by D J Mcintosh
I was about to give up and return to the cavern when I became aware of an unearthly glow. A greenish light dancing across the rock over my head. I turned off the headlamp. The tunnel ceiling glimmered with phosphorescence.
Stretching my arms out, I gave the pack another push. My hands felt a vacuum. A crevice in the rock? It was a hole—I had no idea how deep. I turned my lamp on, bit my lip against the knee pain, and shifted onto my stomach. The cleft in the rock was about three feet wide. It bisected part of the tunnel floor and wall on my right side. When my light shone through the cleft, it revealed another enormous cavern. Water filled the cleft, but I could see that it stopped just inside.
I couldn’t tolerate the thought of trying to squeeze through the tunnel anymore. I was exhausted and thirsty beyond measure. Somehow I twisted myself through the crevice and crawled onto the cavern floor. A huge space. Larger than anything I’d seen in the entire cave system. Its roof soared as high as a cathedral. Here were more massive salt formations like huge white statues. The space resembled a giant’s warehouse, a storage yard for long-forgotten artworks fashioned by some mad sculptor. I crawled to a relatively dry space, took one more drink of water. I ate an energy bar. Only one left now. My face was hot; I must be developing a fever. I pulled some tissues out of my pack, wiped my face and hair with them, then lay my head down on my pack and slept.
I woke up shivering. My fever had worsened. I dragged myself over to the gap and unzipped my fly. Nothing more than a dribble came out. My lips tasted of salt but I was afraid to spit, not wanting to lose even that much liquid. I remembered Nick saying “The salt will shut your kidneys down. It doesn’t take much.” Along with everything else, dehydration was killing me.
I panicked then and stuffed down the last energy bar, hoping the moisture contained within it might help. Someone set adrift on the ocean could at least wait for rain. And I’d been so tired, I now realized I’d fallen asleep with my light on. I pulled out my phone. The battery was dead.
I forced myself to stand, even though I wobbled, woozy as a drunk. The cavern seemed endless. Its floor sloped upward like a very long natural ramp. With the pack and rope once again on my back, I took up my bent aluminum cane and staggered forward. I could make out a big mound in the gloom ahead. As I drew closer I could see it was white—a hill covered with salt crystals? A strange hill, though, as it rose from the cave floor almost at right angles.
Some of the salt had drifted away at the hillock’s base, exposing a circle of rock. I touched it. Not rock—wood. Impossible. Was I hallucinating? Something, round as well, stuck out at its center. I dropped the rope and my pack and eased myself down to give it a closer look. It felt like wood too. Around this mound was a series of small hillocks, also covered in salt crystals. I bashed at one of them with my closed fist. The salt broke away. A man’s face stared up at me.
Forty-One
My first thought was that I’d found Helmstetter.
I whipped off my windbreaker and used the sleeve to wipe away the salt crystals crusting his features. This wasn’t the face of a modern man. Underneath the fine powder of salt his eyes were mere sockets; his corrupted, heavily pocked skin looked like leather. His hair and long beard were thickly braided, and plugs, faintly gold in color, were fixed to his pierced ears. Ragged strips of wool hung under his neck. He wore a metal helmet of some kind. I remembered seeing pictures in the National Geographic News of the Iranian salt men, well-preserved specimens who’d died in salt mines near Zanjan, southwest of Tabriz. The salt absorbed their bodily fluids, leaving them as desiccated as mummies. The same phenomenon had preserved this ancient man.
But the truly astonishing find was what he wore around his throat: a medallion in green tarnished copper, embossed with the figure of a bird with outstretched wings. A vulture. Very similar to the medallion in my treasure chest. I unfastened the chain link holding it and took the copper disc in my hand.
A new energy burst through me. This must be where Helmstetter found the artifacts he’d sent back to America. Elated, almost manic, I ignored my aching leg and scrabbled up the hillocks to chip away at the salt with my knife. One mound revealed the skull of a mule or donkey: onangers they were called in ancient times. Another mule lay beside it, its rough hairs and leather yokes and traces perfectly preserved.
