The Maw

by Taylor Zajonc

  Milo said nothing as he, last in line, stepped into the darkness and shut the steel door behind him. The last thing he heard before the door clanged shut was Logan.

  “Little caves whisper,” mumbled Logan from the darkness, barely audible. “Big caves shout—but supercaves scream.”

  PART 2:

  ANTITHESIS

  But delirium is the antithesis of death; it is the body’s struggle to survive.

  —CORNELL WOOLRICH (1903–1968)

  CHAPTER 7:

  GALLERY

  41 feet below the surface

  Milo stumbled through the darkness, tripping over loose stones as the steel door groaned shut behind him, extinguishing the last of the wind and sunlight. The passage was bored through a muddy mix of shattered limestone. Feeling one wall, he ducked through two dozen feet of virgin tunnel. He could see the intermittent dance of headlamps and flashlights as the party made their way into the interior of the cave before him. Milo held out his hand in front of his face but couldn’t see it in the suffocating darkness.

  As he passed from the tight entranceway to the cool stillness of a wide, dark chamber, he felt a hand on his shoulder, then pressure on his helmet. His own headlamp flickered on with a geyser of light, momentarily overwhelming his still-adjusting eyes.

  “Do be careful!” Joanne took him by the elbow and pointed his entire body away from hers. “Caving etiquette dictates not blinding everyone. In close quarters, keep the lamp pointed down, at your feet—that’s where you need light the most.”

  “Sorry.” Milo kept eye contact with the guide as he averted the angle of his head. “And thanks for turning it on for me.”

  “You must start doing that yourself,” she scolded, her aristocratic accent turned sharp and chastening. “Even in total darkness—especially in total darkness. You might not always have a guide with you.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Milo. “Sorry.”

  Milo unconsciously looked back at the closed steel door. It was shut tightly, but had a wheel on the interior side as well. He appreciated the importance of the hydraulics system; no human muscle could open it against such howlingly powerful air pressure.

  The helmet lamp was more than adequate, but the fixed light barely reached his peripheral vision. He could only see forward, and was blind in all other directions. He successfully experimented with exaggerated head movements, but directing his eyes too far in any one direction revealed only darkness or the haphazard flashes of others’ lights.

  Logan had not made it in very far. The geologist had stopped at the entranceway, examining the walls of the newly dug tunnel and the rocky debris field at its terminus.

  “Look at this.” Joanne pointed to a skeletal menagerie of bones covering the cavern floor. “I see rock hyrax, antelope, dik-dik, gazelle, eland . . . oh, that’s a kudu.”

  “How did they get in here?” asked Milo.

  “Dragged in by predators, probably over thousands of years.”

  The remains were broken and scattered, pulled apart, some splintered, all with toothy indentations. Some of the skull variations appeared primeval, from species long since extinct, the oldest among them covered in a drizzle of calcite and fused to the cave floor. Milo tried to shuffle around them, but the most fragile—the graying remains of birds, bats, rodents—crunched beneath his feet with every step.

  Milo could see that the entrance had once been massive, large enough to fit Dale’s theoretical herds of elephants—a ceiling twenty feet above, thirty feet across, with a flat dried-mud floor. The walls were wavy, multi-hued brown with a texture like sandpaper, a passageway carved through hundreds of millions of years of hard-packed sediment turned stone. A thin layer of dust clung to the air, glittering in the beam of his headlamp.

  “This is incredible,” breathed Milo, soaking in the confined, alien world.

  “Not really,” said Logan with a sigh. “It’s a dead cave, at least this section. No moisture to speak of, and the features—columns, stalactites, stalagmites—all dried out.”

  “What’s a live cave like?”

  Logan smiled for the first time. “Dangerous—but beautiful,” said the geologist. “Slick with wet crystals and growing calcites everywhere. Rushing subterranean rivers. See, native peoples believed that caves were sentient. They breathe, circulate, digest . . . even excrete. They can even become sick and heal. But not this dusty, broken passage. You’ll know a living chamber when you see it—unforgettable.”

