The Lost Cavern: And Other Stories of the Fantastic

THE LOST CAVERN

No, I never visited the place again. Why? Well, listen. Oh, of course, I could have made a reputation and no doubt a living by exploiting the find. Carlsbad’s just a trial well beside Tilapaco. Yes, that’s the name of the only village within a dozen miles. No: I’m not going to give any other reference, save that it’s in Mexico, and Mexico, you know, is a much larger country than those who’ve not been in it suspect. And, thank heaven, a much worse-mapped one than anyone imagines who’s never been off the main routes. Anyhow, the information wouldn’t be any use, as you’ll see when I’ve done. Besides, I believe you’re the sort of man who’ll be able to understand why—and I’d not be telling more when I’ve told you what I’ve said I will.

I’m a speleologist—most people think that’s a man who spins yarns, but you know what it is because that’s how we met. The men who really love loneliness divide into two groups, don’t they? The big majority, of course, take to mountain climbing. But they are the majority because they’re not real solitaries. Indeed, there’s a damned lot of exhibitionism mixed up with their flight from the dusty crowd. Up they go with a fine send-off and, like as not, when they’re at the top, there’re a dozen telescopes and telescopic cameras focused on them. Do you suppose anyone gets rid of self-consciousness, of knowing the fine figure he’s cutting, when almost every daring step he takes is watched and wondered at? They’re less afraid of falling into a crevasse on the way up than into an unbecoming, unstatuesque posture when they mount the summit.

No, the pure solitary, the man who really wants to leave behind him not only the world but himself and the faintest, haunting shadow of himself, that man goes into the dark, not the sunlight or the limelight. He goes to earth, he goes down, not up to mount himself on a monster pedestal. And even our small minority of the pure solitaries—even we can be divided again. If I may say so, you’re still not the pure of the pure. You still go to see something. You still are aware of your place; you’re an explorer, prospector. You don’t, it’s true, have a battery of telescopes trained on you. But you do—don’t you?—sometimes think of those who’ll come after you? You’re blazing a trail. The pioneer often thinks of his followers-to-come. The speleological societies have their minds full of distractions—geology, fossil bones, all that kitchen-midden curiosity. They never get rid of Time because they’re lousy with history. The absolutely pure cave-seeker must go deeper than that, much deeper. He goes down to sink and lose that host of stinging flies, those bees of business that are always buzzing round our heads and in our bonnets—just as a man’s one chance when chased by a swarm of hornets is to plunge into a deep pool; at water level they must leave him. If you go deep enough, and lie long enough, all the caddis-fly accumulation that has been stuck to us and is called our personality—a cake of prejudices and vanities—just melts off and floats away a scum up to the top. There’s no bath like an abyss and no soap like silence.

But I mustn’t run on like this or you’ll be asking why I’m talking. Why don’t I stay silent? Well, my story is just to answer that question. And I think it may. Anyhow, you have to have some notion of the man who’s speaking to you, the eyes through which you’ll have to try to see what he saw—though certainly it was pretty dark most of the time.

Well, I’ve told you that I was up and down Mexico looking for caverns. It’s a wonderful feeling, isn’t it, when at last you find something that really lets you in? When you sink down, down. There’s nothing that somehow so frees you from the world; that sense of leaving all the traffic and fuss far above—Gross darkness of the inner sepulchre is not so deathly still.

When I got to the district where Tilapaco lies, I knew I was, as treasure-hunting children say, getting warm. The whole district is a mixture of the two things we want: limestone for water to cut a tunnel with underground rivers, and also volcanic vents and great lava caverns blown like Gargantuan bubbles by the blazing gases that bulged up the rocks as though they were a pottage on an overhot stove. Why, it was clearly a speleologist’s paradise. But the people didn’t seem to know of any caverns. At least the men I spoke to, as far as I could make out their dialect, wouldn’t show any interest. Of course, it’s hard with people as impassive as those old Toltec stocks to say whether they’re just plain uninterested or whether they’re being wary. I think I know now what their lack of reaction meant in that case, but I didn’t then.

