The Russian began intently studying the darkened inside walls, holding her torch close against the rock face. ‘Here!’ she said.
Geraldine came to the other woman’s shoulder, not at first sure what she was seeing. Lyudmilla physically pointed to red and brown marks and said: ‘Finger painting. Literally. The beginning of cave art. They crushed berries between their fingers, for the juice, and daubed. With luck we might find something better.’
Abruptly, into their headsets, came Raisa’s voice. ‘We’ve found a total of twelve bodies, in their chambers. All the adults seem to have been infected and two children, as well. Five other children appeared unaffected. Again they appear to have died from starvation. There’s some flint tools, an adze and skinning knives and a bow and three arrows.’
Geraldine knelt again, glad the protective gloves were thin enough for her to test the rocklike hardness of the deeply frozen bodies. The trip to the Listvyanka Institute had been necessary to confirm Lyudmilla wasn’t a carrier, but Geraldine was beginning to doubt whether the isolation and autopsy provisions there or at the Irkutsk hospital would be good enough. What was available locally would fall far too far short of what was totally necessary to examine and analyze, not just these prehistoric specimens, but everything else that made up the colony and which might very well provide the vital lead they were seeking. She needed the state of the art facilities of Fort Detrick and the support and combined expertize, not just of the drafted-in scientists but of the genome team at Cambridge who had already discovered the telomere erosion.
Lyudmilla said: ‘Let’s go on.’
Geraldine’s movement was instinctive – as it was to lead – but at the mouth of the tunnel leading further into the mountain she recognized she was frightened, a physical, stomach-dropping sensation, and at her hesitation Lyudmilla collided lightly into her back. Bending quickly to provide the excuse she said: ‘There’s no point in my taking my case.’
‘I’m right behind you,’ said Lyudmilla, presciently.
Stoddart’s voice said: ‘You’ve got fifty minutes of oxygen time. Keep checking.’
The wide reflector torches were the most powerful Stoddart had been able to get but the beams didn’t seem sufficient. Geraldine felt the pressure on her arm from behind and adjusted to Lyudmilla’s unspoken suggestion, shining her flashlight from the middle upwards while the Russian concentrated her’s downwards, giving them the maximum spread of light. Everything sparkled with the ice reflection from the walls and it was slippery at every step, Geraldine’s feet several times skidding off stones or ruts. The passageway was high ceilinged, enabling them to walk upright and because that was the level at which her torch was directed Geraldine saw the blotched whiteness before they found the cause.
‘Bats!’ guessed Lyudmilla.
‘There!’ confirmed Geraldine.
There were eight tiny bodies littering a head-high ledge to their left, frozen like everything else, in every case their lips grimaced back to expose sharp-pointed fangs.
‘Vampire species?’ suggested Lyudmilla.
A possible transmission cause, acknowledged Geraldine, remembering Amanda O’Connell’s account of how West Nile disease reached New York by mosquito-infested birds. There had to be as detailed an autopsy on the bats and whatever parasites there were as upon the humanoid bodies. And upon the droppings splattered all around. She said: ‘We’ve found a bat colony. Any sightings where you are?’
There was no response and Geraldine repeated herself, feeling another lurch of uncertainty.
Lyudmilla said: The mountain is too solid and we’re too deeply into it for anything to be transmitted now.’
They scuffed on, their bodies touching, but came to another quick halt as they rounded a corner into a much more intense jewelled glitter of a stalagmite and stalactite gallery, the downward and upward white calcium carbonate cones almost touching at their tips in several places.
Geraldine said: ‘There would have once had to be water percolating through to have formed these.’
‘Look!’ ordered Lyudmilla, again. On the wall behind the calcium icicles were very obvious paintings, stick-figured men throwing spears with the launch stick at what looked like humped-back bison. There were also long-legged, elongatedbeaked birds and a fish which had been drawn with two rear legs.
‘These stalagmites and stalagtites would have seemed magical: some sort of shrine?’