The tallest mound must have been six feet high. I gritted my teeth against the pain in my knee and pulled myself up. Judging from the placement of the mules, I figured I was at the back of a primitive wooden cart. I dug into the salt and felt hard chunks beneath my fingers: blocks of something about the size of a brick but irregularly shaped. I pulled one out. It, too, was white with salt. Rubbing it against my shirt, I could see faint traces of a heavenly indigo color. Lapis lazuli, the royal gem of the Mesopotamians. A cartload of the precious stone.
Halfway down, a wooden partition divided the cart. In the front section were salt-filled urns and shallow bowls—they may have once held water or provisions. Near them lay leather-wrapped packages. I picked one up; when I unfolded it, the fragile leather disintegrated in my hands. Inside I found a statue, a cousin of the one Strauss had shown me: a priest-like figure with an elongated skull. Another held more cylinder seals of gleaming purple stone. Unlike Strauss’s seals, these had been fashioned from amethyst.
The seals bore primitive drawings, clearly Sumerian, but no wedge-shaped cuneiform marks. I wondered if they’d been made in a preliterate time. If so, they’d be at least 5500 years old, just like the ones Strauss had shown me. Overwhelmed, I sat back and tried to calm my breathing. My pulse had gone into overdrive from dehydration and excitement.
Another body, resting on a long bronze spear and outfitted in a similar fashion, lay at the head of the cart. It too wore a linked necklace, except this one was broken. Someone had removed the medallion. Could it have been the medallion from my childhood treasure box? And if Helmstetter had taken it along with the other artifacts, how did Samuel end up with it?
Many questions, few answers.
A wave of dizziness hit and my vision blurred, reminding me of the precariousness of my circumstances. It seemed beyond cruel. I’d stumbled upon an enormous archaeological find but would never live to tell a soul.
My headlamp flickered ominously. I’d just about run out of time. If there was a way out, I had to find it. I stashed two of the seals and the statue in my pack. The medallion and a small bowl went into my inside jacket pocket nestled beside my phone. I drank the rest of my water, and then with grim humor left the empty plastic bottle beside the mummified man I’d first discovered. Using my aluminum crutch, the rope once more thrown over my shoulder, I limped away from the cart and its precious cargo.
The cavern seemed to stretch on and on, but by then my sense of time was so skewed I couldn’t really tell. The rock walls closed in again. My headlamp dimmed and this time I knew it wasn’t my vision. I got my bearings, picked out a rise on the ground to head toward, and shut off the lamp to save what juice I could. I’d stumble forward for maybe fifty feet then switch the lamp on again. The fourth time I shut it off, I thought I could see another phosphorescent glow. The cavern roof was lower here, no more than twice my height.
It wasn’t phosphorescence after all but a salt seam running from roof to floor. It did look different, though; it seemed to shine. And then it hit me: some kind of light must be coming from behind the salt crystals. Light. Should I pray or was I hallucinating? I plunged my knife into the crust, hacking away at it until I’d made a hole the size of a cup. I thrust my fist through, not caring that it scraped the salt and stung my hand. On the other side was precious, cool air.
I laughed like a maniac. Even gloried in my pain. Hurting meant I was alive, and now I had a way out. I attacked the salt seam with my knife again, widening the hole to the size of a large bucket. And then I had a moment of misgiving. What if it was just another cavern? I hardly dared open my eyes. When I did, the round orb of the sun blazed in a blue sky.
Forty-Tw
o
I have no memory of forcing my way through the rest of the salt seam. When I did make it out I fell onto hard red earth and banged my knee again, sparking white-hot pain. Once the waves of nausea passed, I basked in warm sunlight. I had to close my eyes every few seconds. They weren’t used to the glare, and the salt had made them dry and itchy. I felt like one of those creatures deep undersea— strange, fleshy white beings for whom the sun was an enemy.