  “I can only imagine.” Milo returned the smile.

  “This may seem like an odd question,” said Logan. “But do you know anything about bombs? Controlled demolitions?”

  “No more than the average former fireworks-obsessed teenager.”

  “Something is bothering me about the entranceway,” said Logan, thinking out loud as he ignored Milo’s droll comment. “At this point I’m completely positive it was brought down using explosives. Just look at this place. Whoever did it collapsed the entire entrance.”

  Milo glanced around the caved-in chamber. “They did a thorough enough job of it, all right.”

  “Thorough, yes. But inefficient.”

  “How so?”

  “Standard operating protocol would be to drill about three to six feet into the ceiling, pack, and detonate. It’s a universally utilized technique dating back to the 1700s. But whoever blew this passageway looks like they just threw everything they had into the chamber and set it off. Like they were in a hurry, couldn’t be bothered to do it right.”

  “Just lit the fuse and walked away,” guessed Milo.

  Logan frowned. “Not necessarily,” he said, speaking more to himself than Milo. “More than likely wasn’t set off using a fuse . . . the main charge was probably paired with a precursor explosive . . . or maybe they used an electrical charge with an ignition plunger . . .”

  Milo tried to follow the train of thought, but soon Logan was simply mumbling to himself as he tapped at the collapsed rock with a small hammer. He was probably making too much of it all. A hurry? Maybe the last visitors simply broke their drill and couldn’t get another one. This was Africa, after all.

  The chaotic jumble of rock soon gave way to smooth walls and a flat floor as Milo crept further into the cave passageway. With no more blast-scarred walls or collapsed ceiling, the cave almost resembled the long central gallery of an abandoned museum, a grand chamber complete with small alcoves and side passageways. Milo’s light fell upon loose, broken potsherds, broken flints, strings of coins and animal teeth: the first evidence of ritual practices. His heart leapt into his throat, trembling at the significance of the discovery.

  Ahead, Bridget stood facing a smooth section of cave wall, her light reflecting off the surface and softly illuminating her wonder-filled face.

  “Look,” she whispered, motioning Milo to stand beside her. Milo gazed at the cave wall, and before him materialized a tall mural of petroglyphs. Elongated figures shone in the artificial light, hunting stick-legged buffalo and elephants, the ancient stories cast in vivid red pigments against the stone. The pair traced the wall deeper into the cave, staring as their lamps fell across alcove windows. Ivory and stone idols stood within, some flat and broken from the blast, others standing defiantly tall. Carved African faces stared back at Milo, the figurines flush with rounded bellies and full, drooping breasts. Before them lay empty grit-filled dishes, the food offerings within long since turned to dust.

  “They must be goddesses,” breathed Bridget, barely able to speak. “They’re so intricate.”

  “The carved figures are relatively modern, but these paintings appear ancient,” whispered Milo, matching her reverence. “When the first Egyptian step pyramid was under construction at Saqqara, the paintings could have been already thirty thousand years old. Some say the emergence of cave art marked when we became human—when we first transitioned into a species unlike any that had come before.”

  “Incredible.”

  “This could be one of the greatest fin
ds of this decade. It’s hard to fathom, but stone art from this region dates back 40,000 years. Mumba Cave in South Africa has signs of human activity from 70,000 BC.”

  Together, Bridget and Milo stood frozen in wonderment, almost as if a single spoken word between them would desecrate the sacred space. From behind them, Milo could hear the crunching footsteps of Logan and Joanne. Milo couldn’t understand why, but the other six, Dale among them, had already crossed the threshold to the next chamber, nearly a hundred yards distant.

  “It’s very vaginal,” said Logan, pointing at one of the sacred alcoves. “From an artistic perspective, I mean. Would make sense given the fertility ritual artifacts.”

  “Let’s not dally,” said Joanne, interrupting Logan. “This is just the entrance; we have a great deal of ground to cover before we make it to the main shaft. I don’t want to be left behind.”

  “We’ll come back, take photos of everything,” said Milo. “There’s a dozen publishable papers in this chamber alone—we’ll all get credit for the discovery.”