‘Possibly,’ Lyudmilla accepted. ‘Your voice is breaking up, even as close as we are,’ and her sound was intermittent. Geraldine did, though, manage to hear: ‘We’ve been down for twenty minutes now.’
The stalagmites narrowed the passage and Lyudmilla lowered her torch even further and in doing so saved Geraldine’s life, although it wasn’t Geraldine who saw the gaping abyss. Her first awareness was the snatch of the Russian’s hand, pulling her back before she saw the hole into which she would have plunged if she’d taken one further step. The opening appeared strangely eroded from beneath the painted rock face and continued on to have eaten away all but maybe a half a metre of the tunnel floor. At its widest, the hole was at least a metre and a half wide and would, Geraldine realized, have swallowed her completely. The fear whimpered from her and she began to shake more than she was already doing from the penetrating cold, uncaring that the other woman, who still held her arm, would feel it.
The simple words wouldn’t form at her first attempt but she swallowed and managed: ‘Thank you,’ at the second.
‘You all right?’ crackled Lyudmilla.
Geraldine nodded. ‘Yes. OK.’
‘Do you want to go back?’
‘No,’ refused Geraldine, stronger voice. ‘We need to go on. See everything.’
‘Make sure what’s survived is sound. Tread carefully.’
Geraldine felt out tentatively with her foot and then stamped. Immediately her foot slid sideways towards the hole. Swallowing, needing again to say it twice, she said: ‘It’s firm but it slopes towards the gap.’ She edged out sideways, the abyss seeming to gape almost at her toe’s edge, back pressed against the wall, her own torch directed down to join the illumination from Lyudmilla’s flashlight to her right. Her too-easily skating foot scuffed against a rock and then two bat corpses both of which skidded over the edge of the hole. Geraldine stopped, biting her lip hard to prevent any further whimper. She eased herself on, a millimetre at a time, letting out a gasp of relief when she got to where the passage floor widened again.
She directed her light back to help Lyudmilla and said: ‘Use the stalactites to push yourself back against the wall.’
‘If one snaps off, I’ll fall,’ rejected Lyudmilla.
She was halfway along the narrow ledge when her left foot went from under her and she screamed, steadying herself at the very lip, almost throwing herself sideways to get back to the solid floor.
Geraldine said: ‘We’ve got to find another way out.’
Lyudmilla clutched Geraldine’s arm for several moments and Geraldine held her in return. There were unconnected sounds, not possible to identify as words, breaking into their headsets. The Russian woman said: ‘Could be we’re close to the others?’
The two women formed up closely again, needing the continued reassurance of physical contact. It was so cold it was impossible for either to stop shaking permanently. Geraldine remembered the other woman didn’t have the double protection of a body stocking, just bra and pants. They came across the corpses of two emaciated, fur skin covered babies who had died in each other’s arms in a shallow sided chamber with the remains of five bats on the floor, and two metres further on hesitated again at a very obvious change in the total blackness ahead, where the rock face appeared to end in total emptiness.
They advanced a groping step at a time. Their flashlights picked up the sparkle of more stalagmite and stalactite formations against the ice glitter, at first as if they were suspended in space. Closer, the formations emerged to be row after row of shimmering white pillars, in themselves
breathtaking but the cavern they decorated was even more spectacular, high vaulted – in two places with proper rock pillars from floor to an unseen roof – and clearly the central communal room of the Neolithic colony. It appeared to be full of the dead – the later count came to twenty-two – with what must have been families drawn apart in groups to die. Again all the hair – apart from five young children of varying ages, two only babies – was greyish white, the skin puckered and withered with age. There was a lot of straw floor covering and close to every body – nearly always protecting or partially protecting – were animal skins. There was a lot of faeces and one of the two wolf-like dogs had died close to the body of a man at whose leg it had been chewing. There were hunting scene inscriptions and finger painting on two of the walls, in far more detail than before. There were several depictions of what were clearly woolly mammoths and more legged fish, four with elongated beaks. Quite separately was what appeared to be a war or fight scene. There were animal and fish bones everywhere but no skeletons intact enough to look like the creatures on the walls.