The ground fanned out below me in a series of furrows and ledges heavily populated with boulders. Far in the distance, the terrain flattened to a dusty plain. It might as well have been Mars. I’d been thinking the cave was deep underground and forgotten we’d started out so high. Now I didn’t have the slightest idea of where I was. I couldn’t spot a single human being, not even a road or footpath. Still, common sense told me to make my way down to the plain. My breath came with difficulty, my throat was swelling. I had to get help from somewhere. I began the arduous process of crawling down, this time on my belly, no matter how much it hurt. When I came to a nest of boulders I had no choice but to stand on my good leg and scale them as best I could. The ledges proved to be the worst obstacles. I couldn’t jump even the smallest ones, and some had thirty-foot drops. I’d knot the rope to the nearest spar of rock and lower myself down. Sometimes I was forced to cut the rope when the knot didn’t come undone as it should have.
The sun had almost set when I heard the sound of water slipping over rock somewhere nearby. I searched and found a trickle spilling out of a cleft between two small boulders. I bent my head, held my mouth to it, and then spat it out. Salt. If I’d been able to generate tears, I would have cried. Night was closing in and I’d made it only two-thirds of the way down.
Another sound registered in the distance. This time a murmuring. Someone softly, insistently, calling my name. Two forms wavered in the twilight far below. I squinted to see who they were and my heart leapt. Bennet and Nick. How had they managed to find me? Overjoyed, I called out to them, feebly, but loud enough for them to hear. Bennet pointed in my direction. They stopped in their tracks, laughing together, as if sharing a secret known only to them. Yet they came no closer. Their forms turned into wispy phantoms and faded away.
Despair overwhelmed me again. I’d escaped the cave only to die on this barren, rocky land. Keep going. Keep going. You have to find water. Have to. Wherever that voice came from, it drove everything else out of my mind. I knew I couldn’t rest. So I felt my way forward, staggering like a drunk in the dark. I don’t remember how much farther I went when I fell off a ledge, hit something very hard, and passed out.
Forty-Three
March 12, 2005
Kandovan, Iran
Something soft lay beneath me. And, far away, voices. A woman and a man, talking urgently in a language I didn’t understand. Angel voices, I thought. Alaz had told me this was the land of angels, after all. I could have been resting on a cloud.
A hand pressed gently down on my neck and moved to my jaw. Something didn’t feel right. My beard was gone. Perhaps beards weren’t allowed in paradise. A covering slid away from my eyes. I blinked them open and saw heavy black folds of cloth draped around a woman. I knew her face but not how I’d met her. She held a glass to my lips. “Drink it. Drink it. Water, good for you.” The cool liquid had a faint herbal flavor. It tumbled down my throat, slaking my thirst. My head flopped down on the softness and I slept again.
A bright light shone on my face the next time I woke. A white rock wall rose straight ahead. For a moment I panicked, afraid I was back in the cave, until I realized I was lying in a small, white-stucco room on a single bed covered with a colorful blanket.
A chair creaked. The woman stood and came over to my bedside. I recognized her now. Alaz’s sister. I was in the Nemat home.
I tried to sit up. “What am I doing here?”
She lay her hands on my shoulders and gently pressed me down again. “Very sick,” she said. “Alaz he will tell you when he comes. Soon.” Her lips quivered a little when she smiled. She had beautiful dark eyes and they seemed to hold my own gaze tenderly.
My leg still ached. I reached under the cover and could feel it had been swathed in bandages from the middle of my hip to my calf. The protruding lump at my knee had disappeared. Just as well they’d fixed the dislocation when I was unconscious, sparing me the cutting pain.
“How did I get here? Was I in the hospital?”
“The one who takes his mules on rides for tourists. He found you and remembered how you asked about us. He saw your yellow jacket on the rocks. Hospital not good for you. Police will find out.”
Heavy footsteps echoed on a stair. My guardian angel jumped back as if she’d been stung by a hornet and stood against the wall. A tall figure blocked the doorway.
Alaz.
“You may go, Marya,” he said sternly. She said a few quiet words to him and slipped out of the room. He came and stood over the bed. His face looked worn and tired. “How are you feeling?”
“Been better. What happened out there? Where are Bennet and Nick?”
