The Maw

by Taylor Zajonc

  DeWar’s fame persisted, even after the age of colonies came to an inevitable close. His good looks, boastful tales, and trails of bad debt assured this notoriety—as did rumors of two jilted fiancées. Even so, his backers, likely duped, never stopped believing his intentions, many concluding he’d been kidnapped or murdered. It would have been a considerably more romantic ending for the Victorian sensibility than deeming the young lord a con artist and thief.

  Rumors and sightings bolstered the theories, local legends and the occasional imposter kept the story alive for a time. But over the years, the dream of Lord Riley DeWar emerging alive from the plains of Africa became increasingly remote until, embroiled in the Great War, England simply forgot their missing son. DeWar was left to the historians. The near-end of Milo’s career was little more than an ironic footnote.

  Dale Brunsfield dismissed the tech with a wave of his hand, leaving the pair alone in the luxurious safari tent.

  “I have to be blunt,” said Milo, looking Dale square in the eyes. “DeWar and I have a very troubled history. I know you spent a lot of time and money getting me all the way out here, but as far as any of my peers are concerned, my opinion on DeWar won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.”

  “I don’t care about your reputation with the ivory tower,” said Dale, returning the look with equal intensity. “I care about your expertise. You’re right, I paid an awful lot to get you out here—I think that buys me a five-minute pitch for your time, if nothing else. If you aren’t convinced, I’ll put you on the next truck back to Nairobi.”

  “Let’s hear it,” said Milo, raising his hands in mock surrender.

  “The locals don’t know about the cave,” said Dale. “It doesn’t even have a name as far as we can tell. This area was barely settled in DeWar’s time. Not even the nomadic herders passed through with any regularity.”

  “That’s surprising,” mused Milo. “My knowledge of this region is rusty at best—but didn’t certain tribes maintain cave shrines in this area?”

  “That they do!” Dale agreed, nodding enthusiastically. “Used them for fertility rituals, mostly. But the low profile of this one is good news for us, heads off some potential problems. Locals have a way of thinking we’re out here to steal gold or disturb the spirits of their ancestors, that sort of nonsense.”

  Milo nodded. Dale’s enthusiasm was infectious; the older man could hardly keep still as he talked. One minute he’d be on the couch, then standing up and pacing as he spoke. Maybe the explorer persona was more than corporate posturing after all.

  “Like I said, the locals don’t know about any caves in this valley,” Dale continued. “But what they do know—and you’re going to love this, I promise—is that the elephants visit this area.”

  “Elephants? Why?” asked Milo.

  “Nobody has an explanation,” said Dale with a shrug. “They don’t appear to actually do anything here. Every migration, they’ll stop in this little valley. They won’t eat, won’t breed, won’t do anything special as far as anybody knows. They just stop for no particular reason, have a look-see, and leave.”

  “But you have a theory,” said Milo with a smile.

  “Damn right I do!” answered Dale, grinning almost ear to ear. “I think they remember this cave—or at least what it used to be. It’s all collapsed now, but the original entrance would have been massive, big as a house. We’ll learn more when my workers finish tunneling the new entrance and we actually start getting people inside.”

  “Collapsed? How long ago?” asked Milo.

  “Hard to say,” answered Dale. “Maybe a century? But like they say—an elephant never forgets.”

  Milo folded his arms, thinking, as Dale watched him with intense gray eyes. “But a cave? The DeWar expedition? It still feels like a long shot; I’ve never seen any evidence that Lord DeWar was doing anything but climbing Mount Meru or perpetrating a fraud.”

  “It’s all circumstantial, I’ll give you that,” said Dale, unaffected by Milo’s doubt. “But think about it in the context of the time. Kilimanjaro was conquered in 1889, more than a decade previous. And Mount Meru? Nobody even knows the name; she’s the beauty queen’s plain-Jane sister. Hemingway never wrote about the snows of Mount Meru. Toto didn’t write a song about it. Lord DeWar staked his reputation on this expedition, and he wasn’t the type to go after anything but the prettiest girl in the room . . . figuratively speaking.”

