by Nevada Barr
They were on a plateau to the north of the gypsum plains that spread down into Texas. What vegetation managed to eke out a livelihood from the parched soil kept a low profile. Little had grown to greater than knee height, and there were barren spaces between plants. With the lifting of the clouds and the dazzling clarity of the rain-washed air, Anna could see to the edge of the world, or so it seemed, and the world was all high, clean desert, burnished with gold.
Even knowing she walked over limestone honey-combed with passages, she couldn’t imagine a less likely place to find the entrance to a world-class cave. She pictured the plateau cut into thin sections and placed between sheets of glass like the ant farms she’d seen as a child. Beneath her feet, creeping through those twisting tunnels, were human beings.
“There it is.” Oscar interrupted her musings. They’d walked down a slope and crossed the stone bottom of a wash to climb again. Ahead of them was more of the same: low hills dotted with desert shrubs and cactus. “See that green spot?” Iverson pointed to a cluster of stunted trees poking from a fold in the hills. “That’s it.”
Anna took his word for it.
Within a few minutes they’d reached the trees, and still she was none the wiser. Not until they climbed down four or five feet to where the oak trees had found soil to root could she see the entrance. Back in the rocks an opening maybe twenty feet wide, thirty long, and ringed by heavy overhanging brows of rock, showed darkly.
Over the years Anna had made any number of rappels from ten to two hundred ten feet. After the first step, she’d thoroughly enjoyed the trip. Suspended like a cliff swallow over lakes in the Absaroka Beartooth, dangling above a sea of dusty live oaks in northern California. There was an above and a below. Here, she noted with an unpleasant tingle, there was neither. In the theatrical light of coming evening, the entrance to Lechuguilla looked like a portal, one lacking the standard three dimensions agreed upon by the real world.
She’d read of holes described as yawning, gaping, hungry—words that suggested an orifice, an appetite. The sixty-foot drop leading into Lech didn’t fit any of those adjectives. Rather than sentience, it suggested a departure from life. The last rays of the sun skimmed its surface, lighting the stone for fifteen feet or so. Below that, nothing. Night took all.
“Hi ho,” Holden said happily.
Iverson began checking ropes secured to bolts near a tree that showed scarring from when it had been used as an anchor in previous descents. “The climbs are all rigged. We leave them that way along the main trade routes—established routes through the cave. We’ve found it does a lot less damage to the resource to leave the rigging in place than having every expedition rerig each time.”
“Me first, you last?” he said to Holden as he threaded the rope through his rappel rack.
Holden nodded. Oscar leaned back and walked, spider-like, from sight. The sun slid below the horizon, and Anna felt suddenly cold. “It’s getting dark,” she said, and hoped Tillman hadn’t heard the faint whine beneath her words.
“So?”
“Off-rope,” drifted up from the black hole.
“Good point,” Anna said, threaded the rope through her rack, pulled on her leather gloves, and unhooked the safety. “On-rope,” she shouted down, and stepped back into the darkness.
2
AS SHE RAPPELLED down, Anna closed her mind to all but the task at hand. Peripherally she was aware of the change in temperature, of the quick coming of night as she fell from the last vestiges of the sun. Mostly she concentrated on the play of the rope through her gloved hands, the pressure of the web gear holding her up. Below, in an ink-well of stone, she could see Oscar Iverson’s lonely light winking as he moved his head. Peter Pan’s whimsical directions came to mind: first star to the right and straight on till morning.
Having touched down, she freed herself and called “Off-rope” to let Holden know he was clear to descend. Moments later, sixty feet above, she saw his silhouette in the small triangle of gray that was all that remained of the world.
Switching on her headlamp, she studied the bottom of the shaft, absorbing each detail in hopes of crowding out unnecessary thoughts. The area was small and everything she expected from a cave: irregular, colorless, and dirty. The air smelled of things long buried, of damp and basements, of rotting cardboard and stale bat guano. The floor was uneven, and there were signs of the guano mining that had taken place around 1914. Piles of loose dirt attested to more recent digs.