Certainly they were really down and out, so dirt poor that they might well be forgiven for taking no interest in a silly gringo’s wish to know about rocks and stones. Bread was their consuming interest. Indeed, they were poorer than most such mainly Indian stock. For instance, they had no cattle. I didn’t see even a goat and hardly a chicken. How they raised their children, heaven only knows. Perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps they were dying out—being pushed out. For they had had cattle once. I saw cow stalls here and there, but they looked as though they hadn’t been used for more than quite a while. No, they certainly didn’t welcome questions. Indeed, it was that that led to the cold-shouldering they’d shown me from the first becoming so pointed that I thought I’d better leave. I had remarked once or twice to the grownups, You had cattle once? And asked, Did a murrain take them? But they didn’t seem to understand me. Then one day—I’d made the village my headquarters while I prospected round—I passed that same remark to a child. The small boy was leading me to his aunt, who had some eggs for sale. We were going down by the back of the village street, and there was a whole line of byres—tumbled down but undoubtedly once holding cattle.

Where’re the cows gone, José? I remarked. Why doesn’t anyone keep them any more?

The devils sucked them, milk and blood, he answered.

Well, every backward countryside has devils, of course, to account for everything that goes wrong. They take the post, which, when we’re educated, the Government has to fill. But devils usually are pretty vague. One who would pitch on the cows and milk and bleed them seemed to me archaeologically interesting. So the remark stuck in my mind and actually came to the tip of my tongue when, that evening by the well, I was smoking, with a few of the natives lounging around. One of them had actually volunteered a remark, asked a question, Had José led me to the eggs? I said yes, and that he’d also led me to the solution of the cow mystery. At that I noticed two or three glanced up, but by the time I’d added, He says the devils sucked the cows dry, I saw to my surprise that everyone was looking at me. Their faces, of course, didn’t tell a thing. But their actions did. One by one they all got up—though most had only begun their smoke—and lurched off down the street. Didn’t go to bed, either. When I’d knocked out my pipe and made off to where I’d rigged up my small tent, as I passed by their doors, there was a face looking at me in every one.

The next day it was clear: I must go. No one would sell me a thing—not an egg, an avocado, a stick of corn. Well, I’ve lived long enough among strangers to know how a stranger himself must behave: Go before they get you. My tent was outside the village. I had it folded and on my burro in under ten minutes. When I looked back as the trail breasted a rise—the village was in a hollow—the last thing I saw was the greater part of the population looking after me. The air was clear and still then, and that country can often be almost as silent as a cave. I heard a farewell called out—after which they trooped back, the men to drowse against the south walls of their cabins. But the words I caught kept stuck in my mind: You’re going to the devils. May they catch you.

Not a gracious end to a visit but not uninteresting either. Anyhow, hard words break no bones, and perhaps if they hadn’t been so certain of my destination and direction they might have come with me part of the way, to speed the parting guest with something more emphatic than a curse.

Certainly, as soon as I was over that rise, the country became what moderns call romantic and ancients forbidding. I’d approached this district from the other direction, and this was the last point of the compass which, after my few trips from the village, remained to be explored. It was a lost piece of landscape, if ever there was one. Volcanic activity, pretty lately, as far as I could judge, had tilted and fissured, twisted and blown a mass of limestone crags on which till then water had been filing, drilling, gouging, and fluting. The hills were all sorts of shapes, but none sweet or reassuring. I’d just thought that, more than anything, it was like a fabulous cemetery, great bare-ribbed carcasses, pelves, femurs, and skulls—when, at that word, my eye was riveted, my mind dropped its playing with romantic fantasy, and the master passion took over. For what macabre romance would have idealized as the great yawning mouth of a skull I saw for what it actually was: a quite remarkably promising cave entrance! The sun was behind me and shone some way into the shaft, and I was on sufficiently high ground to be able to look down it as far as the beam of sunlight struck. Well, when I’d reached it, it was even more promising than it had looked at first glance. Even from the entrance it was clear that it went on far beyond what one could see from outside. I saw enough now to know that I might get ready for a real plunge. That’s as exciting to us, isn’t it, as the finding of a fine swimming cove is to a boy who’s just begun to fancy that he might rival Weismuller? And, like a long-distance swimmer, I got ready for a long pull—and well I did! I hobbled my burro. He’d find plenty of odd herbage that he’d like, for in between these arid stones it grew well enough. And what was odd but very fortunate, down at the bottom of a kind of pothole, to which he and I could scramble, was a gleam of water. I got down and tasted it—it was bitter but not repulsive—showed it to him, and knew he’d not of himself leave thereabouts to risk his life in a breakaway across waterless country. They’ve got more horse sense than any horse I’ve met, those burros. So, with a clear conscience and a light heart, I slung myself together: the light climbing-rope, the small grapnel pick, a packet of dried food, and—my own invention—a fluorescent torch. It sends a beam by which you can see when your eye is acclimated, it makes those rocks fluoresce that can, and it takes so little current that its batteries last far longer than the standard torch—and that’s all to the good when you can’t say how long you will be down.

