by JC Ryan
They had paid out most of JR’s rope when they came to the first branch on the right, except it actually seemed larger than the passage they’d been following. Maybe it was the main part instead. JR marked the wall with a yellow grease pencil and continued about twenty-five feet before stopping to link Cyndi’s rope to his, taking the coil over his shoulder now. As they walked, they’d been going steadily downhill at a shallow angle. JR wondered idly how many feet they’d descended in their 500-foot linear journey. He reckoned maybe twenty or thirty. They hadn’t gone much further when their passage opened out into another cathedral-like room, with stalactites and stalagmites forming fantastic shapes throughout. JR was beginning to sweat in his cold-weather gear, and risked removing his face mask and gloves. To his surprise, it was almost warm, really warm. If you could call about 30F warm.
“JR, I have a question.”
“Yeah?”
“How did these form? Isn’t it erosion dripping through limestone that makes these things?”
“Hmmm, you could be right. I’m no geologist, we’d have to ask Robert. But I seem to remember something like that from visiting Carlsbad Caverns. But what’s the problem?”
“It isn’t warm enough for water to flow in here,” she responded. “It’s all frozen.”
JR looked around. She was right, of course. How could he have missed that? Wouldn’t it be the same in the main cave? But Robert hadn’t said anything. “I’ll be damned,” he remarked.
They explored the walls of the room as best they could, though the rope wouldn’t reach far enough to let them thoroughly examine the back wall. Even if the passage continued back there, though, the formations were so thick that JR didn’t think they’d be able to force their way through. They’d reached the end of this promising passage, and it was time to retrace their steps.
~~~
Robert and Rebecca didn’t wait long after JR and Cyndi started into their passage before bidding Summers and Angela goodbye for the moment and going into the leftmost of the twin passages. Almost immediately, they were forced to crouch and then crawl as the ceiling lowered. Robert turned back to ask Rebecca whether she was okay with tight spots.
“I’ve never been in a small cave before,” she admitted. “But, I’m smaller than you. If you can make it, so can I.”
Robert was aware that he should have an experienced caver with him if he were going to go into a passage where he might get stuck. It was so important to map as much as possible of this cave before they left, though, that he admonished himself to be careful and not force his way in while forging ahead. It looked like this passage was going to be a bust, with no branches up to here, and the walls tightening around them. He eyed the way ahead before removing everything from his belt and finally the belt itself, pushing everything back behind him like a mole tunneling through dirt.
Robert knew that if his shoulders would fit, so would the rest of him. However, the move he planned would trap his arms above his head and make them useless to pull himself out if he couldn’t wriggle forward. Before going in, he asked Rebecca to see if she could pull him backward even though she was in a fairly tight spot herself.
At first, she couldn’t. Then she asked if it would be smart to tie the rope around his ankles and retreat far enough that she could sit up and get a purchase to pull with more force. Robert thought about everything that could go wrong, and decided that it was worth the risk. They did a practice run first, and Rebecca was able to move him by bracing her feet against the rough walls and hauling backward on the rope with all her might. They were ready to go for it.
Rebecca stayed where she was, while Robert crept forward, as evidenced by the rope snaking forward toward his position. Each time it stopped, Rebecca held her breath, waiting for the shout that would tell her to pull him out. She kept the rope taut, so she’d know the moment Robert moved. When it went slack, her heart stopped before slamming into her mouth in an effort to jump out. What had happened? Had it broken, or the knot come untied? Should she go forward and try to help, or return to the main room and get Summers? She was in an agony of indecision when she heard Robert shout, louder and more clearly than she would have expected.
“Rebecca! Come on up! I’m through, and you’re not going to believe it.”
She crawled as rapidly as she could before reaching the spot where they’d almost been stopped. Robert wasn’t there.
“Robert?” she called.
“Come on! It opens out in about six feet, and there’s another room here. Bring the rope.”
Rebecca secured the rope to her belt and wriggled into the hole, realizing immediately that she had more room to maneuver than Robert did. She was pushing herself with her toes and reaching forward with her arms when she felt him seize her hands and pull. In no time she’d popped out through the narrow passage into a room that was larger even than the main room at the cave entrance. The far reaches were in darkness as Robert’s headlamp wasn’t strong enough to throw the light that far.
Now they had a dilemma. Rebecca’s remaining rope, with Robert’s still in reserve, was more than three-quarters paid out. To reach the far side, Robert reckoned they’d need more than they had. But, without reaching the far side, they were at the end of their journey. After the difficulty in pushing through what Rebecca was now thinking of as the birth canal, it seemed a shame to waste the effort by not exploring further.
The solution was dangerous, if not difficult. Rebecca would go back the way they’d come and release the far end of her rope, then retrace her steps. There was little chance of getting lost; they’d passed no openings at all before encountering the birth canal. But it was strictly against caving protocol to leave returning to chance. It was a decision that Robert didn’t want to make on his own, especially after lucking out on the last one. Rebecca questioned him closely.
“What’s the danger if we do release it and secure it on this side? We know where the opening is here, and it’s a straight passage back to the main room after that. How could we get lost?”
