Forty minutes later he emerged into the misty morning sunlight of the gouffre. After a rest, he helped the lads dismount the aluminum-tube triangle and the anchoring cables for the winch. They rolled several heavy boulders over the opening, partly to hide it from anyone who might wander that way, but also to block the entrance to protect next spring’s sheep from falling in.

They scattered stone and pebbles to efface the marks of the winch frame and cable tie-offs, but they knew that most of the work of concealment would be done by the onset of winter.

Back in the artzain xola, Hel made his report to Le Cagot, who was enthusiastic despite his swollen arm throbbing with pain.

“Good, Niko. We shall come back next summer. Listen. I’ve been pondering something while you were down in the hole. We must give our cave a name, no? And I want to be fair about naming it. After all, you were the first man in, although we must not forget that my courage and skill opened the last of the chokes. So, taking all this into consideration, I have come up with the perfect name for the cave.”

“And that is?”

“Le Cagot’s Cave! How does that sound?”

Hel smiled. “God knows it’s fair.”

All that was a year ago. When the snow cleared from the mountain, they came up and began descents of exploration and mapping. And now they were ready to make their major penetration along the course of the underground river.

For more than an hour, Hel had slept on the rock slab, fully clothed and booted, while Le Cagot had passed the time talking to himself and the unconscious Hel, all the while sipping at the bottle of Izzara, taking turns. One drink for himself. The next on Niko’s behalf.

When at last Hel began to stir, the hardness of the rock penetrating even the comatose sleep of his fatigue, Le Cagot interrupted his monologue to nudge his companion with his boot. “Hey! Niko? Going to sleep your life away? Wake up and see what you have done! You’ve drunk up half a bottle of Izzara, greedy bastard!”

Hel sat up and stretched his cramped muscles. His inactivity had permitted the cave’s damp cold to soak in to the bone. He reached out for the Izzara bottle, and found it empty.

“I drank the other half,” Le Cagot admitted. “But I’ll make you some tea.” While Be

Hel tugged off his gaiters and boots. “What time is it?”

Le Cagot was carrying over a tin cup of tea. “I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I turn over my wrist, I will pour out your tea, ass! Here. Take the cup!” Le Cagot snapped his fingers to shake off the burn. “Now I will look at my watch. The time at the bottom of Le Cagot’s Cave—and perhaps elsewhere in the world—is exactly six thirty-seven, give or take a little.”

“Good.” Hel shuddered at the taste of the thin tisane Le Cagot always brewed as tea. “That gives us five or six hours to eat and rest before we follow the stream into that big sloping tunnel. Is everything laid out?”

“Does the devil hate the water?”

“Have you tested the Brunton compass?”

“Do babies shit yellow?”

“And you’re sure there’s no iron in the rock?”

“Did Moses start forest fires?”

“And the fluorescein is packed up?”

“Is Franco an asshole?”

“Fine then. I’m going to get into a bag and get some sleep.”

“How can you sleep! This is the big day! Four times we have been down in this hole, measuring, map-making, marking. And each time we have resisted our desire to follow the river course, saving the greatest adventure for last. And now the time has come! Surely you cannot sleep! Niko? Niko? I’ll be damned.” Le Cagot shrugged and sighed. “There is no understanding these Orientals.”

Between them, they would be carrying twenty pounds of fluorescein dye to dump into the underground river when at last they could follow it no longer, either because their way was blocked by infall, or the river disappeared down a siphon. They had estimated that the outfall of the river had to be into the Torrent of Hol

After five hours of deep sleep, Hel awoke as he always did, instantly and thoroughly, without moving a muscle or opening his eyes. His highly developed proximity sense reported to him immediately. There was only one person within aura range, and that person’s vibrations were defuse, defocused, vulnerable. The person was daydreaming or meditating or asleep. Then he heard Le Cagot’s baritone snoring.

Le Cagot was in his sleeping bag, fully dressed, only his long, tousled hair and rust-gray beard visible in the dim light of the ten-watt battery lamp. Hel got up and set the solid-fuel stove going with a popping blue flame. While the water was coming to a boil, he searched about in the food containers for his tea, a strong tannic cha which he brewed so long it had twice the caffeine of coffee.

