Blind Descent

20

A

"Maybe we should turn the light out again," Curt suggested.

"No," she said too quickly, then relented. "Try it." Entombed in darkness they waited. The eerie cry was not repeated.

"An aural hallucination?" Curt took a stab at explanation.

"We both heard it."

"Jesus. It's been nearly four days."

A

"Doggone that Kelly," Curt exploded. It was as close to swearing as A

"Sondra!" A

The name ricocheted from tiers of limestone. A tiny avalanche broke loose to their left, skittering furtively as far as gravity would take it.

Curt turned his lamp back on. By its light A

"Let's keep the hollering down until we're clear of the Pigtail," Curt whispered. "Ulterior motives aside, resource management was right to close this section. It's wanting to come down; I can feel it."

A

Talking only when they had to, and then with an eye to the boulders preying on them from above, she and Curt rigged a rudimentary belay using his body as anchor. The descent was not so steep that A

The claustrophobia from which A

Then the Pigtail was at her feet. Crabbing sideways she set foot on solid rock. Leaving the line secured to her web gear, she picked a trail along the side of the chasm following the goat track that would never see a goat. To her left the rift dropped away, sheer on one side and vicious with broken rock on the other. Her light didn't reach the bottom, but the Pigtail's terrors were all in memory. Falling no longer frightened her. At this point in the journey it was the lesser of half a dozen evils.

When she was far enough away that a second slide would not reach her, she tied the line to a stalactite, moist and growing in its imperceptible way, and called gently, "Off-rope." With his greater weight, should he trigger a slide, Curt could drag A

Schatz's light winked as he turned his back, following the route she had taken. Though streaked with mud and darkened with sweat, his tee-shirt shone a rich emerald green. Color. A

Curt reached bottom. Years of caving made his big feet fall with such delicacy he dislodged scarcely half a cup of soil. Winding line as he came, he made his way down the rift to where she waited.

Pride, a favorite sin of A

From the repetitive clutching required in cave travel, the muscles in the palms and fingers of her hands ached as if she'd opened dozens of recalcitrant peanut-butter jars at a single sitting. By the time the Pigtail was behind them, A

"It's gone."

A

"The tape is gone. Somebody took it."

The monomania of sustained movement cleared from her mind. The orange plastic surveyor's tape marking both sides of the trade routes through Lechuguilla was missing. Without it as a guide, the cave became a treacherous maze, each junction in the sinuous underground indistinguishable from the last. The way was not linear. Jagged rips in the limestone, some big enough to drive a truck through, others providing only wiggle room, were above, below, all around. Only one led out. A hundred such junctions, each with its myriad possibilities, rendered the odds of consistently making the right decision virtually nil.

"Why would Sondra take up the tape?" Curt asked.

A

"She didn't," A

"Gad, but that's cold."

"Or desperate."

Curt dug through his pack for a roll of tape. A

On a natural balcony overlooking Lake Rapunzel, they cried Sondra's name but could not scare up the ghost of the cave a third time. Urgency was growing in A

They sat; they drank. They did not speculate. It took too much energy, and even Curt was begi

They moved without incident through the descents and ascents of Rapunzel and the dry pit of encrusted pillars called the Cocktail Lounge. The two rooms and their co