  “Dale will get credit, at least,” said Logan.

  “I thought you just studied expeditions,” said Bridget, ignoring Logan’s cynicism. “How come you know so much about cave paintings?”

  “The San people were the first explorers,” answered Milo. “They were the first people, the ones who left Africa to colonize the entire world. If hunter-gatherers worshipped in this cave, it’s overwhelmingly likely that they were San.”

  “Their art is incredible,” said Joanne from behind him.

  “It’s not art,” whispered Milo, gently correcting her. “It’s magic. Imagine these images by torchlight. They’d be given life. Ritual practitioners danced into a hallucinatory trance-state, and the paintings danced with them. See the eight-legged animals? It’s a lenticular effect—between the flickering firelight and the tricks of the human mind, these animals ran. This isn’t a rock wall; it’s a veil between our world and the spirit realm.”

  Milo leaned in, looking even closer, as though he could bridge the separation of 40,000 years in the space of a single breath.

  “Trance-dancing?” asked Joanne, shaking her head.

  “The shamans would dance for hours until entering an altered state, during which their spirits would leave their bodies and travel the breadth of the earth. They could sink into the earth and swim the great subterranean river. At the end of the river, they would find threads of light, which they could climb into the sky.”

  “What would they find in the sky?” asked Bridget.

  “Depends on the interpretation,” said Milo. “Some would plead their case before God—ask Him to spare a sick member of the tribe, grant favors, rain, fertility, that sort of thing. Others said they’d commune with the trickster demon, the first shaman.”

  “The devil,” said Joanne. “You’re saying they’d see . . . the devil.”

  “Or they’d simply traverse the cosmos,” said Milo. “Explore the universe—free of their earthly bodies.”

  Bridget shivered as she turned away from the cave paintings. “Anyone else get the feeling of being watched?”

  Joanne led the way deeper into the cave, the lights before them having already vanished into the next chamber. Milo adjusted his headlamp downward, letting the illumination play across the dry mud floor.

  “Dale was right about one thing,” said Milo, pointing down as he kept pace with the other three. “Check it out—elephant tracks.”

  “Amazing they made it this far into the cave,” said Bridget, bending down to trace the outline of an oversize imprint. “Look at them—all these jumbled footprints on top of one another. The pilgrims could have visited this site for centuries, even thousands of years.”

  Milo felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling him aside as Bridget and Joanne continued toward the next chamber. Logan stood beside him, unflinching even as Milo accidentally blasted him in the face with his headlamp.

  “All these observations—very important, very important, no question,” mumbled Logan.

  Milo felt a sudden tingle of worry; Logan seemed restless, or even agitated. “What’s up?” whispered Milo. “Are you okay?”

  “All these things we see,” said Logan, eyes darting, his voice too fast and low. “But what do you . . . not see?”

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” admitted Milo. An experienced caver acting in such a squirrelly fashion worried him—what was so unsettling?

  “Where is everybody?” asked Logan. “It’s been bothering me from the moment I rolled into camp. Where are the Tanzanian archaeologists? Interpreters? Guides? Government representatives? Local porters? I don’t think Dale has told the authorities about this expedition—which means everything we’re doing down here is unsanctioned and illegal.”

  CHAPTER 8:

  THE ELEPHANT TOMB

  300 feet below the surface

  Though the rest of the party had disappeared into the second chamber, their echoing voices remained. Milo could only assume they were waiting for Joanne, Bridget, Logan, and himself. Milo glanced up as he passed beneath the mammoth fossil-impregnated limestone archway separating the chambers, his headlamp playing across the multi-hued sedimentary layers and the mineralized shells of primitive aquatic invertebrates. The division between the two rooms was stark. After a distinct and immediate rise up three wide stone steps, the second chamber more resembled an auditorium, with a high, domed ceiling and vanishingly distant walls. The larger of the hanging stalactites and growing stalagmites had long since met, foresting sections of the chamber with thick columns like that of an ancient temple.

