Hammond Innes - Levkas man

I was left holding in my hand the heavy spotlight that Bert claimed had been whipped away from him by some unseen presence.

I did not at that moment draw any conclusions from the fact that the stiffened fingers were not actually gripped round the torch handle. My mind simply recorded it, too shocked by the discovery of his body to think of anything else as I followed it upwards and broke surface myself in the cavern.

There is something instinctively revolting about being in a confined space of water with the corpse of a drowned man. I played the beam of my torch over the cavern, saw that it was as Bert had described it-the lozenge shape with gallery entrances yawning at either end, the rope hanging down from the gaping hole in the roof, the ledges of darkened rock-and then I had propelled myself to the side and was hauling myself up out of the water. The rock was blackened with slime and very slippery, indicating some sort of tidal or surge movement of the water level inside the cavern.

Just clear of the water, I pushed the mask back off my face, removed the mouthpiece and lay there panting. The atmosphere was warm, the air I sucked into my lungs heavy and humid. Stretched out on a sloping slab of rock, I reached up and got a fingertip on the ledge above me. The belt and cylinders were heavy after the weightlessness I had experienced during the dive. The time was 10.09. I had been 22 minutes under water-22 minutes of diving time gone. I had to remember that.

Somehow I got out on to the ledge and slithered forward on my stomach until at last I was above the tidemark, safe on dry rock. Here I relieved myself of the weight of the belt and shucked myself out of the straps that held the cylinder to my back. I had been making for the entrance of what I believed to be the western gallery, and after removing my flippers, I climbed the last few feet to the mouth of it. Only then did I put my gear down, on the flat of the gallery floor where there was no chance of anything slipping down the sloping ledges of rock into the water.

Standing there, my head almost touching the gallery roof,

I tried Bert's spot, pressing the rubber we had so carefully taped over the switch. The bulb glowed dully and then faded, the battery exhausted. There had been hours of light in that new battery when Bert had started his dive. I put the spot down with the rest of my things and turned the beam of my diving torch on to the hole in the roof of the cavern where the rope hung forlornly, a pale umbilical cord, its end falling to the black pool of water. The surface of the pool was still now, flat like a floor of glass, except for Holroyd's body floating there, motionless, the white shirt clinging like an attenuated shroud. And beyond the body, dark rocks climbing to the gaping arch of the gallery's continuation on the far side.

No sound-the whole cavern gripped in utter silence; a grave-like stillness. Only my own breathing for company, the thud of my heart. I was remembering what Bert had said. Was there a "presence" here? He had said he had sensed it the way you sense a shark lurking. But that might have been the hypersensitiveness of a man alone in an underwater cave.

The spotlight's faded bulb was a reminder that my own torch had a limited life and I switched it off to save the battery. Instantly, I was enveloped in darkness so black that I felt as though my eyes had suddenly become sightless. How the hell had Bert managed to grope his way out with no torch and under water? I was shivering, but not with cold, the jacket of the wet suit clinging snugly to my body. I was thinking of Holroyd. Had he been alive, here in this cave, when Bert climbed out to where I stood now? Was it Holroyd's presence he had sensed?

I sat down abruptly, still shivering, and tried to think it out. Holroyd had come down that rope, and the rope's end trailed in the water. But he couldn't have drowned there, not with rock ledges all round. And the spotlight. Was it his hand that had reached out from the dark to grab that source of light? But then I remembered how his fingers had been crooked so loosely over the handle and a sudden chill invaded my stomach.

Of course, if he had slipped, as Bert had slipped, his grip

could easily have been loosened as he fell. But if he'd taken the torch, then he must have been alive when Bert entered the cave. Alive, he would surely have spoken to him, made his presence known. And Bert had talked of a body-the cold touch of a body as he had sunk through the water towards the blow hole tunnel.

Afraid suddenly of the dark thoughts in my mind, I switched on my torch again and instantly the beam of it flooded the pool with light. Quickly I scrambled to my feet, stepping forward, intent on reaching Holroyd's body. I had to examine it. That was my one thought. I had to find out for myself the cause of death. Nothing else would drive out the dreadful thought that was then at the back of my mind. But moving forward, quickly like that, my feet on the slime instead of hard rock, I only just saved myself from the sort of fall that had knocked Bert out and broken his arm.

Panting with fright, I recovered myself, turning and stepping back into the yawning archway of the gallery behind me. And then I saw it. The beam of my torch was on the gallery wall and the etched shape of a mammoth stared me in the face. The high-domed head, the great curve of the tusks-it seemed to be charging towards me along the pale rock wall. And behind it was another, etched more deeply, the lines of the drawing sharp and black, and it too was possessed of an extraordinary sense of movement.

I stood there, rooted to the spot, panic mounting with the sense of remembered evil. Then, slowly, I began to advance into the gallery, Holroyd forgotten, my imagination running riot. My thoughts had taken a frightening turn. And as I moved forward, I saw mammoth after mammoth, the torch beam shadowing the deep-cut lines, so that the shapes of the beasts stood out very clear, with hard scratched lines running into their bodies. And there were other drawings, scratch marks that were geometrical, like a hut, a rhinoceros superimposed on the slanting rump of a mammoth, the suggestion of a fish, or perhaps a lizard. And then, suddenly, there was colour.

It was on the roof, where it sloped upwards-a great band of red. I didn't see it as a shape, not until I was right underneath it. Then suddenly I saw it, a large-horned bull sprawled lengthways along the run of the gallery roof, a beast in full flight and falling, forelegs stiffened, head thrown back, the eyes staring, wild with fear. The realism of it was fantastic, the painting enormous-so enormous that I wondered how the artist, using the bulges of the rock for belly and rump, had been able to keep the perspective of the whole in mind.

I swung the beam of my torch away from that monstrous death-throe painting, probing the continuation of the gallery, and where the roof rose, the gallery opened out into a cavern, and it was all red. That was the overwhelming impression- a cave the colour of dried blood. But as I moved slowly into it the colouring separated into individual paintings-bulls and bison, some reindeer, a lynx, three ibex close together and a bunch of tiny horses galloping over a cliff.

The torch trembled in my hand, the beam fastening on a bull, vertical on the wall. Again the head was reared back, the forefeet braced, the whole animal ochre red, caught and held in the moment of its fall to death. I was appalled. Standing in the centre of that cavern, which was about fifty by thirty feet, I played my torch on the walls and roof, and one by one the red beasts dying leaped to life as the beam touched them. The whole cave was a charnel house, a portrait gallery of hunted animals, and all so life-like, so animated, so full of the dreadful certainty of death.

A short gallery led to another, bigger cave. I moved into it in a daze. The roof was lower, the smooth silt floor humped in strange pits, and the witch doctor artists had filled every inch of their rock canvas. Bulls and deers and bison, ochre-painted the colour of stale blood, and at the far end my father sitting, his back propped against the wall and his eyes staring like blue stones into the beam of my torch. I thought he was dead. But then his mouth opened, and the breath of a question came from him, sibilant in the stillness-"Who are you?"