A man who committed himself totally to all physical activities, Le Cagot was a deep sleeper. He did not even stir when Hel tugged his arm out of the bag to check the time. They should be moving out. Hel kicked the side of Be

Without turning over, Le Cagot growled thickly, “There is an ancient Basque proverb saying that those who kick sleeping men inevitably die.”

“Everybody dies.”

“You see? Another proof of the truth of our folk wisdom.”

“Come on, get up!”

“Wait a minute! Give me a moment to arrange the world in my head, for the love of Christ!”

“I’m going to finish this tea, then I’m setting off. I’ll tell you about the cave when I get back.”

“All right!” Le Cagot kicked his way angrily out of the sleeping bag and sat on the stone slab beside Hel, hunching moodily over his tea. “Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the Donkey! What kind of tea is this?”

“Mountain cha.”

“Tastes like horse piss.”

“I’ll have to take your word for that. I lack your culinary experience.”

Hel drank off the rest of his tea, then he hefted the two packs and selected the lighter one. He took up his coil of Edelrid rope and a fat carabiner on which were threaded a ring of smaller carabiners. Then he made a quick check of the side pocket of his pack to make sure he had the standard assortment of pitons for various kinds of fissures. The last thing he did before setting off was to replace the batteries for his helmet lamp with fresh ones. This device was another of his own design, based on the use of the experimental Gerard/Simon battery, a small and powerful cylinder, eight of which could be fitted into the helmet between the crown and webbing. It was one of Hel’s hobbies to design and make caving equipment in his workshop. Although he would never consider patenting or manufacturing these devices, he often gave prototypes to old caving friends as presents.

Hel looked down at Le Cagot, still hunched petulantly over his tea. “You’ll find me at the end of the cave system. I’ll be easy to recognize; I’ll be the one with the victorious look on his face.” And he started down the long corridor that was the river’s channel.

“By the Rocky Balls of St. Peter, you have the soul of a slave-driver! You know that?” Le Cagot shouted after Hel, as he rapidly donned his gear, grumbling to himself, “I swear there’s a trace of Falange blood in his veins!”

Shortly after entering the gallery, Hel paused and waited for Le Cagot to catch up. The entire performance of exhortation and grousing was part of the established heraldry of their relationship. Hel was the leader by virtue of personality, of route-finding skills granted him by his proximity sense, and of the physical dexterity of his lithe body. Le Cagot’s bullish strength and endurance made him the best backup man in caving. From the first, they had fallen into patterns that allowed Le Cagot to save face and maintain his self-respect. It was Le Cagot who told the stories when they emerged from the caves. It was Le Cagot who constantly swore, bullied, and complained, like an ill-mannered child. The poet in Le Cagot had confected for himself the role of the miles gloriosus, the Falstaffian clown—but with a unique difference: his braggadocio was founded on a record of reckless, laughing courage in numberless guerrilla actions against the fascist who oppressed his people in Spain.

When Le Cagot caught up with Hel, they moved together down the slanting, rapidly narrowing cut, its floor and walls scrubbed clean by the action of the underground stream, revealing the formational structure of the cave system. The rock above was limestone, but the floor along which the stream ran was ancient foliate schist. For eons, soak water had penetrated the porous limestone to the depth of the impermeable schist, along which bed it flowed, seeking depth and ultimate outfall. Slowly the slightly acid seep water had dissolved the limestone immediately above the schist, making a water pipe for itself. And slowly it had eaten at the edges of the water pipe until it had undermined its structure and caused infalls, which nibble it patiently eroded by absorptions and scrubbing; and the rubble itself acted as an abrasive carried along in the current, aiding in the work of undermining, causing greater infalls and multiplying the effect: and so, by geometric progression in which effects were also causes, through hundreds of thousands of years the great cave system was developed. The bulk of the work was accomplished by the silent, minute, relentless work of scrubbing and dissolution, and only occasionally was this patient action punctuated by the high geological drama of major collapses, most of them triggered by the earthquakes common to this underground system of faults and fissures which found surface expression in a landscape of karst, the abrupt outcroppings and frequent runnel pits and gouffres that earned this region its caving reputation.