  “I suppose,” said Milo, still unconvinced. He liked theoretical musing and cocktail-napkin calculations as much as the next historian, but the key to reasonable conclusions was a dispassionate, unattached outlook, which Dale clearly lacked. The CEO was nothing less than smitten with DeWar.

  “Look past Kilimanjaro for a moment and give some thought to the other notable geological feature in this area—Amboni Caves, the largest natural caves in Africa,” Dale continued. “They’ve been the source of myth and legend for centuries. A popular refuge for hoodlums, revolutionaries, and would-be Robin Hoods alike. Some believed that the underground passages crossed from the coast of Tanzania to the slopes of the great white queen herself. One writer claimed that a dog went missing in one of the caves and was found two hundred kilometers away, supposedly emerging from some other hidden entrance. The mapped caves—the ones the tourists and the religious pilgrims visit—never quite measured up to the legends. But I think this one just might.”

  “I’m afraid I’m just not familiar enough with caves to comment,” admitted Milo. He hated coming across as so fundamentally useless on the subject, though it hardly seemed to dampen Dale’s enthusiasm. Milo wished he’d been briefed on the expedition—or given any indication of the purpose for his visit, for that matter. At least then he could have brought some books and studied during the thirty-plus-hour journey across oceans and continents. Maybe then he’d have more to offer.

  “No matter,” said Dale, flipping the main screen away from the dead robotics feed to a series of false-color aerial images of the valley. The camp itself was rendered in muted blues, with a cluster of yellow and green plumes seeping from the ground about a hundred yards further down into the valley.

  “What am I looking at?” asked Milo.

  “I’ll give you the short version,” said Dale. “We had to establish that this is a bona fide cave and not some itty-bitty hole in the ground, right?”

  Milo stepped closer to the display. He couldn’t make sense of it, not quite, but could recognize the layout of Main Camp, the motor pool, and the main thoroughfare down the center. The plumes looked almost like geysers, roiling puffs of clouds spilling upward from a hundred tiny crevices. Was this a live feed?

  “There are only fourteen mountain peaks in the entire world that rise over 8,000 meters in height,” Dale began. “All fourteen are situated on the perimeter of the Indian subcontinent. There are even fewer known supercaves in the world, none of which are in Africa. Just like with mountaineer expeditions, exploring these super-caverns requires large, costly expeditions and multiple camps over multiple weeks. A massive undertaking. When first presented with the idea of supercaves, astronaut Buzz Aldrin said, ‘I never thought there could be an environment as hostile as the lunar surface. No more.’ That quote has always stuck with me.”

  “But how did you establish that you were looking at a supercave?” asked Milo.

  “We do this through measuring air exchange,” said Dale. “This is live infrared heat-mapping, by the way. We have a small drone circling overhead on a holding pattern, collecting data for the egghead types. Basically, all caves ‘breathe’—they maintain a constant internal temperature while the outside temps fluctuate due to the weather, day-night cycle, seasons, and so forth. During the warmth of the day, she ‘inhales,’ and then ‘exhales’ at night when the temperature drops—like you can see on the screen.”

  “And then you use that information to get an idea of the cave volume,” concluded Milo.

  “Precisely,” said Dale with a sly smile, leaving Mil
o to suspect he’d sprung one of Dale’s little conversational traps.

  “So how big?”

  “I’d give you an estimate,” Dale replied, “but she never stops breathing. The best my analysts have come up with is ‘unquantifiably large.’ A supercave, no doubt. The analysts have never seen anything like it. No supercaves have ever been discovered on the African continent. We scanned for ten miles in each direction; there are no other plumes, no other way in or out. She’s a rare bird, Milo. A rare bird indeed, unprecedented on this continent. We know it—and I think Lord Riley DeWar knew it too.”

  “Incredible,” breathed Milo as he leaned toward the screen, trying to visualize a city-sized system of underground chambers beneath his very feet.

  “Riley led me right to it,” Dale whispered. “I own a great deal of his collected letters and documents, some purchased at considerable expense from distant heirs. Initially I was only interested in his reputation, a persona I do admit admiring in my own way.”

