a pipe, others where it widened out into expansion chambers, and the angle of the slope, as well as its direction, varied considerably. Also the walls, though smooth, were not glazed like the entrance cave below.
All this was observed more or less automatically, my mind being concentrated on what I would find when I broke surface in the upper cave. Thus it was that, when the beam of my torch showed me a man's legs, I was slow to react.
I had just paused in one of the expansion chambers to glance at my depth gauge. It now read 10 feet and I remember thinking that I was already over halfway up the blow hole. The walls closed in again as I entered a particularly narrow section, and it was then that the beam of the torch showed him swimming away from me.
At least, that was my first thought, seeing in the dim light of my torch the soles of his feet, the white of legs disappear-
ing into the red of swimming trunks. And for a moment I accepted it, noting that, as I checked, he seemed to swim away up the tunnel, his legs trailing off into the miasma of sediment-saturated water through which the torch beam could not penetrate. And because I could swim and breathe in that tunnel it didn't shock me the way it should have done to find another man down there.
I suppose the truth is that my nerves were so concentrated upon what I was doing that my reactions to anything extraneous were uncommonly slow. I went on after him, the tunnel rising more steeply, and round the bend, where it was wider, I saw him lying like a log broadside to me, white shirt clinging to a white body overblown by the optic enlargement of the water.
No flippers. No cylinders. No belt, no mask, and the legs and arms bent as though in movement, but quite still.
It was Holroyd.
That was when I reacted, when my heart turned over and my stomach suddenly became a void, wanting to evacuate itself. I knew now what I had been swimming through that hung suspended like miasma in the still water.
He was dead, of course. He couldn't possibly be alive, lying so still in the water without a mask, his eyes staring straight at me, unnaturally enlarged. He looked like a very learned frog, an albino, pop-eyed, ready-to-croak frog. Indeed, at that moment a bubble of air, or gas rather, detached itself from him and went sailing away up the final slope of the tunnel to burst with a noise like a distant gunshot at the surface.
And when I had watched that bubble break and knew I was at the threshold of the upper cavern, my gaze returned to something that had puzzled me. Holroyd's right hand was gripped around a metal object that shone dully in the beam of my torch. I paddled nearer and reached out. The fingers were crooked, stiff as hooks in their state of rigor, and yet when I caught hold of the object it lifted clear of his hand. Instantly the corpse drifted up the last few feet of the tunnel to break surface, gently, silently, in the cavern.
I was left holding in my hand the heavy spotlight that Bert claimed had been whipped away from him by some unseen presence.
I did not at that moment draw any conclusions from the fact that the stiffened fingers were not actually gripped round the torch handle. My mind simply recorded it, too shocked by the discovery of his body to think of anything else as I followed it upwards and broke surface myself in the cavern.
There is something instinctively revolting about being in a confined space of water with the corpse of a drowned man. I played the beam of my torch over the cavern, saw that it was as Bert had described it—the lozenge shape with gallery entrances yawning at either end, the rope hanging down from the gaping hole in the roof, the ledges of darkened rock—and then I had propelled myself to the side and was hauling myself up out of the water. The rock was blackened with slime and very slippery, indicating some sort of tidal or surge movement of the water level inside the cavern.
Just clear of the water, I pushed the mask back off my face, removed the mouthpiece and lay there panting. The atmosphere was warm, the air I sucked into my lungs heavy and humid. Stretched out on a sloping slab of rock, I reached up and got a fingertip on the ledge above me. The belt and cylinders were heavy after the weightlessness I had experienced during the dive. The time was 10.09. ^ had been 22 minutes under water—22 minutes of diving time gone. I had to remember that.
Somehow I got out on to the ledge and slithered forward on my stomach until at last I was above the tidemark, safe on dry rock. Here I relieved myself of the weight of the belt and shucked myself out of the straps that held the cylinder to my back. I had been making for the entrance of what I believed to be the western gallery, and after removing my flippers, I climbed the last few feet to the mouth of it. Only then did I put my gear down, on the flat of the gallery floor where there was no chance of anything slipping down the sloping ledges of rock into the water.
Standing there, my head almost touching the gallery roof,
I tried Bert's spot, pressing the rubber we had so carefully taped over the switch. The bulb glowed dully and then faded, the battery exhausted. There had been hours of light in that new battery when Bert had started his dive. I put the spot down with the rest of my things and turned the beam of my diving torch on to the hole in the roof of the cavern where the rope hung forlornly, a pale umbilical cord, its end falling to the black pool of water. The surface of the pool was still now, flat like a floor of glass, except for Holroyd's body floating there, motionless, the white shirt clinging like an attenuated shroud. And beyond the body, dark rocks climbing to the gaping arch of the gallery's continuation on the far side.