For more than an hour they inched along the corridor, descending gently, while the sides and roof of their tunnel slowly closed in on them until they were easing along a narrow ledge beside the rushing current, the bed of which was a deep vertical cut not more than two meters wide, but some ten meters deep. The roof continued to close down on them, and soon they were moving with difficulty, bent over double, their packs scraping the rock overhead. Le Cagot swore at the pain in his trembling knees as they pushed along the narrow ledge walking in a half-squat that tormented the muscles of their legs.

As the shaft continued to narrow, the same unspoken thought harried them both. Wouldn’t it be a stupid irony if, after their work of preparation and building up supplies, this was all there was? If this sloping shaft came to an end at a swallow down which the river disappeared?

The tunnel began to curve slowly to the left. Then suddenly their narrow ledge was blocked by a knob of rock that protruded out over the gushing stream. It was not possible for Hel to see around the knob, and he could not wade through the riverbed; it was too deep in this narrow cut, and even if it had not been, the possibility of a vertical swallow ahead in the dark was enough to deter him. There were stories of cavers who had stepped into swallows while wading through underground rivers. It was said that they were sucked straight down one hundred, two hundred meters through a roaring column of water at the bottom of which their bodies were churned in some great “giant’s caldron” of boiling foam and rock until they were broken up enough to be washed away. And months afterward bits of equipment and clothing were found in streams and torrents along the narrow valleys of the outfall rivers. These, of course, were campfire tales and mostly lies and exaggerations. But like all folk narratives, they reflected real dreads, and for most cavers in these mountains the nightmare of the sudden swallow is more eroding to the nerves than thoughts of falling while scaling walls, or avalanches, or even being underground during an earthquake. And it is not the thought of drowning that makes the swallow awful, it is the image of being churned to fragments in that boiling giant’s caldron.

“Well?” Le Cagot asked from behind, his voice reverberating in the narrow tunnel. “What do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s reassuring. Are you just going to stand there? I can’t squat here forever like a B

“Help me get my pack off.”

In their tight, stooped postures, getting Hel’s pack off was not easy, but once he was free of it he could straighten up a bit. The cut was narrow enough that he could face the stream, set his feet, and let himself fall forward to the wall on the other side. This done, he turned carefully onto his back, his shoulders against one side of the cut, his Vibram boot cleats giving him purchase against the ledge. Wriggling sideward in this pressure stance, using shoulders and palms and the flats of his feet in a traverse chimney climb, he inched along under the projecting knob of rock, the stream roaring only a foot below his buttocks. It was a demanding and chafing move, and he lost some skin from his palms, but he made slow progress.

Le Cagot’s laughter echoed, filling the cave. “Ola! What if it suddenly gets wider, Niko? Maybe you had better lock up there and let me use you like a bridge. That way at least one of us would make it!” And he laughed again.

Mercifully, it didn’t get wider. Once past the knob, the cut narrowed, and the roof rose overhead to a height beyond the beam of Hel’s lamp. He was able to push himself back to the interrupted ledge. He continued to inch along it, still curving to the left. His heart sank when his lamp revealed ahead that the diaclase through which they had been moving came to an abrupt end at an infall of boulders, under which the river gurgled and disappeared.

When he got to the base of the infall raill

His return to the knob was rapid; he rappelled down the infall clog on a doubled line which he left in place for their ascent. From his side of the knob he called to Le Cagot, who had retreated a distance back down the tunnel to a narrow place where he could lock himself into a butt-and-heels stance and find some relief from the quivering fatigue of his half-squatting posture.

Le Cagot came back to the knob. “So? Is it a go?”

“There’s a big hole.”

“Fantastic!”

The packs were negotiated on a line around the knob, then Le Cagot repeated Hel’s chimney traverse around that tight bit, complaining bitterly all the while and cursing the knob by the Trumpeting Balls of Joshua and the Two Inhospitable Balls of the Innkeeper.