Lyudmilla said, thin voiced again: ‘I have never seen – know of – anything like this, anywhere in the world. There’s nothing like this at Lascaux, Les Combarelles or Font-de-Gaume, which are supposed to be the best and most well preserved prehistoric art there is.’
‘What are they?’ demanded Geraldine, bending closer over a family of five – two adults and three children, all girls – unusually side by side, as if they had been properly laid out in death.
‘Arctic roses,’ identified Lyudmilla, understanding Geraldine’s question.
Even in the wavering light the pink and red colouring of the tight flower buds was obvious. Their stems had been split to be threaded one into the other, to make chains. Two of the girls wore them as wristlet bands, the woman as a crowned head-dress.
‘Funeral tributes, from those who survived?’ queried Geraldine.
‘More likely decoration: these are their jewellery.’
There was a sudden blare of Russian – Bobin’s voice – into their headsets so loudly that both women jumped. Almost at once they saw the approaching flashlights of the institute director and his entomologist and unnecessarily – forgetting that their torches would be equally obvious – Geraldine called: ‘We’re over here.’
As the two men approached Bobin said: ‘We were worried. Have you seen the others?’
‘No,’ said Lyudmilla.
‘They might have turned back,’ suggested Geraldine.
‘I hope they have,’ said Bobin.
Geraldine physically shuddered at the thought of being lost, incredulous that she’d actually set off alone, unsure how long she would have continued if Lyudmilla hadn’t caught her up. With the extra light, concentrated at Bobin’s direction, they more fully explored the communal cavern. Each family had its cache of weapons, some spears longer than those they had so far found without throwing sticks, and bows with bird-feather flights, and all seemed to have stores of grasses and stalks and usually corn husks. There were more paintings on a far wall, behind a separate outcrop of stalactites, one a hunting scene with a woolly mammoth in a pit, being speared from above by a group of men, which Lyudmilla explained was one of the ways the behemoths were stampeded into traps where they would be helpless. Immediately after, beyond a cleft in which a lot more grass, straw and plants were stored, they found what Lyudmilla identified as the hide of such an animal huge enough to be divided to cover two separate groups of dead. They pinpointed all their light for the entomologist to probe the fur and recover several insect specimen. Bobin thought the cavern might once have had natural light through openings or fissures closed over the millenias by volcanic shifts and they actually shone their pooled light upwards but the beams were too weak to reach the roof, although ice walls sparkled back at them.
‘People from around the world will want to see this … become involved …’ Bobin said.
‘Not if there’s a source of infection,’ warned Geraldine.
Bobin visibly shivered at the cold permeating his suit, checking his watch. ‘Just over twenty minutes. We should get out.’
The institute director said they’d encountered two boreholes in the passages along which they’d reached the cavern – quoting them as evidence of volcanic shift – when Lyudmilla cautioned about the danger of the other approach and they initially chose what looked to be a third tunnel out, no one voicing the shared thought that Raisa, Dupuy and the other entomologist might have fallen into such a crevasse. Bobin led, Lyudmilla and Geraldine at the rear behind the other Russian man. After only about five metres the tunnel divided into two. Bobin hesitated momentarily before going to the right but almost at once the passage became narrower and lower and finally ended. Briefly, until it widened sufficiently, Geraldine had to lead the retreat. They found another dog and a small colony of bat carcases in the other tunnel, which very quickly became so low they had to bend double. Bobin hit a rock spur with his head and Lyudmilla cried out when she slipped on ice and turned her ankle. Even as close as they were their sentences broke up when they tried to speak, so dense was the rock, despite which Bobin every few moments called out, in Russian, for Raisa and her companion and then in English, for Dupuy. There was never a reply.