“It’s never as simple as it seems, love. I don’t know exactly what might happen. What if we disturbed some of the support system coming through? If there were even a small cave-in, the others wouldn’t know where to find us, for example. I think it’s too dangerous. We should turn back, get more rope and maybe something to widen that opening, and come back tomorrow.”
Rebecca had caught the excitement of exploring, and was disappointed.
“Well, you’re the leader, and I’ll follow you. But I can’t wait to come back! It’s so beautiful!”
“That it is, love, but it could kill us. Let’s do it right.”
~~~
Carmen was ready to throttle the expedition leader. He’d done nothing but complain from the moment they started on their way. First, that he wasn’t in the lead and then that she was following Robert’s instructions. He preferred to get as far to the end of the original passage as possible, then explore coming back. Carmen explained that just because the original passage opened into the main room didn’t mean it led anywhere exciting, and that the other branches could just as well be the one they were looking for. Then LeClerc complained that they didn’t know what they were looking for and that the whole trip was a waste of time and resources.
After a while, Carmen stopped responding, which annoyed LeClerc greatly, but the more he railed at her the more silent she became, until he gave up in frustration. Then he was annoyed because she’d stopped speaking to him, which forced him to keep up with her lest she turn into a side passage and he lose her.
Despite Robert’s admonition that cave etiquette decreed they not relieve themselves inside the cave, LeClerc had turned aside to do just that when Carmen did turn into a secondary passage that turned out to be a dead end. She was skirting a deep depression in the center, looking for a continuation, when LeClerc came bustling in. He was holding the rope loosely in one hand as a guide, but looking at the light from Carmen’s headlamp instead of his feet, opening
his mouth to castigate her for turning without warning him, when he stepped into nothingness. A thin scream accompanied a sudden jerk on the rope that almost took Carmen off her feet, but was bitten off after only a few seconds.
When she’d stabilized her own position, Carmen carefully approached the edge of the depression and pointed her flashlight toward the bottom. For at least twenty feet, the furthest reach of the light, the edges were as smooth as rock could be. She couldn’t see the bottom, nor could she see any sign of LeClerc.
“Paul, are you hurt?” she called. There was no answer.
Carmen was not given to hysterics. As a scientist, she’d been trained to think things out before acting. Accordingly, she took a seat on the floor of the cave and thought. If LeClerc were alive, he must be unconscious, which indicated he’d hit his head, either on the way down or on impact. How long he’d be unconscious was anyone’s guess. Without medical attention, it was possible he wouldn’t regain consciousness at all, or for an extended period. She could possibly climb down to him, but then both of them would be in the hole, and she doubted she could climb back out without assistance for the distance to the bottom, assuming it was just beyond the reach of her flashlight beam. If it was deeper, there was no way. The only sensible thing to do was to return to the main room for help.
Before doing so, Carmen methodically ate one of her sandwiches and took a few sips of water. Fortified for the walk back, she left the rope secured to another piton and guided herself back the way she’d come.
~~~
Summers had brought along a device that he frequently had use for in archaeological ruins that were largely intact. Borrowed from the construction industry, it was a handheld device that used a laser beam to measure the distance between walls. The range wasn’t sufficient to measure across the entire main room of the cave system, but it was coming in handy for Angela’s to-scale representation of the room anyway. She was measuring from stalagmite to stalagmite as near to the outer walls as she could and entering the information into a software program running on her little Samsung eight-inch tablet, which would eventually connect the dots and accurately map the perimeter of the room. Summers had taken the opportunity while Angela was preoccupied to step to the cave entrance several times and breathe, alleviating his unease.
The last time he’d done so, he failed to see Roosky, and worried a bit about what the man was doing. Had he seen a fracture in the overhang? Detected an instability, perhaps? Summers shuddered. He could think of nothing worse than having those tons of ice and rock break loose and cover this opening, trapping them inside. It was the reason they’d deferred exploring the cave until they’d retrieved Roosky from the base in the first place. If the worst happened, Roosky would use explosives to clear the opening so they could get out. It gave Summers some comfort, but had brought up another fear.
Now as he looked up at the overhang, he imagined it falling while he was at the cave opening, crushing him. Duty called him back inside, but it took all the willpower he could muster to move in that direction rather than running helter-skelter out and down the scree to the ice pack below. Clenching his teeth, he thought of Angela alone in the main room and forced himself to return. Not without a backward look and another fleeting worry about the overhang, though.
Angela had finished the perimeter measurements and was now programming features into the map. First the passageways that the three teams had gone to explore, then the major decorations in the center of the vast space. She was humming to herself, a tuneless sound that nevertheless was somewhat of a comfort to Summers when he returned to her side.
“Charles, do you know how caves like this are formed?” she asked.
“Not really. I’m an archaeologist, not a geologist. You’ll have to ask Robert when he returns.
~~~
JR and Cyndi had regained the main passage and continued beyond the first branching one to a second, even wider than the first. Cyndi’s question about erosion had been nagging him. If the water couldn’t flow, how did the stalactites and stalagmites form? He turned over every natural phenomenon he could think of in his mind. As they turned into the second room, he determined to take a sample or two of the material for Robert’s examination. He’d do it in an inconspicuous place, to avoid defacing the beauty of this natural treasure.