No sound—the whole cavern gripped in utter silence; a grave-like stillness. Only my own breathing for company, the thud of my heart. I was remembering what Bert had said. Was there a "presence" here? He had said he had sensed it the way you sense a shark lurking. But that might have been the hypersensitiveness of a man alone in an underwater cave.
The spotlight's faded bulb was a reminder that my own torch had a limited life and I switched it off to save the battery. Instantly, I was enveloped in darkness so black that I felt as though my eyes had suddenly become sightless. How the hell had Bert managed to grope his way out with no torch and under water? I was shivering, but not with cold, the jacket of the wet suit clinging snugly to my body. I was thinking of Holroyd. Had he been alive, here in this cave, when Bert climbed out to where I st
ood now? Was it Holroyd's presence he had sensed?
I sat down abruptly, still shivering, and tried to think it out. Holroyd had come down that rope, and the rope's end trailed in the water. But he couldn't have drowned there, not with rock ledges all round. And the spotlight. Was it his hand that had reached out from the dark to grab that source of light? But then I remembered how his fingers had been crooked so loosely over the handle and a sudden chill invaded my stomach.
Of course, if he had slipped, as Bert had slipped, his grip
could easily have been loosened as he fell. But if he'd taken the torch, then he must have been alive when Bert entered the cave. Alive, he would surely have spoken to him, made his presence known. And Bert had talked of a body—the cold touch of a body as he had sunk through the water towards the blow hole tunnel.
Afraid suddenly of the dark thoughts in my mind, I switched on my torch again and instantly the beam of it flooded the pool with light. Quickly I scrambled to my feet, stepping forward, intent on reaching Holroyd's body. I had to examine it. That was my one thought. I had to find out for myself the cause of death. Nothing else would drive out the dreadful thought that was then at the back of my mind. But moving forward, quickly like that, my feet on the slime instead of hard rock, I only just saved myself from the sort of fall that had knocked Bert out and broken his arm.
Panting with fright, I recovered myself, turning and stepping back into the yawning archway of the gallery behind me. And then I saw it. The beam of my torch was on the gallery wall and the etched shape of a mammoth stared me in the face. The high-domed head, the great curve of the tusks—it seemed to be charging towards me along the pale rock wall. And behind it was another, etched more deeply, the lines of the drawing sharp and black, and it too was possessed of an extraordinary sense of movement.
I stood there, rooted to the spot, panic mounting with the sense of remembered evil. Then, slowly, I began to advance into the gallery, Holroyd forgotten, my imagination running riot. My thoughts had taken a frightening turn. And as I moved forward, I saw mammoth after mammoth, the torch beam shadowing the deep-cut lines, so that the shapes of the beasts stood out very clear, with hard scratched lines running into their bodies. And there were other drawings, scratch marks that were geometrical, like a hut, a rhinoceros superimposed on the slanting rump of a mammoth, the suggestion of a fish, or perhaps a lizard. And then, suddenly, there was colour.
It was on the roof, where it sloped upwards—a great band of red. I didn't see it as a shape, not until I was right underneath it. Then suddenly I saw it, a large-horned bull sprawled lengthways along the run of the gallery roof, a beast in full flight and falling, forelegs stiffened, head thrown back, the eyes staring, wild with fear. The realism of it was fantastic, the painting enormous—so enormous that I wondered how the artist, using the bulges of the rock for belly and rump, had been able to keep the perspective of the whole in mind.
I swung the beam of my torch away from that monstrous death-throe painting, probing the continuation of the gallery, and where the roof rose, the gallery opened out into a cavern, and it was all red. That was the overwhelming impression— a cave the colour of dried blood. But as I moved slowly into it the colouring separated into individual paintings—bulls and bison, some reindeer, a lynx, three ibex close together and a bunch of tiny horses galloping over a cliff.
The torch trembled in my hand, the beam fastening on a bull, vertical on the wall. Again the head was reared back, the forefeet braced, the whole animal ochre red, caught and held in the moment of its fall to death. I was appalled. Standing in the centre of that cavern, which was about fifty by thirty feet, I played my torch on the walls and roof, and one by one the red beasts dying leaped to life as the beam touched them. The whole cave was a charnel house, a portrait gallery of hunted animals, and all so life-like, so animated, so full of the dreadful certainty of death.
A short gallery led to another, bigger cave. I moved into it in a daze. The roof was lower, the smooth silt floor humped in strange pits, and the witch doctor artists had filled every inch of their rock canvas. Bulls and deers and bison, ochre-painted the colour of stale blood, and at the far end my father sitting, his back propped against the wall and his eyes staring like blue stones into the beam of my torch. I thought he was dead. But then his mouth opened, and the breath of a question came from him, sibilant in the stillness—"Who are you?"
"Paul," I said, my voice barely recognizable, so gripped was I by my dreadful surroundings.
"Paul?" he seemed not to understand, his appearance wild, his voice dazed.
I shifted the torch in my hand, directing the beam of it onto my face.