  Milo had heard about the estate sales at the time; the purchaser had always opted to remain anonymous, leaving historians to speculate as to the identity. Dale pointed a remote and quit the live infrared display, flipping through a collection of archival photos to another display—a faded parchment map composited with modern Google Earth satellite imagery.

  “This was hidden with his estate ledgers—taxes, milk delivery expenses, that kind of thing. My researchers almost missed it. They didn’t know what to make of the map at first. After considerable investigation, we discovered that it shows the entrances to the entire Amboni cave network. But DeWar mapped an extra entrance unknown to modern cartographers, quite far from all the others—the entrance at the base of this camp. I had a plane fly over the area with an infrared camera and discovered the plume of humid air seeping out of the soil, right where the map was marked. Not sure where Riley got his information—local tribesman, one can only assume.”

  Dale sighed and leaned against the back of the couch as Milo processed a flood of thoughts. The CEO was no dummy, and circumstantial evidence was still evidence of a kind. Milo couldn’t believe he hadn’t found the map during his time with the documents, kicking himself for overlooking it. Still, he didn’t have the funding for a team of researchers like Dale did.

  “But this all begs the question—” began Dale.

  “What happened to Lord Riley DeWar?” whispered Milo, finishing the thought. Silence hung between the two men for a moment as Dale collected himself.

  “I think you can help me with that,” said Dale. “I know this is tough for you, but I want you to climb back into Lord DeWar’s mind, son. Get all cozy in there. When we get inside that cave and start finding clues—and I promise you, we will find clues—you will be our guide. Let’s make some history together. Let’s put you back in the good graces of your peers. What do you say?”

  Milo barely remembered making his way back to the personnel tents, his mind wandering as he walked under the deepening reds of the sunset sky. The amount of information he’d absorbed was almost overwhelming. It wasn’t hard to find his tent, helpfully marked with a small placard on the front flap that read Luttrell, Milo. He unzipped it and stepped through into the cramped interior. Though a far cry from the ornate interior of Dale Brunsfield’s tent, the inside still boasted a comfortable low cot with an unrolled sleeping bag and enough leftover room for his backpack.

  He clicked on the LED lamp hanging from the ceiling, illuminating the tent. A small tablet computer lay on top of his backpack, no doubt a gift from Dale. It was hard not to marvel at the remarkable efficiency of Main Camp. Curiosity took hold, and Milo turned on the small electronic device.

  The tablet was loaded to the gills with research data. Six different biographies of Lord DeWar were saved to the home screen, as well as an unpublished PhD thesis and multiple books on the geology of Tanzanian caves. In addition to Milo’s own papers on the subject, the entire contents of Lord DeWar’s personal archives had been lovingly digitized and uploaded to the device in ultra-high fidelity. The implication was clear—Milo was expected to re-familiarize himself for the expedition, and fast.

  Milo sighed. Maybe the long flight hadn’t been a waste of time after all. Dale certainly had a way of making him feel like a critical part of the expedition, a partner even. Despite the promise of scholarly redemption, Milo still suspected that any resulting glory would be Dale’s and Dale’s alone.

  He opened his backpack and fished around for a clean set of clothes, intending to change before dinner. His appetite had returned, a good sign, though the jetlag still gnawed at his tired body and fuzzy mind.

  As he dug in his backpack for a clean pair of jeans, Milo realized something felt entirely wrong—like coming home after work and realizing a stranger had been inside your bedroom. Everything in the backpack was as he’d left it, but not quite.

  Then it struck him.

  His digital camera, smartphone, and Macbook Air were all missing.

  Someone had searched his bag and taken them.

  CHAPTER 4:

  CONVERGENCE ZONE

  Milo sat alone at the long table in the mess tent, trying to ignore the one-woman camera crew scrambling to capture footage of Main Camp. The small, energetic producer with a brunette bob had been at it since the last light of the day started to fade, alternatively asking on-camera questions of cornered team members or hurrying around the camp looking for attractive people with interesting things to say. Now, in the early hours of the night, she’d set up powerful lights at the other end of the table for one-on-one sessions with various expedition members, none of whom Milo recognized. The blonde logistician followed the producer in virtual lockstep, ensuring those attractive people weren’t saying anything they shouldn’t.

