Nevada Barr: Blind Descent

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 utter 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.

"Want a piece of candy?" Holden held out a red Jolly Rancher, and Anna accepted it gratefully.

"I'm sorry about the Jupiter Pearl," she said to pay for the treat.

"So it goes," Holden said. "And then it's gone."

The sadness in his voice cut through her cloak of self-pity. In more ways than one, the underground was the only true wilderness remaining. The lead where Frieda had been injured had been discovered Tuesday. Thursday of the same week Anna found herself sitting, staring at Holden's beloved cave pearls. She would be the twelfth or thirteenth person ever to walk where they were going, ever to see whatever it was they were going to see. No animal-human or otherwise- had made its home here. No planes flew overhead in any real sense. Helicopters couldn't airlift the lost and injured to safety. The cave was within easy walking distance in miles to restaurants and VCRs, yet the far rooms of Lechuguilla were among the most remote places on the globe. Intellectually, Anna could see the attraction. Viscerally, she still wanted to go home.

"Off-rope," boiled up from the pit at her back. An echo accompanied it, hinting at cavernous spaces and irregular walls.

"I know," Anna said irritably. "Me next, you last." Having gone meticulously through the drill: clipped in safety, called "on-rope" to clear the fall zone, threaded the rack and replaced the JUMAR safety on a harness 'biner, she eased over the edge of the falls. The terrain revealed by her lamp provided footing as she gently touched the cliff face on the descent. Then the cliff undercut, and her feet dangled free. She held herself from the wall with her left arm, the right paying out rope from below the rock. In an instant the wall was a memory. She hung suspended in the middle of nowhere, of nothing.

She paid out twenty or more feet of line, then stopped. Perhaps she swung gently, held safe by a few links of metal and nylon, seventy feet above a floor she couldn't see-probably would never see but in the niggardly scraps afforded by a headlamp. With no up and no down, no walls, no horizon, all sense of motion was lost. Her light pried into darkness but reached no destination. All that existed was the bright yellow-and-blue weave of the line that held her, and the rough russet of her battered leather gloves. An ideal rappel for an acrophobe. Without any shred of visual evidence, the mind refused to grasp the situation fully.