How good it is to leave the harsh daylight and the dust, wind, insect fuss, and all the agitation of the superficial world, and to sink down into the cool, steady dark, with that faint, distinct perfume of a deserted cathedral—deserted by man, reoccupied by that which isn’t man. I sank down one level, sliding down a steep slope of soft shale, and the sunlight was now only a moted shaft over my head. Another curving slope ending in a clamber down a rough natural staircase—made, I suppose, by a talus-spill of rock fragments—and the upper world’s blazing light was now only a greenish-gold blur on a rock boss in the vault above my head.

And after that the Dark, as old Tennyson says. The real palpable stuff in which—as you and I know—if the eye is wrapped up long enough, the other senses, which it overlays, begin to have a look-in. I’d switched on my fluorescent torch, but naturally, as it’s nearly wholly an ultra-violet light, one’s eye takes some time to get used to it. But when you do, I’m convinced you see not less well but better. You can pick up a detail you’d otherwise miss, and that’s often a matter of life and death when you’ve got to find a crack or cleft to get you out of some pocket in which you’re literally buried, perhaps a thousand feet underground. And while you’re getting used to that sort of seeing you can make quite good going with touch and sound. In a cave you’re dealing with a close-up nearly all the while, and when things open up and you’re in a vaulted cavern, then sound is a pretty good guide. In that stillness you can judge quite well—I expect you’ve found it so, too—the size and shape of a rock cavern by the way the echoes of your movements come back to you. Some animals, especially one, orient themselves almost entirely by ear, take all their bearings by what may be called the only literally true soundings. More of that, however, later.

But it was while I was getting along in this way that I sensed my first notion that I might be coming up against something more than simply a gaping cavern. My ears had sharpened in that stillness even more quickly than my eyes. After all, eyes take their standard twenty minutes to change gear, back and down, to the primitive night-sight which lies back of our ordinary color-seeing vision. But, directly you stop stunning your ears with all our superficial racket, they start at once hearing as they did a million years ago. Don’t they remain cocked all night, when our lazy eyes have drooped? You can close your eyes but never, save with your fingers, your ears—and even then they insist on listening quite a lot. And I was sure, after I’d made another scramble down—and paused at the foot of this stage of my descent to listen to the echoes I’d roused die away—that I must have entered a really large place, a hall. That was quite natural enough; as you know, after the first entrance through some fissure, I ought to be getting to that level where I’d be finding the large water-eroded caverns of the underground rivers. So I experienced only the ordinary gentle increase of pleasant interest.

But the other thing wasn’t sure at all, and wasn’t reassuring, either. I was certain I must have heard another sort of sound. But what sort? It came just after the last pebble I’d displaced ceased its trickle of noise. So I couldn’t be sure I’d heard it properly, and while it was on I couldn’t place it at all. There may have been a small ticking sounding, a minute click, and then—and, though this is vaguer, I’m more certain of it—a giant sough or swish such as the top branches of a pine tree will sometimes give when underneath on ground level all is still. But the really odd thing about it was this. It was, I couldn’t help judging, much farther off, for it was much softer and vaguer and up at the limit of hearing than would be the sigh of the wind in the uppermost twigs of a tall tree. And you see how odd and unplaceable that made it! For what room was there in this close place for such spans, and, anyhow, what wind down here could be moving through high branches?

The question, of course, was nonsense. But that I had to ask it at all was a bit uncanny and sent my mind harking back to that unfriendly send-off of the upper-world dwellers with which I had been dispatched to this place. I stopped and looked and listened. And then my night-sight gradually began to dawn and reassured me. There wasn’t another suspicion of a sound, and as I began to make things out, in the violet light, I could, casting the beam about, see I was in a fair-sized cavern. Nothing out of the common—about as roomy as my echo-sense had led me to suppose and certainly not lofty enough for haunting airs to murmur in a high-bowered roof. I was reassured—at least as far as sight and sound went. And that ought to have been enough. But one sense, older than either of them, and a true night-sense, kept questing a little uneasily still. You know what I’ve referred to already: the deep cave-smell, the scent of the primal sanctuary, the atmosphere of the very womb of the earth—that still climate, never freshened by growth and breeze, never tainted by decay or tattered by storm, too massive and still to be called stagnant. Well, I was sunk in that, true enough, but because it was so pure I found my nostrils questing some small possible trace of an alien flavor. But that, again, like the sound I had suspected, faded.… And now that I could see, I had plenty of definite observations to hold my attention.

