The Angel of Eden (27 page)

We turned north just before Saray Deh. A village stood at the foot of farmers' fields, a V-shaped cleft of green amid the dusty scrub and red rocks.

Alaz kept his eye peeled for the road he wanted to take. “There,” he said, gesturing to his left. “Road” was an exaggeration. A rough, furrowed track extended upward, climbing the low mountain that rose out of the plain.

We bounced and jostled over the bumpy surface, the Jeep's poor suspension making my teeth chatter. It required Alaz's full concentration just to stay on course. Before long the track ended and he pulled over to a lee under a rocky outcrop to park his car. The sun disappeared behind gathering clouds and the air grew chilly.

“It's going to be a long hike.” Alaz pointed upward as we dug into the trunk for our climbing packs.

The track reappeared, this time as a footpath dipping and twisting among high limestone outcrops and gigantic boulders. For almost two hours we steadily ascended until we entered a narrow canyon. Cliffs shot up on either side of us. The rocks here took on fascinating shapes. Full of pits and spherical hollows, they looked like huge upright sea sponges.

“Almost there.” Alaz motioned for us to hurry. “It's ahead.”

We rounded a bend. Far below was a small valley, its flat rocky floor bisected by a curving river of white crystals. The ghost of a river: the water had evaporated, leaving only a trail of salt. Alaz stopped at a yawning, ellipsis-shaped hole to his right, about the width of a soccer pitch. He tilted his head, looking up at the somber blanket of clouds. “We've got to do this as fast as possible,” he said. “The way ahead is not so hard at first.”

He told us to leave our shoes behind a rock and put on our rubber boots. Before long, the entrance widened into a space the size of a ballroom. Bennet let out a gasp of surprise. The low-hanging rock roof amounted to a giant natural arch, striated with ribbons of gorgeous grays and reds, washed smooth by some long-lost underground river. Little white cones stood up from the
floor like miniature stalagmites. Thick wedges of white salt coated the base of the rock walls. I bent down and picked up one of the thousands of small pebbles that covered the cave floor, polished by an ancient water flow.

“Amazing,” Bennet breathed. We'd all fallen silent at the splendor of the place.

Alaz smiled. “Much more to behold ahead. This was once thought to be an old salt mine. That proved false—far easier for people to gather all the salt they wanted on the lakeshore.” We switched on our headlamps and paced along a funnel-shaped corridor that tightened until it wasn't much more than five feet wide. Twenty minutes later we stepped into what looked like an underwater paradise. Salt encrusted the cave's entire ceiling in a multitude of forms: twisting crystalline pillars, frozen lace, cornices of dripping icing, branches of white coral—a fantasy of glittering, upside-down sculptures.

Bennet furiously snapped photos. Even Nick stretched his neck to gape. A shallow greenish pond extended over most of the cave floor. Bennet dipped her finger in. “Yech. Really salty.”

“Never drink that,” Nick cautioned. “Get enough salt in your system and it'll shut your kidneys down. Believe me, it doesn't take much.” Rosan, I remembered, had said the same thing.

The pond turned out to be a stream that disappeared into a nearby cleft in the rock wall. Alaz motioned us forward. “We're taking the river route now,” he said. “We have no other choice.”

We waded slowly through the water, stepping carefully along the flat, slippery river bed. I began to feel claustrophobic. The place had a damp, ancient smell and you could hear the steady
plink, plink
of water without knowing where it came from. The farther we went, the more I could taste salt in the air. I was glad there were four of us with headlamps to banish the gloom.

The current flowed in our direction, making it easier to proceed. We now entered another wide underground space, our lights dancing off more magical shapes—icing sugar snowflakes, giant frosted icicles, salt heaped on rocky ledges like snowdrifts. Except for the dripping water, I hadn't realized how silent it was until a rush of sound came at us like the whoosh of wind. Above us bats swooped and spiraled in the air. Bennet laughed and took more pictures.

The current picked up and now a distant murmur reached our ears. The sound of rushing water.

Thirty-Seven

F
rothy waves flushed up against the vertical wall on our right. On our left, the ground had widened to a ledge of pebble-strewn rock. Alaz scrambled onto it, lurched, and fell on his hands and knees. Then he stood, brushing off his pant legs as we clambered after him. “I'm sorry,” he said. “It's been a long time since I was here. And this”—he waved his arm, seeming to take in the entire cave system— “is always shifting. In limestone caves, the stalagmites last thousands of years, perhaps grow larger—that's all. Here it is salt. In a few days the whole landscape can change if enough water goes through.”

“What do you mean, ‘if enough water goes through'?” Bennet sounded anxious.

“This area is arid. Dry most of the time, although occasionally it does rain. If so, the water finds its way through cracks and crevices. This stream can fill up, become a torrent.”

“I didn't much like the look of the sky,” Nick interjected. “Why didn't you tell us that earlier?”

Alaz shrugged. “You wanted to come here. It's probably better to go on. We've almost reached the cliff.”

Another fifteen minutes and the ledge broadened to a wide platform that dropped off sharply in front of us. The salt formations were only thin white streaks now, like spittle on the rock. The stream, though, had become a little Niagara, plunging over the platform's lip. We looked down into a cavernous space. The water disappeared far below in a plume of white. I could make out nothing but blackness. “How far does it go, Alaz?”

“I don't know. I cannot remember what Helmstetter said. Maybe a couple of hundred feet.”

We all had climbing experience. Nick was the most skilled but I wasn't far behind him; I'd climbed in the Catskills recently and in Iraq, crawled through underground passages dangerous enough to make your hair stand on end. Bennet had once done a story on free climbing in the Rockies and picked up the basics as a result. Despite our collective experience, I felt a jab of fear.