This entry to Lechuguilla, originally called Old Misery Pit, had been known for years. Like many other caves in the area it was merely a deep hole melted into the limestone, valuable only as a source of fertilizer for the California citrus crops. But there had been tantalizing drifts of air coming from the rubble. The cave was “blowing.” Following these ephemeral leads, cavers dug repeatedly in attempts to search out the bigger cavern promised by the passage of air. In 1986 they finally broke through to what was arguably one of the most important discoveries ever made by the caving community. They’d pushed into a system that not only promised to break records for length and depth but housed an unusual number of stunning decorations and cave formations.
Her knowledge of Lechuguilla’s history exhausted, Anna turned her headlamp on Oscar, looking for distraction from that quarter.
“Over there,” he said, indicating a darker slit in the floor. “You can hear the cave breathe.”
Anna didn’t tell him the last thing she needed was to hear the damn thing breathing.
In a tangle of beams from three headlamps, Holden disengaged from the rope. The entire descent had taken so little time, neither Anna nor Oscar had bothered to take off their packs.
“Onward and downward,” Oscar said, and walking to an unpromising looking hole dug into the bottom of the shaft, picked up a nylon rope Anna’d not noticed before and wove it deftly through the metal ladder of his rack. “A nuisance drop—maybe ten feet. On-rope.” And he was gone. “Off-rope” floated up seconds later.
The hole was hand-dug and dirt-walled. To Anna it looked as unstable as the caves the children used to dig in the sand pit behind the local airport in the neighborhood where she grew up; caves the airport operator was always dynamiting for fear some hapless little gene would get itself culled from the pool before its time.
Anna went second. The bottom of this drop was more rank and evil than the first. From a landing barely long enough to lay a coffin down, a ragged hole cut through to another chamber. Beyond this uninviting aperture, Anna could see a spill of light from Iverson’s lamp. Then that was snuffed, and she felt terribly alone.
A blinding eye winked over the lip above. “You off-rope?” Holden asked.
“I guess.” Anna couldn’t move. A creeping numbness was flowing in from her fingertips. As it passed through her insides she felt her bowels loosen and bile rise in her throat. “I don’t think I can do this,” she said.
Holden landed beside her as lightly as a feather and flipped open the rack to free the rope. “Were you talking to me?”
“No.” Anna didn’t trust herself to elaborate.
Holden dropped to his knees and skittered out of sight through the crevice. “We having fun yet?” she heard him say.
Mechanically, she got on hands and knees and followed. From the look of the tiny room she entered, things were going to get worse before they got better. Hacked from native soil, the space was too low to stand upright in. The far side was higher but partially blocked by a slide of dirt and rock. Nowhere could she see anything that even obliquely promised the wonders she’d heard spoken of in connection with Lechuguilla. Oscar and Holden crouched with their backs to her, their helmet lights pointed toward the floor, where they groveled before some god hidden from the eyes of unbelievers.
Light swung in a dizzying arc and struck her in the face. “Ta da,” she heard Holden say.
“Down the rabbit hole,” said Iverson.
Vision cleared, and Anna saw the altar at which the men worshippe
d. Sunk into the floor was a heavy metal manhole cover with a T-shaped handle welded to its center.
“Cover your eyes,” Iverson said, but Anna couldn’t. She was transfixed. Grasping the handle he pulled the hinged trapdoor open, swinging it on a counterweight. Corrugated metal drainpipe set vertically in the ground was exposed. A ladder welded to one side led down. Wind gusted from below, blowing dirt into Anna’s eyes.
“It blows. Hoo-ee, does it blow,” Holden said. “By the air coming out of here it’s been estimated Lechuguilla might go three hundred miles or more.”
“From where?” Anna asked, and was embarrassed when the words came out in a wail.
“Air pressure,” Iverson said. “When it gets low outside, the cave exhales; high outside, it inhales. Pressure equalization is all it is. You last, me first?” he said to Holden. The other man nodded, and Anna wondered if they consistently put her in the middle so she couldn’t escape. Iverson slid easily into the pipe and pulled the trapdoor closed behind him. The sudden stillness was a boon for Anna’s nerves.
