Hammond Innes - Medusa

I remember the way she said that, the intensity, the excitement in her voice. She really did believe she had found something important. And then we were at the start of the track that wound down the cliff-edged ravine to the first cove.

‘You turn left in about a hundred yards,’ Petra said. ‘After that we walk.’

I stopped at the turn-off, waiting for the others, and after that we were on sand and gravel — not a road, nor even a track, just a piece of cliff-top country, a sort of maquis. Judging by the litter and the worn patches of thyme people came here to picnic, fornicate, or simply park their cars and sleep in the sun. It was tired, worn-looking country, but as I pushed on, driving carefully round the worst of the potholes, I realised that we had moved on to some sort of a track. A sharp turning to the right, a cave entrance marked by a sprinkling of tattered rags, then we were dropping down very steeply. ‘You’ll be able to park at the bottom,’ Petra assured me. ‘There’s just room to turn there. Do you know this place?’

‘Once or twice I’ve stopped at the top,’ I said. ‘But only for a bite to eat or to relieve myself before going down to the cove.’

She nodded. ‘If you’d got out and walked around you’d have found quite a few cave entrances. There’s one that looks almost like a house. It’s got a painted front door, a couple of windows, a stove pipe stuck out of the side and a vine trained over an arbour of wooden posts. I’m told the man it belongs to visits it regularly right through the winter.’

We reached the bottom, the narrow gravel track petering out into what looked like a watercourse. There was only just room to turn the two cars and park them with their back ends in the shrubbery. I thought we had reached the bottom of the ravine then, but Petra said no, we still had a hundred yards or so to go, then there was a soft patch, almost a stretch of bog to cross before climbing up to the cave entrance. ‘It will take us about ten minutes.’

By then we were out of the cars, all four of us standing in a patch of moonlight. The bushes were higher here, their shadows very black, and no sign of the cliffs that edged the ravine. ‘How did you find it?’ Soo asked her.

‘I don’t know really — some sixth sense, I think. The first time I came to Cales Coves was about six months ago. I’ve always been fascinated by natural caves. Most of them are in limestone and water-worn like these. And after I had explored several of them, I made enquiries and managed to locate a fisherman who uses a cave down by the water, just by the rock ledge that leads round into the other cove. He keeps his nets and gear there and it was he who told me there were several caves above here on the far side of the ravine. He thought it probable that very few people knew about them. The cave openings are mostly hidden by vegetation. At any rate, he hadn’t heard of anybody visiting them, and though he thought I was mad, he very kindly came with me that first time. There are about half a dozen of them up there at the base of the cliffs. I came here several times after that, and then yesterday I found somebody had been digging in one of them. That’s where the wall drawing is.’ She started to move off. ‘Come on. I’ll lead the way.’

But Soo wasn’t at all happy at being left on her own, and it was only when Lloyd Jones agreed to stay with her that she accepted the situation. I hesitated, suddenly uneasy at leaving her there. But Petra had already bounded off into the bushes. ‘I’ll tell you about it on the way home,’ I said and followed her along what seemed to be the ghost of a path. The ground became damper, the light of my torch showing the imprint of soft-soled shoes.

We came to water, a shallow flow over gravel, the bright green of aquatic plants, and at that point we could see the moon shining on the cliffs above us, a grey, very broken curtain of rock splattered with the black of cave entrances. Almost immediately the ground began to rise and we lost sight of them. We were moving across the steep side of the ravine, still following traces of a path. It reached a point where we could see the waters of the cove entrance black in shadow, then it doubled back on itself, steeper now as we moved out on to the detritus caused by weathering of the cliff face above. Once Petra stopped to point the torch I had lent her at skid marks on the surface of the scree. ‘Looks as though a bed or a crate, something heavy, has been hauled up here. Did you notice the imprint of feet down in the bottom?’

She scrambled up the steep bend, following the path across loose stone until it reached the base of the cliff where there were bushes growing, the entrance to the cave above screened by a dense thicket. Again there were indications of recent use, twigs snapped, small branches bent back, and in the black hole of the entrance itself the dry dust of the floor was scuffed by feet. ‘That’s not me,’ she said, flashing her torch. ‘I’ve only been into this cave once.’ Again there were skid marks as though a box had been dragged along the ground. ‘Watch the roof.’ She went on ahead of me, the height of the cave gradually lessening until I had to stoop. The sides of it were very smooth. ‘I’m not sure,’ her voice echoed back at me, ‘whether this has been scooped out by surface water making its way to the sea or by the sea itself.’

There were any number of caves around the coast, most of them well below sea level, some reached only by water-filled sumps or chimneys. Looking back at the moonlit half-circle of the entrance, I realised we were striking into the cliff at an oblique angle. We were also moving downwards. ‘You’ve got to remember,’ I said, ‘that when the ice-caps and the glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age the level of the sea rose very considerably.’

‘I know. The best of the caves are thirty to sixty feet down.’

‘Is that what your diving friend says?’

‘Bill Tanner? Yes. He says there’s a marvellous one by Arenal d’en Castell, a sort of blue grotto, enormous. He’s promised to take me down, sometime when I’m not fossicking around, as he calls it.’

I switched off my torch, looking back up the slope. The entrance was no longer visible, only the glimmer of moonlight on stone showing ghostly pale. The roof was getting very low, though at that point the walls had pulled back as though this were some sort of expansion chamber. Like the other caves in the Cales Coves area, the walls here were water-worn and the upper entrance high above sea level. It must have been formed at some period when the island’s rainfall was very much greater than it was now. The pounding of the sea so far below could never have done it by air pressure alone.

‘Here’s the roof fall.’ Petra’s voice came to me distorted and booming. ‘I’m just about there. But mind your head.’ And then I heard her swear.

‘What is it? Have you hurt yourself?’ I snapped my torch on, swinging it to send the beam lancing ahead down the tunnel.

‘No. Nothing like that.’ She was crouched down, her torch on the left-hand wall. In front of her the cave appeared to have collapsed, loose rock piled almost to the roof, rubble everywhere.

‘What is it then?’ I scrambled down the slope.

‘Look! It’s gone. The bastards have put their bloody shovels right across it. They’ve scraped it clean away. Why did they have to enlarge the hole?’ She was leaning forward, brushing at the rock face with her fingers, the fine limestone dust sifting on to the stone below and almost white in the torchlight. She sat back on her haunches, cursing softly under her breath. ‘If only I’d sent you a message and come straight back here and waited. When do you think they did it?’

She turned her torch on the fallen roof and the gap that showed between the broken rock and the rubble below was about three feet wide and not more than two feet at the highest point. There was air coming through it. I could feel it cool on my face and there was a smell of the sea. ‘I should have come back,’ she said again. ‘Knowing somebody had been working on this fall, I should have stayed here to explain to them how important that drawing was.’