Nevada Barr - Blind Descent

Perseverance was rewarded. After what seemed more time than her wristwatch assured her had elapsed, she was reborn in a chamber so vast that half a dozen rooms the size of Tinker's Hell could have been stored within it. Hardened as her heart was against all wonders remotely stygian, she was swept up by the unearthly beauty. After so long in a black and mud-brown world the illusion of light took her breath away. Chandeliers of snow-white Selenites covered the ceiling. Like great inverted winter trees glittering with hoarfrost, branches grew down fifteen and twenty feet. This fairy forest was thick and extended. Grandeur, Anna suspected, unequaled anywhere on earth. At least anywhere human eyes had been. The cavern walls were draped in curtains of liquid stone, frozen in place one molecule at a time over the history of the world. Sheets of gold, burnt umber, ocher, ivory, and white spilled down hundreds of feet, folding in on themselves, then crumpling on the floor as gracefully as the satin skirts of a fine lady. Throughout the enormous room were columns, some joined to form arches, stalagmites grown up and stalactites down to meet in fantastic pillars hundreds of feet high. Some, still growing, had windows yet to be filled with dripping limestone. Within the windows were tiny worlds, variations on the grand scheme. Openings not more than two feet high and half that in width were encrusted with ferns of iridescent crystal and delicate popcorn formations in shades of copper and bronze. Through the midst of this enchanted land meandered a shallow stream, a collection of seeps and drips from a square mile of desert. Water so clear it seemed to be only the eye's distortion, flowed over rock looking no less liquid and mobile.

A caricature of a wonder-struck child, Anna sat on the lip of the tunnel, eyes wide, mouth agape. Millions of reflective surfaces caught her little light and magnified it. Drinking in the color she'd so yearned for, she muttered an unconscious prayer: "Holy shit."

Cavers the world over dreamed of, lived for, risked their lives in search of a room such as this. And she, a dirt-detesting claustrophobe, had found it. The fates have a wicked sense of humor.

Not the first, she reminded herself. This had to be what Frieda had discovered, what she was hurrying back to tell the others about. Anna had found the answer, and it made no sense. A room such as this was an incomparable good to all involved: a treasure for the park, a feather in the cap of every team member including Brent Roxbury. This miracle of miracles, located in the heart of protected public land, had no downside.

If the answer made no sense, Anna had yet to probe deeply enough.

Falling gracefully away, polished flowstone beckoned her to further exploration. At the first step onto the glassy walk, she heard Holden Tillman's cowboy cursing in her head. Lug-soled boots, caked with mud, had no place in this ballroom of the damned. Rubbery socks, the kind made for playing on rough beaches and rocky lake shores, were part of the kit of every caver allowed into Lechuguilla. They wore them on the delicate flowstone around Lake Rapunzel and anywhere else boots would destroy nature's artwork. The first cavers faced with this dilemma had doffed boots and traversed the fragile landscapes barefooted. Then it was noted that the oils from human skin disfigured pristine surfaces.

Rubber shoes in place, Anna sat a little longer, studying the ground. Tracking, reading the record of men or beasts, was something she did almost without thinking aboveground. In this alien environment she'd overlooked this fundamental skill. With limited light, the task was hard, but in a world without wind, automobiles, or creatures bigger than a microbe, there was little confusion. In front of her, nearly between her feet, was a partial print: mud on stone, the corrugated pattern of a hiking boot, small in size. There was but the single print. Either Frieda had turned back or, like Anna, had changed footgear.

Assuming Frieda would have taken the path of least resistance, Anna followed suit and flowed down with the stone into the great room. For fifty or sixty feet she saw no other evidence that Frieda had been there. Time was slipping by. She had already used more than half the time she'd promised Curt she'd be gone. She'd seen nothing of the cavern but that first stunning survey and the rock immediately in front of her toes. Tracking was not conducive to sightseeing. Soon she must turn back. To date, all her sweat and fears had bought was a slightly-used doctor's wife and an even greater mystery.

Squatting, she tried for a new perspective. In ribbons that ran through the yellow spectrum, rock spread out in three directions. One ended against a stalagmite older and more impressive than a giant redwood. To her right the flow slid under the water of the stream. On the left it ended in a mist of soil ground fine as flour. A minuscule imperfection cut through this internal desert. Closer inspection revealed a bootprint. Frieda had not changed boots for socks. But then where were the inevitable prints from the entrance tunnel? So untouched was the flowstone, the merest smear of mud would have been as obvious as a billboard on a stretch of virgin meadow.

Anna removed her helmet and held it high, increasing the spread of light. Half a dozen prints materialized, prints larger than the one left by Frieda Dierkz. Moving slowly, eyes to the ground, she followed. Two sets, one coming, one going, led across the silted patch and between curves of silky stone growing out from the wall like the roots of an immense tree. Scrapes and streaks of mud showed where the booted individual slid down, then climbed back up. Twenty feet above the cavern floor, maybe fourteen yards from where she emerged, was an oval of black overhung with liquid limestone.

Anna retraced her steps. Near the polished run of flowstone, at the base of a convenient chair-high rock, the silt was churned up. A logical place to slip off the offending boots to proceed on the more fragile surface in booties or stockinged feet.

The "how" of the first attack on Frieda became clear.

Brent Roxbury had been following a lead on the back wall of Tinker's Hell. Curt was waiting for him, working on sketches for the survey. Brent was gone a considerable time but returned to say the lead had petered out. It hadn't. The end wall of Tinker's was honeycombed with back doors, at least two of which exited into this undiscovered room. Brent had come out in the cavern and seen Frieda.

Anna would check on the return trip, but it was a good bet that the fork between here and Tinker's, where she'd felt the drift of air, opened into a passage connected with the route Brent had taken. As he crawled back toward Tinker's, he heard Frieda in the parallel passage and went through to meet her. He must have arrived before her in time and above her in elevation. He shoved the rock, then went back the way he had come to report nothing but a dead-end.

That was how. "Why" was still at large. Anna looked at her watch again. She was going to be late. Hopefully Curt wouldn't panic, and Sondra wouldn't become any crazier than she already was.

Leaving the dead man's tracks, she walked back to the flowstone, an honest-to-God yellow brick road through a subterranean Oz.

Fatigue, awe, and fear combined to make the unreal surreal. Walking was upright, unhampered. It put to death the cavers' theory that there was no unbroken ground in this great cave. Vision was limited to the stingy reach of her lamp, but such was the glitter, she felt as if she walked in a moonlit garden. Stone flowed beneath the creek, and she waded across. Ice-cold water soothed feet too long confined in heavy leather. Beyond, she climbed a low rise and circled a formation of white spheres, piled one on another until the entirety of it resembled an elephant sitting on its haunches, forelegs raised the way she had seen them do in circus acts.