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"Off-rope," boiled up from the pit at her back. An echo accompanied it, hinting at cavernous spaces and irregular walls.
"I know," A
She paid out twenty or more feet of line, then stopped. Perhaps she swung gently, held safe by a few links of metal and nylon, seventy feet above a floor she couldn't see-probably would never see but in the niggardly scraps afforded by a headlamp. With no up and no down, no walls, no horizon, all sense of motion was lost. Her light pried into darkness but reached no destination. All that existed was the bright yellow-and-blue weave of the line that held her, and the rough russet of her battered leather gloves. An ideal rappel for an acrophobe. Without any shred of visual evidence, the mind refused to grasp the situation fully.
A
For the first time in a long while, she was alone. The men, one a hundred feet above, the other nearly as far below, could have been on the face of the moon, such was her momentary isolation.
Time, snatched away by the urgency of Frieda's head wound, was by some alchemy of darkness and suspension, returned for the nonce, and A
Hearing the story, A
It was toward this shameful and dangerous mindset that A
Going back was out of the question.
She took a deep breath and let the claustrophobia build in a vacant center of her skull. Terror gushed from her pores in a sweat that stank of fear. A metallic taste flooded her mouth, and her hands grew so cold and stiff she wondered if the rope would slip though the fingers of her right hand and leave her to plummet to the rocks below. Though she remained upright, she had the overpowering sensation of falling in all directions at once.
When terror had filled every cell of her being, she gripped the rope tightly and pressed her cheek against it. Screwing her eyes shut she braced herself against the detritus in her head and willed it to move. Not gone, she told herself, knowing that was too much to hope for. Just stored away in a vault. Later, when she was out of the cave and Frieda was safe, she would give herself permission to go completely insane if that was what was required.
Sharp pain cut between her eyes, and she could almost hear the creaking and snapping as she mentally bulldozed the mountain of neurosis to the back of her mind.
For half a minute more, she dangled with her eyes closed. Her head hurt, but feeling was returning to her hands. The fear was not vanquished. It hung over her, a huge and precariously balanced boulder ready to come crashing down and crush her at the first loud noise or brush of air. Being wired with a panic button on a hair trigger was not reassuring, but, with luck, it would never be pressed. If it was…
I'll burn that bridge when I come to it, she told herself. Until then she could think again; there was room to care for others. She could go on.
Rapidly she began paying out rope, descending to the bottom of Boulder Falls, where Iverson welcomed her with the light from a small battery-powered star.
3
The hellish pace set by Iverson was a godsend. Traversing the rugged subterranean landscape took all of A
Such were the demands of travel that majesty and grandeur were lost. A
Names went by with the black velvet-clad scenery: Colorado Room, seen as a series of slides framed by the limiting scope of headlamps; Glacier Bay, great pale glaciers calving in a sea of night. Windy City, Rim City.
A
Wriggling through a narrow chimney, knees and elbows thrust against the rock, she remembered a story she'd been told by a friend who led canoe trips for Outward Bound in the Boundary Waters of northern Mi