Because Hel had left a line in place and had cleared out much of the rotten rock, the climb back up the scree clog was not difficult. When they were together on the flat slab just after the crawl between two counterbalanced boulders that was later to be known as the Keyhole, Le Cagot struck off a magnesium flare, and the stygian chaos of that great cavern was seen for the first time in the numberless millennia of its existence.

“By the Burning Balls of the Bush,” Le Cagot said in an awed hush. “A climbing cave!”

It was an ugly sight, but sublime. The raw crucible of creation that was this “climbing” cave muted the egos of these two humanoid insects not quite two meters tall standing on their little flake of stone suspended between the floor of the cave a hundred meters below and the cracked and rotten dome more than a hundred meters above. Most caves feel serene and eternal, but climbing caves are terrible in their organic chaos. Everything here was jagged and fresh; the floor was lost far below in layers of house-size boulders and rubble; and the roof was scarred with fresh infalls. This was a cavern in the throes of creation, an adolescent cave, awkward and unreliable, still in the process of “climbing,” its floor rising from infall and rubble as its roof regularly collapsed. It might soon (twenty thousand years, fifty thousand years) stabilize and become an ordinary cave. Or it might continue to climb up the path of its fractures and faults until it reached the surface, forming in its final infall the funnel-shaped indentation of the classic “dry” gouffre. Of course, the youth and instability of the cave was relative and had to be considered in geological time. The “fresh” scars on the roof could be as young as three years old, or as old as a hundred.

The flare fizzled out, and it was some time before they got their cave eyes back sufficiently to see by the dim light of their helmet lamps. In the spot-dancing black, Hel heard Le Cagot say, “I baptize this cave and christen it. It shall be called Le Cagot Cave!”

From the splattering sound, Hel knew Le Cagot was not wasting water on the baptism. “Won’t that be confusing?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“The first cave has the same name.”

“Hm-m-m. That’s true. Well, then, I christen this place Le Cagot’s Chaos! How’s that?”

“Fine.”

“But I haven’t forgotten your contribution to this find, Niko. I have decided to name that nasty outcropping back there—the one we had to traverse—Hel’s Knob. How’s that?”

“I couldn’t ask for more.”

“True. Shall we go on?”

“As soon as I catch up.” Hel knelt over his notebook and compass, and in the light of his helmet lamp scratched down estimates of distance and direction, as he had every hundred or so meters since they left base camp at the rubble heap. After replacing everything in its waterproof packet, he said, “All right. Let’s go.”

Moving cautiously from boulder to boulder, squeezing between cracks and joints, picking their way around the shoulders of massive, toppling rocks the size of barns, they began to cross the Chaos. The Ariadne’s String of the underground river was lost to them beneath layers upon layers of boulders, seeping, winding, bifurcating and rejoining, weaving its thousand threads along the schist floor far below. The recentness of the infalls and the absence of weather erosion that so quickly tames features on the surface combined to produce an insane jumble of precariously balanced slabs and boulders, the crazy canting of which seemed to refute gravity and create a carnival fun house effect in which water appears to run up hill, and what looks level is dangerously slanted. Balance had to be maintained by feel, not by eye, and they had to move by compass because their sense of direction bad been mutilated by their twisting path through the vertigo madness of the Chaos. The problems of pathfinding were quite the opposite of those posed by wandering over a featureless moonscape. It was the confusing abundance of salient features that overloaded and cloyed the memory. And the vast black void overhead pressed down on their subconsciouses, oppressed by that scarred, unseen dome pregnant with infall, one-ten-thousandth part of which could crush them like ants.

Some two hours and five hundred meters later they had crossed enough of the Chaos to be able to see the far end of the cave where the roof sloped down to join the tangle of jagged young fall stone. During the past half-hour, a sound had grown around them, emerging so slowly out of the background ambience of gurgle and hiss far below that they didn’t notice it until they stopped to rest and chart their progress. The thousand strands of the stream below were weaving tighter and tighter together, and the noise that filled the cavern was compounded of a full range of notes from thin cymbal hiss to basso tympany. It was a waterfall, a big waterfall somewhere behind that meeting of roof and rubble that seemed to block off the cave.