The moment they stepped into the second room, he knew something was very different. In the main room of the cave, along the passages, and in the first room they’d discovered, the formations looked similar to those he remembered in Carlsbad Caverns. They were light-colored, and looked like quartz, a creamy white for the most part. This room was so different that he and Cyndi both stopped in wonder. Before them were formations in black, dark rusty red and orange. If they’d thought before that the rooms resembled cathedrals, they now knew it was nothing compared to this. It took a while to understand that they were seeing more than their headlamps would have revealed, so dazzled were they by the color.
Before they did, JR noticed something odd on the walls. It looked like…it was.
“Cyndi, look at this! What do you make of it? I’m willing to bet those are manmade.”
Cyndi looked where JR was pointing, on the cave wall. There, between two thin stalactites, were marks…marks that didn’t look natural. She stepped closer, casting the light from her headlamp on what looked like lines of some kind of script. There was no question that they weren’t natural…they were too straight, and the ends were too even.
“Oh, my God,” she breathed. “Is that what I think it is?”
“If it isn’t, we’re both hallucinating,” he answered, his heart beating rapidly. Unless he and Cyndi were both crazy, they’d just made a major discovery; that people had been here before them. And if those people were 9th or even 10th Cyclers, they were the first to see these marks in perhaps thirty-five thousand years. A spark of his former love of archaeology kindled an elation that he could barely control. At that moment, he thought about his Grandpa Nick and how proud he would be.
Beside him, Cyndi was only slightly less awed, mostly because she’d forgotten the vast reaches of time that they were hoping to bridge. “Do you think?”
“That we should go back for the others? Absolutely! This could be what we’re looking for, although I don’t see any signs of a city. I don’t recognize the script; it isn’t Arabic. We need to get Summers, right now!”
With slightly more presence of mind than JR was at the moment capable of, Cyndi took some pictures with her otherwise useless cell phone. Summers had teased the younger ones about being so attached to the darned things that they carried them even though there wasn’t a cell tower within thousands of miles, but he would eat his words when he saw this!
Pausing only to mark the entrance to the room with another swipe of his grease pencil, JR and Cyndi hurried from the fabulous room without a backward look. A pair of eyes watched them leave, and then the watcher moved stealthily toward the wall where they’d seen the script. A camera flashed, and the watcher faded back into the passage from where he’d emerged.
~~~
Carmen was the first to reach the main room. With little emotion, she told Summers that they needed to go back to see if they could rescue LeClerc, telling him what she could of how the accident happened. Since she’d had her back to his approach, all she could do was surmise that he hadn’t been watching his footing, and had stepped into the void without noticing it was there. Angela was aghast. Carmen seemed to be unaffected by the accident, and Summers was dithering as if there weren’t a man in need of help. To her relief, Robert and Rebecca emerged from their passage only moments after Carmen dropped her bombshell.
It had to be clear that there was an emergency. Carmen was remonstrating with Summers, who was throwing up objections to accompanying her back to where LeClerc had been lost. Angela was about to step over to Robert and Rebecca to explain when Robert took matters into his own hands.
“What’s going on?”
Carmen turned to him a
nd began once again reciting the meager facts of the accident. Robert listened carefully, but Rebecca looked over at Angela, whose face reflected her consternation. Something was wrong here, and neither woman could understand it. Rebecca recovered first.
“We’ve got to go and see if we can reach him. Robert, let’s go.”
Robert looked at Summers for approval, and seeing that he was staring uselessly at Carmen, agreed. “Come on, Summers, it may take both of us to get him out.”
Even in the gloom of the cave, it seemed Summers lost his color. “I…I don’t think I can.”
“Come on, mate, man up. Carmen, how tight are the passages?”
Confused, she answered. “They aren’t. We walked upright the entire way.”
“Summers. Av-a-go-yer-mug, we need you. Follow me.”
Summers took a tentative step forward as Rebecca suddenly recognized what was going on.
“Charles, I’m right here with you,” she said in a low voice, not wanting to embarrass him further. He threw her a grateful look and took a more confident step as she fell into step behind him.
“Carmen, lead the way. Angela, please stay here and let the others know where we’ve gone, can you do that sweetheart?”
Angela was reassured that Robert could handle it, and nodded shyly at him. It hadn’t escaped her notice that the handsome Aussie was the object of many an admiring glance, not only from herself but also from Carmen and Cyndi. That he had eyes only for Rebecca hadn’t escaped her notice either, so his endearment, while just a habit, thrilled her.
“Yes, Robert. Whatever you need,” she answered, putting more into the words than the immediate meaning. Robert winked at her and headed toward the passage, following Carmen.
They’d no sooner disappeared within when JR and Cyndi tumbled out of their passage, calling out with excitement.
“Hey, everybody, you’ve got to see this!”
When no one answered, JR looked around and spotted Angela, who was standing with both hands pressed to her mouth and her eyes wide. She was shaking. JR strode over to her and put his arm around her.