  The walls around Milo glittered with crystals as he traced the circumference of the room with his light. Unlike the flat mud floor of the previous chamber, tectonic forces had cleaved the auditorium in two, leaving a deep, gaping crevasse ten meters wide and four times as long in the center of the chamber. There were no more shrines—though the gods had graciously received their worshippers in the gallery, the auditorium was now the uncontested domain of the underworld, devoid of even the faintest human fingerprint.

  “Look at the walls,” said Logan, guiding Milo’s attention to the crumbling earth at eye level. He moved closer, his light revealing a bas-relief of endless crisscross scrapings stretching from his boots to far above his head.

  “What am I looking at?” asked Milo, brushing his fingers across the rough crosshatching.

  “This chamber was formed biomorphically,” said Logan. “Elephants used their tusks to dig rocks out of the walls; they’d grind them up with their molars and swallow them for the salt. They would have continually hollowed out this section over a hundred thousand years or more.”

  “Incredible—creating a room of this size, one mouthful at a time,” marveled Milo, imagining the two thousand successive generations of the massive animals making their way through darkness and silence. He wondered if they too treated this as a shrine, a sacred place.

  “The climate has changed a lot,” added Logan as he absentmindedly picked up a loose conglomeration of petrified elephant dung and squeezed it. It gently exploded to dust in his hand, the glittering fragments slowly drifting to the cave floor. “They probably liked to wallow in the mud outside when this region was wetter. We’re in a true wild cave now.”

  Charlie had posed himself in front of Isabelle’s camera at the edge of the room-cleaving chasm. Dale and Isabelle prompted the host with questions as the two guides set up powerful lamps in various parts of the chamber, illuminating it throughout. With each take, Charlie leaned closer to the camera, conspiratorially pointing out dubious sources of danger and shoehorning the phrase “extreme history” in at every opportunity.

  Milo recognized—and hated—the style. It was the same artificial, self-serious tone adopted by any number of interchangeable media personalities, making a mockery out of rigorous scientific and historical study. Still, it was hard to fault Charlie for his genuine earnestness. Milo concluded that Charlie would ha
ve made the world’s best middle school instructor, but had the unfortunate luck of family fortune and handsome features and would thus never satisfy his true calling.

  “If this is all illegal, should we be filming everything?” asked Milo, feeling a little stupid for broaching the subject again.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time Dale has asked forgiveness rather than permission,” said Bridget. “I’m sure he has a plan. Hell, the fact that it’s illegal will probably only increase interest in Charlie’s pilot.”

  Logan couldn’t take his eyes off Charlie; he shook his head and grumbled every time the man said something particularly stupid or inflated. Bridget seemed to not hear him at all; she studied the walls of the cave as though enraptured, a look of pure marvel across her wide eyes and open mouth. Watching her, Milo tried to bury a familiar twinge of longing in his stomach.

  Separating from Logan and Bridget, Milo traced his way along the far wall, away from the glare of the camera. The earth beneath his feet crunched louder with every step until it felt almost soft, like thawed grass underneath a thin layer of spring ice.

  Milo bent down, casting the light of his headlamp at his feet.

  Dead bats.

  Thousands—no, tens of thousands—lay piled beneath his thick boots, mummified to little more than wispy pelts, brittle skin and dried, yellow bones. Their thin membranes had long since withered away, leaving the rat-like bodies with frozen, open mouths and empty eye sockets, the wings now long, delicate claws.

  Milo slowly backed away, retracing his steps, wincing each time he crushed the fragile skeletons beneath his feet. The layer of bodies was easily six inches deep, more in some sections. He imagined the entire ceiling was once alive, rippling with movement as the bats slept and groomed and raised young. He thought perhaps some had died from the initial blast at the distant entrance, the concussion ripping down the confined gallery and spilling into the elephants’ salt mine. Others would have perished from stress, their sensitive eardrums ruptured by the terrible noise. Any survivors would have futilely sought an exit for weeks, only to starve and die; a feast for the insects that preyed upon their bodies and guano, until the insects too succumbed in the now-sealed environment.