For more than an hour, they picked back and forth along the rubble wall, squeezing into crevices and triangular tents formed of slabs weighing tons, but they could find no way through the tangle. There were no boulders at this newer end of the Chaos, only raw young slab, many of which were the size of village frontons, some standing on end, some flat, some tilted at unlikely angles, some jetting out over voids for three-fourths of their length, held up by the cantilevering weight of another slab. And all the while, the rich roar of the waterfall beyond this infall lured them to find a way through.

“Let’s rest and collect ourselves!” Le Cagot shouted over the noise, as he sat on a small fragment of slab, tugged off his pack, and pawed around inside for a meal of hardtack, cheese, and xoritzo. “Aren’t you hungry?”

Hel shook his head. He was scratching away at his notebook, making bold estimates of direction and even vaguer guesses of slope, as the clinometer of his Brunton compass had been useless in the wilderness of the Chaos.

“Could that be the outfall behind the wall?” Le Cagot asked.

“I don’t think so. We’re not much more than halfway to the Torrent of Hol

“And we can’t even get down to the water to dump the dye in. What a nuisance this wall is! What’s worse, we just ran out of cheese. Where are you going?”

Hel had dropped off his pack and was beginning a free climb of the wall. “I’m going to take a look at the tip of the heap.”

“Try a little to your left!”

“Why? Do you see something there?”

“No. But I’m sitting right in the line of your fall, and I’m too comfortable to move.”

They had not given much thought to trying the top of the slab heap because, even if there was a way to squeeze through, it would bring them out directly above the waterfall, and it would probably be impossible to pass through that roaring cascade. But the base and flanks of the clog had produced no way through, so the tip was all that was left.

Half an hour later, Le Cagot heard a sound above him. He tilted back his head to direct the beam of his lamp toward it. Hel was climbing back down in the dark. When he reached the slab, he slumped down to a sitting position, then lay back on his pack, one arm over his face. He was worn out and panting with effort, and the lens of his helmet lamp was cracked from a fall.

“You’re sure you won’t have anything to eat?” Le Cagot asked.

His eyes closed, his chest heaving with great gulps of air, sweat running down his face and chest despite the damp cold of the cave, Hel responded to his companion’s grim sense of humor by making the Basque version of the universal hand language of animosity: he tucked his thumb into his fist and offered it to Le Cagot. Then he let the fist fall and lay there panting. His attempts to swallow were painful, the dryness in his throat was sharp-edged. Le Cagot passed his xahako over, and Hel drank greedily, beginning with the tip touching his teeth, because he had no light, then pulling it farther away and directing the thin jet of wine to the back of his throat by feel. He kept pressure on the sac, swallowing each time the back of his throat filled, drinking for so long that Le Cagot began to worry about his wine.

“Well?” Le Cagot asked grudgingly. “Did you find a way through?”

Hel grinned and nodded.

“Where did you come out?”

“Dead center above the waterfall.”

“Shit!”

“No, I think there’s a way around to the right, down through the spray.”

“Did you try it?”

Hel shrugged and pointed to the broken helmet lens. “But I couldn’t make it alone. I’ll need you to protect me from above. There’s a good belaying stance.”

“You shouldn’t have risked trying. Niko. One of these days you’ll kill yourself, then you’ll be sorry.”

When he had wriggled through the mad network of cracks that brought him out beside Hel on a narrow ledge directly above the roaring waterfall, Le Cagot was exuberant with wonder. It was a long drop, and the mist rose through the windless air, back up the column of water, boiling all about them like a steam bath with a temperature of 40°. All they could see through the mist was the head of the falls below and a few meters of slimy rock to the sides of they ledge. Hel led the way to the right, where the ledge narrowed to a few centimeters, but continued around the shoulder of the cave opening. It was a worn, rounded ledge, obviously a former lip of the waterfall. The cacophonous crash of the falls made sign language their only means of communication as Hel indicated to Le Cagot the “good” belaying stance he had found, an outcrop of rock into which Le Cagot had to squeeze himself with difficulty and pay out the defending line around Hel’s waist as he worked his way down the edge of the falls. The natural line of descent would bring him through the mist, through the column of water, and—it was to be hoped—behind it. Le Cagot grumbled about this “good” stance as he fixed his body into the wedge and drove a covering piton into the limestone above him, complaining that a piton in limestone is largely a psychological decoration.