“How long is that?” She pointed to the culvert.
“Twenty feet maybe. It was installed to stabilize the entrance. You can see the soil up here shifts when we get rain.”
“Clear,” reverberated through the metal conduit. Holden laughed. “Oscar goes down in record time. The pipe’s so small he can’t use the steps. He’s too long from hip to knee. Coming out is what really gets to him.” He pulled open the trapdoor, releasing an angry blast of warm, wet air, warmer than the air aboveground. Lechuguilla maintained a temperature of about sixty-eight degrees with close to a hundred percent humidity year-round. In this case it was a blessing. In a colder cave Frieda would have been at risk from hypothermia in addition to her other ills.
“M’dam.” Tillman gestured toward the culvert with the pride of a maître d’ indicating a coveted window seat.
Down the drain.
In that instant Anna knew she had to confess her shortcomings, admit her fears, and get out of the hole with as much speed and grace as she could muster. Most people would be understanding. Even cavers would see that it was better to bow out than to fall apart once inside and, at best, provide the rescuers with a second casualty to evacuate or, at worst, endanger other members of the team. Not going would, in a way, be the more courageous choice. Facing up to one’s failure. All this went through her mind in a calm and orderly fashion as she watched her body, possessed by demons, crab-walk over to the open culvert and begin the climb down.
Holden dropped the trapdoor. Anna felt the tremors through the palms of her hands, but she didn’t hear the clang of finality. Her mind had shut down. She had no thought but of her next step, her booted toe reaching for the rung beneath, the catch of her pack on the pipe above, the circle of light inches in front of her eyes.
The culvert emptied out into a crawl space much the same as the one she’d just left. Anna chose not to think about it. Having hollered back up the culvert to let Holden know she was clear, she turned her back on the escape hatch and crawled after the faint glow of Iverson’s lamp. The air in her lungs compressed until she breathed in short gasping sips. Perspiration, born cold and feeling like ice water, drenched her armpits. She wanted to weep for herself.
Then the passage opened up. Not gradually but with a suddenness that must have shattered the composure of the first men digging into the cave. Jules Verne time, Anna thought, breathing a bit easier, and pushed herself to her feet.
A tunnel big enough for a locomotive led away to the southwest. “Tunnel,” with its connotations of smooth walls and unhampered passage, was not the right word. The space Anna stared down was more a fantastical corridor, walls and floor and ceiling merging, growing together in rock outcrops and smooth pale beards of liquid stone, separating again, leaving behind delicate towers to reemerge into recesses maybe six feet deep, maybe going into the shadowed heart of the world for a thousand miles.
A path had been worn down through this cluttered basement of the desert. Orange plastic surveyor’s tape marked both sides, the dirt between pounded and tracked. This surprising touch of humanity gave Anna back a morsel of control, and she felt the grip of muscles on the scruff of her neck loosen somewhat.
The trail wound through enormous blocks of limestone studded with rough grayish-white formations called popcorn, then vanished in darkness beneath a low arch in the rock. Though impressive, and the size a relief to her fear-tightened mind, the cave had no life and no color. In a land devoid of sunlight, color was superfluous. Everywhere the puny beam of her headlamp touched was gray or white or brown. The paucity of light circumscribed the area, making it no larger than the small circle illuminated, creating a sense of fragmentation that was disorienting.
In the world above, the memory of which was already fading, there were signs and portents, clues that let one know one was alive: breezes, birdsong and crickets, the sound of distant thunder, the smell of sage. Here, the silence was absolute, the only sounds those of their own making. With the manhole closed, the air moved, but much more slowly, and the only smell was the dank odor of ancient rock. In this place unmarked by the rise and fall of the sun, the tides, the seasons, time ceased to have meaning.
With a thud and a scrabble, Holden Tillman joined her at the commencement of the passage. “Pretty neat, huh?”
“Neat.”
“This is nothing. Wait till we get in the cave.”
Iverson ducked into sight from beneath the arch. Something in the cast of his features, the set of his shoulders, had changed subtly. The unhitched movement of his joints had tightened up, become smoother. Responsibility wrapped around him, tying up all the loose ends. He radiated competence.
