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After too short a ride, the pickup pulled off the rutted dirt road into a wilderness parking lot incongruously marked off with concrete curbs. A
Holden Tillman opened the tailgate, and the three of them divided up the gear. As they started the hike to the mouth of Lechuguilla, Oscar filled A
A quiet person with an aw-shucks drawl, Tillman seemed half embarrassed and half amused by Oscar's effusions. "Oscar's going to write my eulogy," he told A
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Despite narrow shoulders and small frame, Holden carried a prodigious amount of equipment. Though half a foot shorter than Oscar, arms and shoulders were corded with muscle where Iverson's were mapped in bone. A
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Holden and Oscar, along with CACA's superintendent and the chief of resource management for the caverns, had organized a four person team that would follow the two men A
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They were on a plateau to the north of the gypsum plains that spread down into Texas. What vegetation managed to eke out a livelihood from the parched soil kept a low profile. Little had grown to greater than knee height, and there were barren spaces between plants. With the lifting of the clouds and the dazzling clarity of the rain-washed air, A
Even knowing she walked over limestone honeycombed with passages, she couldn't imagine a less likely place to find the entrance to a world-class cave. She pictured the plateau cut into thin sections and placed between sheets of glass like the ant farms she'd seen as a child. Beneath her feet, creeping through those twisting tu
"There it is." Oscar interrupted her musings. They'd walked down a slope and crossed the stone bottom of a wash to climb again. Ahead of them was more of the same: low hills dotted with desert shrubs and cactus. "See that green spot?" Iverson pointed to a cluster of stunted trees poking from a fold in the hills. "That's it."
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Within a few minutes they'd reached the trees, and still she was none the wiser. Not until they climbed down four or five feet to where the oak trees had found soil to root could she see the entrance. Back in the rocks an opening maybe twenty feet wide, thirty long, and ringed by heavy overhanging brows of rock, showed darkly.
Over the years A
She'd read of holes described as yawning, gaping, hungry-words that suggested an orifice, an appetite. The sixty-foot drop leading into Lech didn't fit any of those adjectives. Rather than sentience, it suggested a departure from life. The last rays of the sun skimmed its surface, lighting the stone for fifteen feet or so. Below that, nothing. Night took all.
"Hi ho," Holden said happily.
Iverson began checking ropes secured to bolts near a tree that showed scarring from when it had been used as an anchor in previous descents. "The climbs are all rigged. We leave them that way along the main trade routes-established routes through the cave. We've found it does a lot less damage to the resource to leave the rigging in place than having every expedition rerig each time."
"Me first, you last?" he said to Holden as he threaded the rope through his rappel rack.
Holden nodded. Oscar leaned back and walked, spiderlike, from sight. The sun slid below the horizon, and A
"So?"
"Off-rope," drifted up from the black hole.
"Good point," A