  Served late, dinner was not yet prepared, but the mess tent was the best-lit area in the camp and a good spot to read. Besides, Milo had to admit that his own tent was a bit claustrophobic, a little concerning if Dale wanted him to accompany the cave expedition once the entrance was reopened.

  Tablet in hand, Milo skimmed the six Riley DeWar biographies to re-familiarize himself with the explorer. It all came back to him quickly. Stories about DeWar’s lost loves and noble Scottish heritage were romanticized studies of the era, revealing little of the man himself. As he suspected, Riley’s disappearance remained a question mark, a gap glossed over with various degrees of authorial prerogative and credulity.

  Milo then tried to absorb the caving guides, finding them full of geological analysis and practical caving techniques. It was all but impenetrable. Abseiling, colloids, cavernicolous, epiphreatic zones, kernmantle ropes and carabiners, spitzkarren and stromatolite . . . it was like trying to learn a foreign vocabulary in one sitting.

  Dale Brunsfield’s digitized DeWar archive held a great deal more promise. Soon Milo found himself lost in Lord Riley’s letters, inspiring pitches to potential financial supporters, correspondence with backers and advisors—and more than a few florid love letters. The lattermost held to a remarkably predictable pattern, and once a new conquest entered Riley’s sphere, the letters would begin as an overwhelming flood of affection and emotion. But his interest in the Rose or Grace or Mary (sometimes several simultaneously) would inevitably peak within a year, then drop off with both frequency and passion until it ceased altogether.

  The explorer wasn’t what Milo had expected. Far from the square-jawed picture of unassailable will, DeWar was often vulnerable, even insecure. Though sharp-witted and decisive, many of his letters portrayed a man who desperately wanted to live up to his family name, despondent that his finances (or even his life) might end before he made his mark on history. Themes of irrelevancy and inadequacy were revisited with ever-greater frequency as his supposed Mount Meru expedition approached.

  Strangely, Lord DeWar had come to believe that the golden age of exploration had ended. Milo was baffled by this. In 1901, the poles had not been reached, manned powered flight was unachieved, the oceans were larg
ely a mystery. Everest was a half-century from summit, to say nothing of feats of aerospace. Milo pondered the thesis, wondering how much of a similar arrogance might be reflected by his own generation.

  “Hey you,” said a warm, familiar voice from behind him. Milo looked up to see a woman sitting across from him on a folding chair, a woman he’d never expected to see again in his entire life. She was as beautiful—no, more so—than when they’d last spoken nearly a decade prior.

  Milo smiled, half-baffled and more jolted than he cared to admit. “Hey yourself,” he finally replied.

  “I was going to lead with a Doctor Livingstone line,” she said. “Or something out of Casablanca. But I figured seeing me here would be enough of a surprise.”

  She wasn’t wrong. In fact, Bridget was rarely wrong at all.

  Bridget—no, not Bridget, it was Dr. Bridget McAffee now, wasn’t it? In any case, they’d first met when he was a newly minted undergraduate instructor and she was a premed student at UNC Chapel Hill. It was his first job after completing his master’s. She’d been a tennis prodigy–one ill-timed ankle injury away from going pro—and a brilliant scholar. With her tennis career over, she’d trained as a triathlete before becoming an early adopter of the CrossFit fad; the constant training paid dividends in her strong shoulders, muscled arms, and easy confidence.

  Their relationship was volatile and lasted well beyond its natural expiration date, the turmoil made all the more consuming by its semi-secrecy. Despite all odds and good sense, they’d stayed together for nearly three years.

  It only took a few incriminating text messages to blow up the floundering relationship. Milo left UNC Chapel Hill and eventually wound up in Georgetown. Bridget became Dr. McAffee, ultimately landing her dream job as a trauma surgeon with Emory University in Atlanta.

  Now, the only evidence of their relationship—he’d tossed or deleted all the photos and emails—was the awful pang he still felt in his chest every time her face flashed in his memory. At that precise moment, Milo just wished he didn’t find Bridget so goddamn gorgeous.