Alaz rubbed his face with his hands. “You were already out of sight when we heard a crack and then what sounded like an avalanche. As soon as everything was quiet, we yelled and yelled for you. You didn’t answer.”
His tone carried an edge of dread. I asked the question again: “Where are Bennet and Nick, Alaz?”
His shoulders slumped as he sank into the chair. “Nick started down after you. Every second counted. He wouldn’t wait for another rope to be hooked up and used the one attached to you. Bennet and I tried to brace it. Nick made it maybe sixty feet down. I could just make him out with my headlamp. Bennet leaned over on the edge and I was right behind her. Then Nick lost his footing. He screamed and tumbled out of view. That caused a powerful jolt on the rope, catapulting Bennet over the edge. It all happened in an instant. I almost went over myself. I couldn’t catch her. I’m sorry.”
My pulse thundered. “They’re both gone?” But why hadn’t I seen them lying at the bottom of the chasm? Then I remembered the rock ledge. It must have broken their fall. I turned my head away. My stomach felt as though it was filled with lead. Both of them dead because I’d insisted on going into that godforsaken cave. I swallowed painfully. “Have you recovered their bodies?”
“No. You don’t need to worry. No one will ever find them.”
“You can’t do that! They have to be sent home—to their families. We can’t leave them down there!”
“Yes we will. Do you have any idea what would happen if we went through government officials to send their bodies back to the U.S.?” He got up and paced the short length of the room. “It will be hard enough getting you out of the country. We know the back routes. When you are better we will take you to Turkey. Unless you want to spend the rest of your years in an Iranian prison.”
I put my head back on the pillow and closed my eyes. Exhaustion and grief drained my will. What he said made sense. When I got back I’d see Nick’s adoptive family and any relatives Bennet might have. Confess everything. They’d have a better chance of retrieving their remains than I would. I looked at Alaz. “Thank you for trying to help. My friends meant a lot to me.”
He grunted and jerked his thumb toward the corner of the room. “I brought back their packs, so I got their room keys. The bags from the hotel and your climbing pack are there too. I paid for your rooms. You can leave the country as soon as you’re better.” He gave me a weak smile, turned, and went out.
I maneuvered to the end of the bed and stretched out my arm just enough to hook my fingers around the strap of my climbing pack. It came away easily. Too easily. I pulled it over to the side of the bed, fumbled with the zipper for the main compartment, and stuck my hand inside. It was empty.
Forty-Four
I swore. Who took the artifacts—Alaz? But maybe the donkey man had rummaged through my pack and taken them himself. I slumped back onto the bed. Who cared anyway? Nick and Bennet were gone.<
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Marya came in and set a little metal table beside the bed, then went back downstairs and returned with a tray bearing a steaming pot of tea and a bowl of soft, warm rice. She motioned for me to eat. I propped myself up on one elbow and dug into the rice, the first thing I’d eaten in days, bland but immensely comforting. Marya poured the tea into the cup. “Drink,” she said. “Helps sleeping.”
After I’d polished everything off she moved the table away and sat down. She looked at me as if she wanted to ask something but wasn’t sure whether she should.
“What is it?” I tried to smile to reassure her.
She gave me a tentative nod, hesitated, then said, “Yeva. Have picture?”
I was about to say no when I remembered the photo we’d taken at the restaurant before I left for Turkey. I pointed to my yellow jacket, now torn and streaked with mud, hanging on a wall hook near my pack. Marya rose quickly and brought it over. I fumbled in one of the inside pockets, got my phone, and asked Marya to use my cable to plug it into the wall socket. The screen flashed on, overly bright in the dim light of the room. She brought the phone as close to me as she could. I clicked on the picture and passed her the phone. She took it in her hands and gazed at the image for a long time, touching the screen softly as if to reach across the thousands of miles and caress Evelyn’s face. Her eyes clouded with tears. She wiped them away with a corner of her headscarf and handed the phone back. I couldn’t imagine what it was like for a loved one to come back into your life after so many years.
“Thank you,” she said simply. Then she turned the kerosene lamp down low and resumed her vigil in the chair.