He recognized me then. "So it's you!" His words sounded like a sigh of relief and I saw his limbs move, an awkward attempt to rise to his feet. His face was grey with stubble, the eyes deep-sunk and staring. "Give me that torch." His voice was hoarse, a harsh whisper desperate with urgency.
I didn't move. There were questions that had to be answered, and I stood there, rooted to the spot, my mouth dry, my tongue mute. There was an atmosphere about that place—something old, very old, that touched a chord, a deep sub-conscious instinct. And as though he read my thoughts, he said, "You are in the presence of the Earth Goddess. Man's oldest god. And this—" His thin hand moved—"This is her temple. Move the beam of your torch to the right—over there. Those bison—they're being driven over a cliff. Superb!" he breathed. "And I've been here in the dark, unable to see since . . ." He checked himself. "How long is it? How long have I been down here?"
"Almost three days," I said.
"And only a few hours—of light—to see what I had found. All those years, searching . . ." He was trembling, his voice on the edge of tears. And then he moved, sheer willpower pushing him up till he stood erect, the rock wall supporting him and his limbs shaking under him. His head—ascetic, skull-like with age and exhaustion—was outlined against the red flanks of a charging bull. "The torch," he whispered, the urgency back in his voice, his hand held out—begging for the light.
I passed it to him then, and he snatched it from my hand in his eagerness to see what he'd been living with in darkness—his fantastic discovery. Slowly he swung the beam, illuminating that butcher's cavern with its great beasts
tumbling into traps, driven over cliffs, or caught in the moment of death with the weapons of the hunters scoring their flanks. "Look!" he breathed, the beam steadying on the red shape of a bison painted on the roof. "See how the cave artist used the bulge of that rock to emphasize the weight of the head, the massive power of the shoulders." The torch trembled in his hand, the croak of his voice almost breathless with wonder. "I haven't seen anything like this since I was in Font de Gaume. I was just a youngster then, and I had left the Dordogne before they discovered Lascaux. I've seen photographs, of course, but that's not the same."
By then I had a grip on myself, was thinking of Bert, and Holroyd's body in the pool out there beyond the further cavern. "What happened after the rock fall trapped you?" I took hold of his arm. It was thin and hard, all bone under my hand as I pressed him for an answer. But he was still intent upon the beam of the torch, lost in a world of his own as he feasted his eyes on the paintings. It was only when I asked him how he'd found them that I got any sensible reaction.
"By accident," he said, his eyes following the beam as it illuminated a gory melee of animals superimposed one upon another. "I'd only matches. And not many of those—no other light. But that's how I saw it first—this temple to Man the Killer." He said those words as though they carried a personal message. "Look! See how the charcoal has been used to express the terror in that reindeer's eyes—marvellous!"
I slid my hand down his arm and took hold of the torch. "I have to save the battery," I said. But he didn't seem to understand. He was beyond practicalities, entirely rapt at the wonder of his find, and he tightened his grip on the torch so that I had to wrench it from him. It wasn't difficult. There was no strength left in him.
"Give it to me." He was suddenly like a child, pleading. "You don't realize what it means—all the hours sitting here-waiting, praying for a light to see them by."
"Sit down." My hand was on his shoulder, urging him. And then I switched off the torch and in the dark he cried
out as though I'd hurt him physically. Then suddenly he sank to the floor of the cave, exhausted.
"Now," I said, sitting down beside him, my back against the wall. "Tell me what happened. You were through the old rock fall, exploring the upper cave, when that earth tremor brought the roof down. What happened then?"
The darkness was total, and in the darkness I could hear his breathing, a rasping sound, very laboured.
"Did you have your acetylene lamp with you?"
"Of course."
"And you'd found the blow hole?"
"Yes. I was in there, examining the walls, when it happened—the ground trembling and the crash of rock falling." In the blackness, without the distraction of the cave paintings, he began to talk. And once he had started, it was like a dam breaking, the whole story of his discovery pouring out of him.
He had gone back up to the cave-shelter to examine the rock fall, and realizing there was no way out, that he was trapped with little chance of being rescued, he had explored the only alternative, going down the blow hole until at last he reached the end of it. Then, with his back braced against the wall of it, he had peered down, leaning perilously over the gap and holding his lamp at the full stretch of his arm. He had seen the glint of water, the vague shape of the rock ledges and the shadowed entrance to a gallery beyond. "I was afraid at first." His voice breathed at me out of the darkness, a croaking whisper, tired and faint. "It seemed a desperate step, to let myself fall into the water, the lamp extinguished—no light, nothing but darkness."
He had tried to climb back up the slope of the blow hole, but it was too steep and his muscles were tired. And then gradually the acetylene flame of his lamp had weakened. Finally he had worked his way back down to the end of the blow hole. There he had managed to slip the box of matches he carried into the empty wallet in his hip pocket, and as the flame of his lamp dwindled to nothing, he had let himself
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