Hel began his descent, stopping each time he found the coincidence of a foothold for himself and a crack in the rock to drive in a piton and thread his line through the carabiner. Fortunately, the rock was still well-toothed and offered finger— and toeholds; the change in the falls course had been fairly recent, and it had not had time to wear all the ledge smooth. The greatest problem was with the line overhead. By the time he had descended twenty meters and had laced the line through eight carabiners, it took dangerous effort to tug slack against the heavy friction of the soaked rope through so many snap links; the effort of pulling on the line lifted his body partially out of his footholds. And this weakening of his stance occurred, of course, just when Le Cagot was paying out line from above and was, therefore, least able to hold him, should he slip.

He inched down through the sheath of mist until the oily black-and-silver sheet of the waterfall was only a foot from his helmet lamp, and there he paused and collected himself for the diciest moment of the descent.

First he would have to establish a cluster of pitons, so that he could work independently of Le Cagot, who might blindly resist on the line and arrest Hel while he was under the falls, blinded by the shaft of water, feeling for holds he could not see. And he would be taking the weight of the falling water on his back and shoulders. He had to give himself enough line to move all the way through the cascade, because he would not be able to breathe until he was behind it. On the other hand, the more line he gave himself, the greater his drop would be if the water knocked him off. He decided to give himself about three meters of slack. He would have liked more to avoid the possibility of coming to the end of his slack while still under the column of water, but his judgment told him that three meters was the maximum length that would swing him back out of the line of the falls, should he fall and knock himself out for long enough to drown, if he was hanging in the falls.

Hel edged to the face of the metallic, glittering sheet of water until it was only inches away from his face, and soon he began to have the vertigo sensation that the water was standing still, and his body rising through the roar and the mist. He reached into the face of the falls, which split in a heavy, throbbing bracelet around his wrist, and felt around for the deepest handhold he could find. His fingers wriggled their way into a sharp little crack, unseen behind the water. The hold was lower than he would have wished, because he knew the weight of the water on his back would force him down, and the best handhold would have been high, so the weight would have jammed his fingers in even tighter. But it was the only crack he could find, and his shoulder was beginning to tire from the pounding of the water on his outstretched arm. He took several deep breaths, fully exhaling each one because he knew that it is more the buildup of carbon dioxide in the lungs than the lack of oxygen that forces a man to gasp for air. The last breath he took deeply, stretching his diaphragm to its full. Then he let a third of it out, and he swung into the falls.

It was almost comic, and surely anticlimactic.

The sheet of falling water was less than twenty centimeters thick, and the same movement that swung him into it sent him through and behind the cascade, where he found himself on a good ledge below which was a book corner piled with rubble so easy that a healthy child could make the climb down.

It was so obvious a go that, there was no point in testing it, so Hel broke back through the sheet of water and scrambled up to Le Cagot’s perch where, shouting over the din of the falls into Be

It was a peculiar phenomenon that, once they were behind the silver-black sheet of the falls, they could speak in almost normal volume, as the curtain of water seemed to block out sound, and it was quieter behind the falls than without. As they descended, the fails slowly broke up as a great quantity of its water spun off in the mist, and the weight of the cascade at the bottom was considerably less than it was above. Its mass was diffused, and passing through it was more like going through a torrential rainfall than a waterfall. They advanced cautiously through the blinding, frigid steam, over a slick rock floor scrubbed clean of rubble. As they pressed on, the mists thinned until they found themselves in the clear dark air, the noise of the falls receding behind them. They paused and looked around. It was beautiful, a diamond cave of more human dimensions than the awful Le Cagot’s Chaos; a tourist cave, far beyond the access capacities of any tourist.

Although it was wasteful, their curiosity impelled them to scratch off another magnesium flare.

Breathtakingly beautiful. Behind them, billowing clouds of mist churning lazily in the suction of the falling water.