Geraldine, who’d never before known of claustrophobia, began to feel uneasy at the tight, enclosing constriction and consciously tried to subdue it, breathing deeply in and out, at once wondering at the level of her oxygen supply. She extended her arm into the beam of her torch. Eighteen minutes before the switch to the emergency reserve. They should have given themselves more time: prepared properly for the increasingly funnelling passage to become impassable and for their having to retrace their steps for one of the already explored, dangerous routes. Whose heavy, measured breathing was she hearing over the communication link? More than one person. Measured, for conservation? Or against the discomfort she was barely managing to control? There was a grunt, a man’s tone, and gratefully she saw them straightening ahead and did so herself, relieved, entering a sudden chamber. Geraldine was the last to enter and by the time she did Bobin was calling again for the missing group. There were two more adult bodies, flintcutting tools and a spear and its launch stick but no furs, and there were a lot of flower fronds she didn’t recognize. There looked to be a continuation of the passageway on the far side of the chamber, with another tunnel exit to the left side.
Geraldine said: ‘I’d say we’ve got another ten minutes from our main oxygen supply.’
Bobin said: ‘I’m sure we’re going back in the right direction.’
Geraldine wasn’t. ‘There’s time for us to go back and take one of the routes we know.’
‘It’s your choice,’ accepted Bobin.
Geraldine didn’t want to try alone.
Lyudmilla said: ‘We’re using up our oxygen, talking. I’ll give myself five minutes, going on this way. At the first problem I’m going back to the main cavern to the way out I know.’
‘So will I,’ agreed Geraldine, at once.
‘We all will,’ concurred Bobin.
The apparent continuation on the other side of the chamber turned out to be nothing more than a recess, containing more grass and fronds. The other ice-shimmering passage was high enough for them to walk erect although it was little more than a body width, so at the rear Geraldine couldn’t see the reason for Bobin’s next abrupt exclamation. The man said: ‘I think we can get by,’ and Geraldine finally saw the institute director and the entomologist pressing themselves through what couldn’t have been more than a half a metre gap between the rock wall and a series of stalactite icicles hanging like long-fanged teeth.
Lyudmilla said: ‘Let’s go back. Hurry!’
Geraldine turned without argument, but at once Bobin said: ‘Don’t! I can feel wind, blowing against me,’ and there was a burst of Russian from the other man.
The ice, against the rock and coating the stalactite, acted as a lubricant and it was easier than Ge
raldine expected to get past the obstruction. She felt the wind pressure directly beyond and the anxiousness to get to wherever it was coming from – to try to run even – surged through her, as difficult to curb as the earlier claustrophobia. She did it, though, swallowing as if physically to keep it down, conscious that they were moving faster and knowing she hadn’t been the only one to be frightened. The darkness broken only by the yellowness of the flashlights abruptly lightened, at first into greyness and then even lighter, making the torches unnecessary, and Bobin said: ‘I can see daylight,’ and Geraldine did too, finally, an oblong beacon of sun and blueness growing bigger and bigger.
At once Stoddart’s voice came into their headsets, urgently but calm. ‘You’ve got seven minutes on your main supplies. Plenty of time. Glad to get you back. I’m where you went in …’
They didn’t emerge directly on to the exposed facade of the cave dwellings but from the side, where part of the cliff still remained to conceal them. Geraldine wasn’t sure if she let out any sound of relief, but thought she probably had. The American acted as a support for each of them to jump down from the ledge, easing each of them away from the scree to the firmer ground, repeating as he did so: ‘Don’t stop. All the way down to where the bags are, where it’ll be safe to get out of the helmets.’
Geraldine felt his reassuring pressure against her arm and back where he helped her and said, uncaring that everyone would hear: ‘Jesus, am I glad to see you.’
Her oxygen began to go as she rounded the bluff – immediately seeing Guy Dupuy already by the equipment bags – and she was actually holding her last breath when she reached him. Stoddart had to help her unfasten her mask and as it fell away from her face she gasped: ‘Where’s Raisa and Vadim Ivanovich, the other Russian? Are they out?’
Ice Age Page 34