“Scared?” Bennet's eyes twinkled as she came up beside me. “I saw those guys in the Rockies scramble down something like that in twenty minutes—without ropes.”

We decided to take a quick break. As we drank from our water bottles and chewed our energy bars, we began to work out how to negotiate the drop. Having been the one to persuade everyone to come here, I offered to go first. Alaz would follow—this at Nick's insistence; presumably he didn't trust a guy he barely knew with the anchors—and Bennet and Nick would bring up the tail. We slipped off our rubber boots and put on our climbing shoes.

The store in Tabriz sold 210-foot lengths of climbing rope— which meant a maximum 105 feet, since I'd have to double the rope and thread it through the anchor. I'd also have to hammer in new pitons every 100 feet. Descending would be a slow process.
With only one person at a time able to use the rope, the whole group would need to assemble at various points on the way down, after I banged in new pitons to begin the next leg.

Nick flaked out the rope, its tough nylon black-and-tan bands making it looked like snakeskin. We secured the webbing to a sturdy stump of rock shaped like one of the bollards you see on a wharf. For the second anchor, Alaz stuck a wedge into a narrow crevice. To be really bombproof we needed three anchors but there wasn't another decent crack in the rock for that. Once we'd fixed the rope, Alaz and I pulled hard on it to make sure the anchors held.

I got rigged up and ready to rappel. I threaded the rope into my belay device and clipped it with a locking carabiner onto the belay loop on my harness. Then I tied a prussic hitch around the rope as a safety and attached it to the harness strap around my leg. The hitch qualified as a precious piece of equipment: pretty much my only protection against a deadly fall.

It was time for me to launch. Heart pounding now, I stared down into the abyss. My headlamp illuminated the area immediately around me but little more. The rest was pitch black. I had no idea whether I'd encounter jutting shelves of rock or smooth sailing all the way.

I'd once seen that famous Colville painting of a dark horse galloping full tilt down railway tracks at night toward the single light of an oncoming train—as though the horse was unconscious of the threat and yet knowingly embraced it. I felt the same way now.

A wide, shallow crevice of bumpy rock that I thought might provide easier footholds lay close to the waterfall. I knotted both ends of the rope—fail-safes if my equipment cut out—and tossed them over the lip, hearing them slap the rock as they swiveled down. I turned around and half bent at the waist. The last thing I saw was Bennet's camera flash as I gingerly stepped over the edge.

The first section was bare limestone, pitched at a steep angle but offering enough purchase for an easy balance. No dramatic bungee-type jumps on this escapade—I'd be walking it down, and very slowly at that. Despite the spray, I didn't see any green algae or organic material on the rock, probably a result of the pervasive salt in the atmosphere. Just as I was getting into my stride, feeling that the rock and I were working together, it offered up another obstacle: about forty feet down, the crevice narrowed and then disappeared altogether. The spume now tumbled over straight vertical rock. Perhaps the limestone here was harder and less subject to erosion. I halted and repositioned myself.

I tried to keep my legs more or less perpendicular to the rock face. It was damn slippery; I cursed my decision to stay close to the waterfall and slipped repeatedly. At one point my legs windmilled. I began to think I'd have to slide rather than walk it down.

Shortly thereafter I hit the salt.

The cliff began to tip slightly outward—that must be why the salt remained on the surface. At first it was just a powdery overlay, no more than a light coating, like fresh snow when the temperature's very cold. I could easily sweep it away with my boot to expose the bare, thankfully drier rock underneath. I figured I'd made it close to seventy feet down, although in the darkness I couldn't see where the rope ended.

The salt grew denser, making it harder to uncover the under-lying rock. The crust was brittle, almost icy. I began to slip again. I tried using my boot to kick a toehold into it, thinking we should have worn crampons, but this had been the last thing I'd expected. I prayed it was just a dip in the rock face where salt had collected. But no. It seemed to stretch on. I looked below. For the short distance I could see, the cliff face was white. No sign of the bottom.

I continued to take it slowly—I had no idea how stable the salt crust was and didn't want to start a mini landslide. Moving
at a snail's pace now, it took much longer to chip little footholds into the dense crust. The next time I slipped, I kicked out hard in frustration. The crust cracked and split. Beside me, a section the size of a small boulder calved like an ice floe and fell. Splinters of salt flew into my face. I took a worried look down. A long ledge was about ten feet below, not entirely horizontal but wide enough that the others could get a purchase on it when they rappeled down after me. Good thing, too: I could now see the rope ends lying in a coil there. Not much length left, but it was a perfect opportunity to bang in another piton for the next leg down. God only knew how far that was.

I reached the ledge and found I could stand on it easily. My heart was in my mouth. I didn't trust the salt; another break could happen anytime. No point in punching the piton into the crust; it would never hold. I had to find the rock surface that must surely lie beneath it. I braced myself and chipped away carefully. Then came a sound unlike anything I'd ever heard. As if the rock itself groaned. A fissure at the level of my chest split through the crust horizontally, widening fast. I grabbed the rope, dropped my pick, and summoned all my energy to haul myself over the spreading gap.

With a crack as hard as a rifle shot, salt crust the size of a small house broke off, sweeping me away. My knee hit something. Pain set it on fire. My eyes were blinded by salt spray. I breathed it in and choked. I was not aware of falling, of the time it took. Just naked terror as I dropped through a vast space.

My body slammed into something. The force punched all the breath out of me. I felt as if I'd been cut in half, my spine severed. Still in my harness, I dangled over a black void. I couldn't move my leg. It didn't matter—nothing was there to reach for. Pain eclipsed everything. I tried to suck in a breath but couldn't make my lungs work. The world turned gray.

Thirty-Eight