“Frieda and her team are on what is usually a two-day trek—maybe a day and a half. It’ll be at least that hauling her out. Traveling fast, I figure we can get there in seven hours. Maybe a bit less. We’ve been over this before, but we’re going to go over it again. I can make it. Holden can make it. If you don’t feel up to it, Anna, now’s the time. No loss of face. We leave all testosterone topside. Heroes are a pain in the butt down here.”
“I’m okay with it,” Anna said, wondering at the ease with which she kissed off her last chance.
“If you get too tired, start getting stupid or scaring yourself, let me or Holden know. We’ll take a break, eat a bite, swap some stories. Can’t leave anybody by ’emselves down here. Hodags’ll carry ’em off.”
“Cave spirits,” Holden said solemnly. “Mischievous little beggars.”
“Got it,” Anna said, relieved she’d never be left alone in the vast gullet of New Mexico with only her own brain for a playmate.
After a couple hundred yards the passageway came to an abrupt end, the floor dropping unceremoniously away into a pit so deep that light was lost. Water dripping from the ceiling laid a slippery layer over gold-colored stone that poured over the lip into the void. Two stalagmites, just more than knee high, protruded like eyeteeth on either side of the trail. A climbing rope was anchored to one of them, its hefty weave of nylon looking as insubstantial as a spider’s web in the formidable throat of limestone.
“Boulder Falls,” Iverson told Anna. “More a pit than anything, but ‘Boulder Pit’ lacked poetry. The descent is one hundred eighty-five feet. Half of it free fall. Me first—”
“Me last,” Holden finished.
Iverson hooked up his descent gear and, bracing a foot to either side of the line, walked backward, his weight on the rope, his body angled out over the shaft.
The descent didn’t frighten Anna. She trusted her gear and her ability. It was the thought of going yet deeper into the ground, farther from the light of day, that made her queasy. She turned her back on the falls and looked at the already familiar face of Holden Tillman. He reached up and switched off his headlamp. “You might want to do the same,” he said. “Save batteries every chance you get.”
Anna clicked her light off and was instantly lost in a universe of such ut
ter blackness that she had a sense of vertigo. Afraid to move so much as a centimeter in any direction, she sat down cross-legged where she was. An unwelcome wetness seeped through the seat of her trousers. Should anyone notice, she hoped they wouldn’t think the moisture had originated from within. Given the shock of total light deprivation, it was not impossible.
As she sat in the seep puddle, the darkness began to harden around her. It was not a mere absence of light, it was a substance, an element, a suffocating miasma that filled her ears, clogged her nostrils, bore down on her shoulders and chest. When the pressure on her eyelids became such that she could feel the black leaking like raw concrete into her brain, she reached up and switched on her lamp.
Probably thirty seconds had passed since she’d turned it off.
The light pushed the cave back to its former size, and she breathed deeply, embarrassed that her sigh of relief was so audible.
“Lookie,” Holden said, politely ignoring her personal crisis. “Cave pearls.”
To the left of the trail, in a shallow basin on the lip of Boulder Falls, was a formation cavers called pearls. They formed much the same way pearls formed in oysters. As water dripped from above, rolling around grains of sand, the limestone in the liquid began to coat them. Because of the movement the pearls stayed free rather than being captured in a static formation.
“There used to be one in Liberty Bell. A big one we called the Jupiter Pearl,” Holden said. “It had a red dot on it. Every time you came through, the dot was in a different place, orbiting around its tiny solar system.”
“What happened to it?” Anna asked just to keep the conversation going. She didn’t care, and that shamed her. People caught up in themselves, trapped in their own web of fear and greed, were the worst possible custodians of the wilderness.
“Some SOB stole it.”
Anna nodded, trying to communicate a concern she knew she should feel. To her the pearls lacked beauty. They were misshapen and dirt-colored; their wet convex surfaces looked like things not quite alive: stumps oozing, eyeballs set aside for unimaginable Frankensteinian monsters.