This hall or anteroom, I’ve said, wasn’t large, but it was fine enough. It was fluted all down the sides with those curtains and flowing frills which stalactitic, in-filtering water precipitates as it oozes and before it drips clean down and starts the actual pendants and columns. My light on these folded and billowed panels, polished and translucent, gleamed and glowed, sparkled and glimmered. I went up to a particularly fine fringe of fretted crystal. Like the embroidered border of a carved giant’s robe, the great laps and folds of sculpture work ran from floor to ceiling. It was quite wonderfully undercut, and, when I came up to it, I could see that it stood out like a narrow keel or lean undercut buttress. I held my light on one side of it and, stepping into the cleft which divided this glasslike arras from the actual cave-side, amused myself with the lovely glows and flushes which broke and surged through it as I moved my lamp.

Then I sighted in this cleft a piece of coving, a sort of scooped-out shelf, down near the floor. I saw that if I put my torch down there I should see its light like sun through a stained-glass window. I was right. The effect was lovely. I bent down to thrust my light into a still deeper cleft, and to do so I stepped back farther into the narrow passage which separated this great screen of semi-glass from the dead rock wall, from the upper curve of which it had been distilled and hung. And suddenly the wall, the screen, the light—everything—was gone. I was sliding at a rapid rate down an invisible shoot, so smooth that there was no shock but so polished that I knew I was leaving the upper world more rapidly than ever before I had taken that leave. Providentially, as I felt myself slip, I had seized on my torch and, huddling myself in my coil of climber’s rope, with my rucksack to pad my back, I wasn’t getting too badly bumped. The queer oubliette or duct down which I was falling was small enough to fit me fairly well, and, as it smoothly curved and wound, I didn’t bound or plunge or gain a breakneck speed. But in that smooth steepness I couldn’t stop myself slipping and spinning down. Indeed, after the first skid and fall, I was more giddy than actually shaken. So I can’t say how long I was spun down what I now judge must have been a kind of corkscrew channel, drilled, worn, and polished by a small stalactitic stream.

But at last I did slow down and, after a moment or two, I stopped. I stretched my feet first, and, sure enough, they could be waved as far as I liked. I raised my hand. There was smooth rock a foot above my face. I switched on my torch. I was lying in the gleaming duct which now was only gently sloping from my head to where my feet stretched out into a black hole. Facilis descensus Averno, I thought, and put the rest of the quotation out of mind. Anyhow, I had arrived at a new stage and level. Cautiously I pressed myself forward. I reached the lip of my small tunnel. I got my legs out—for the mouth flared quite a bit—and there I sat up—there was just room—and swung my torch to and fro, surveying the next scene into which I had been switched, as by a revolving stage.

I was sitting in a land of sill or ledge, a seat, if you will. For the duct that had delivered me had this, its opening, some four or five feet above a floor, an arena: a real arena, for it was sand-covered—a space, I suppose, of a couple of hundred feet across, as fine a circular area as you ever saw in a circus, smooth and empty, as though waiting for a troupe to run in and begin performing. And they might; for all around there were grotto entrances just like the one in which I was perched. I judged it must have been some vast form of a sinkhole into which had drained, during the last Pluvial Period, the streams which had cut the limestone into the channels and ducts down one of which I had made my rapid entrance. These streams must have carried with them and spilled on the floor all this sand, through which in time the water itself had percolated away. The walls of the place were also quite theatrical. For they were all pillared, pilastered, paneled, and fluted with stalactite shafting and ribbing and molding—rather like the old Alhambra Music Hall in long-ago London. And as the ribs and vaultings ran up to the great natural dome they took on more fantastic shapes, spanning and bracketing like winged caryatids, pendentive to the roof. Naturally, they were at every angle and arc, soaring and careening, some seeming to rise vertically, others appearing to dive headlong. And all this energy of movement frozen into dully gleaming stone, as though over some pandemonic flight or ballet there had been poured an imprisoning gum.

I swung my light to and fro to study this fabulous tracery of fan-vaulting. The whole billowing elevation was so fantastic that, as the beam flickered over the deeply shadowed limbs and members of the fretwork, one could not help imagining that they themselves might be shifting and fluttering. Finally, so convincing did that fancy grow that it became not so much fun to imagine as fear to think it might possibly—impossibly—be somehow true. You know, when you’re alone like that, you, just a little gobbet of soft stuff, right down, swallowed deep in the stony gizzard of the earth, you have to take care. Fancy’s all right to play with where, if it should show signs of getting out of hand and getting the upper hand, you can blow it away with a lungful of laughter drawn from the bright air. But if you’re where your own laugh might itself get loose, crossbreed in a thousand dark holes with obscene echoes, and come back at you as a blast of insane mockery, then, I say, you must take care. It’s up to you to listen, watch, pin down that shifty whispering thing before it can get off on its own, grow in the shadow, and lunge out of the dark, pouncing onto you from the back. So I listened and watched as, vault after vault, spandrel and pendant, I picked off with my torch each fantastic body and made it endure steady, illuminated analysis. One by one they had to yield, to go back into simple, dull, rigid stone. I was the only master here. The rest was simply shelves and steps, should I wish to clamber.

Yet one of those details was a bit stubborn, I must own. For it was hard to get it into the full light; another contorted shaft gave it unfair cover. It seemed almost seeking a protecting shadow, and, whenever I tried to get my beam right onto it, the outer rib seemed to extend a little farther, or the inner one to draw back. Well, you know, if you get looking at a thing like that too long and just can’t get the hang of it and properly explain it away, then you’re back again at the danger spot from which that ill sort of fancy can rise round you. It will start its misbegotten crossbreeding on the fact you’re failing to domesticate, and, hey-presto, you’ll find you’ve raised a monster instead of laying it. So the advice, of course, is: lay off the pretty little puzzle before it turns itself into an ugly, insane certainty. Naturally, that’s what I did. And, sure enough, when I’d gone my watch-round once again and inspected all the other carvings, covings, and roof-grottoes and come back to my problem-piece, it had settled down and become as commonplace geology as all the rest.

After all, come to think of it, fancy started up in the caves. It was in an embossed dusk like this I’m telling of that all man’s cave art came shimmering and shuddering, bison-big and rhino-charging, right out onto the dull stone. Indeed, so obviously stone-simple had that piece of my canopy now become that I just couldn’t, do what I would, see again the queer suggestion of coming-alive sinisterness which had been almost too convincing five minutes before. So remarkable was the change, so vivid my memory, so impossible now to reconstruct that eidetic form, that I then could almost have believed that something up there must have moved off, stolen away, while I was resting my fancy-threatened eyes elsewhere. And just then, as if to keep me on the qui vive, as my eyes gave the all-clear, my ears chose to add, Wait a minute. Was that anything? The place, of course, was more silent than the tomb, and in a vault like that your own heart might almost wake an echo. Besides, far away, somewhere in this water-wrought set of uncharted chambers and labyrinthine ways, a last drop of water itself might have fallen, and its ultimate echo in turn fallen exhausted on the fine tension of one’s ear. But if it was a sound, was it the sound that is made by a splash, however small? Wasn’t it rather the sound, not of water, but of air, a sigh rather than a tear? And with this hint came another from an even vaguer sense. I fancied in that air, which was as still as deep water, something had moved, a faint fan, not a draft but a breath too gentle to sound as a sigh. Well, that gave me a chance to rouse myself. If there was, down here, even the faintest current of air, it must be moving in from some unseen entrance. Here was a clue I could and would follow.

I pushed myself forward and dropped lightly on my feet to the sand floor. When I was in the middle of the arena, I saw that the chamber, though nearly circular, had, in fact, a sort of apse at the end opposite to my entrance. On reaching this big embrasure, I made my next discovery. On my left, behind one of the stalactite shaftings that ran up to the roof on either side, the rock was fissured. Like a tall, Gothic, lancet window, the gap ran almost from roof to floor. But it gave no light. Indeed, it gave no answer to the flash of my torch but swallowed up the beam in complete darkness. I mounted the low sill and peered in—or should I say out? Then, at last, I got some sort of bearings. I was standing, apparently, at the tip of a sort of funnel. I mean by that that the walls splayed back, almost exactly at the angle of my perspective—at least for as long a distance as I could now gauge. This didn’t, of course, tell me much, but enough for the next step. For it was clear that here was the kind of funnel which could convey my spectral draft—though I had to own that the air in it, which I could now feel as I stood on its lip, was as still as that in the arena that lay behind me. Anyhow, here was a path and, what all of us speleologists love, one leading deeper. The slope, naturally, wasn’t a steep grade, and the floor was smooth—again, evidently water-worn, a spillway, no doubt, out of the cistern I had just left. So I made good going for that kind of terrain.

I don’t know how long I slithered quietly down that incline with the walls of the funnel opening up around me. Once or twice I did turn back just to throw my light up