The Angel of Eden (28 page)

N
ick would come. I was certain of it. He was invincible—all I had to do was wait. I tried to lift my head but felt too weak. I tasted a sour bitterness in my mouth mixed with the salt. I'd thrown up and couldn't remember doing it. How long had I been out? A band of pain sliced through my back. That was nothing compared to the agony of my leg. I tried to move it again and couldn't. I listened for the sounds of rescue—the scrape of boots digging into salt.

But the void was quiet except for the nearby rush of water. Had the salt shelf that split off been weakened by it? Water—now my enemy. How close was I to the bottom? Or had Alaz lied and there was nothing below me but a black hole stretching to the center of the earth? Had Alaz even
known
Helmstetter, or was that story of his going into the cave's depths thirty-five years ago a complete fabrication?

Had my real family tried to murder me?

I swung a little in the harness cradle, the light from my headlamp bouncing off a rock wall. I brushed the salt from my eyes: the wall looked to be about ten feet away. Too far. Even the smallest movement ignited an incandescent pain.

And then I felt the slightest shift in the rope. A loosening. I dropped a few inches. It hurt badly when the harness jerked, eating the slack of the rope, but I didn't care. My heart soared. Nick
was
coming for me after all. Rescue was only minutes away. Someone above was deliberately adjusting my rope. They must be rappeling toward me. I raised both hands and waved them. Tried to yell but managed only a whisper. Nick would need to know I was still alive. I waited to feel his reassuring grasp.

Another jolt. Another blast of fire through my spine. This time the rope dropped almost a foot.

In the first instant, I couldn't understand why coils of rope fell on me. And then I ran out of time to think at all. I went into free fall. My body spiraled in the air. I braced for the end.

Thirty-Nine

T
he salt woke me. Mixed with my blood, it stung the torn flesh where my teeth had cut into the soft flesh of my mouth. I vomited again: this time a mercy; it cleared much of the salt from my throat. I was very dizzy. I tried once more to yell for Nick, managing a weak cry. It was pitch black wherever I'd landed. This second fall killed my light. I felt around on the ground—I seemed to be lying on a bed of hard, sharp chips, like a hill of broken glass. My hands were cut and they stung, too. My back and leg ached. At least I had sensation in my leg; it wasn't paralyzed. I managed to raise myself into a sitting position. I could be anywhere. Whatever lay beneath me might not hold and the slide and the fall could begin all over again.

I unclasped my pack, shrugged off a shoulder band, reached around, and pulled the zipper open. I groped inside and found the spare bulb. After feeling for the harness that attached the light to my helmet, I managed to unfasten it and bring the headgear close
to my face. I unscrewed the cap, got the dead bulb out, and put in the new one, praying it would work. The beam shone out like a beacon, cutting through the night.

I'd come to rest on a hill of salt chards, the remains, perhaps, of the shelf that had broken off and taken me with it. I turned my head to swing the light around. I could just make out a protruding ledge of rock high above me: the salt crust that broke had probably formed over that ledge. Banging away at the crust had been enough to shear it off. Below the ledge the cliff sloped outward again—the chunk would have fallen briefly and then slid the rest of the way down rather than taking the entire drop vertically. Which explained why I was still alive. At least I was at the bottom with nowhere farther to fall.

My eyes watered constantly to rid themselves of the salt. Everything was blurry. I played the light around again, this time on the surrounding ground. And then I remembered the rope. It lay curled and twisted on the ground around me, its snakelike, black-banded coils stark against the white chips. I took a couple of deep breaths and drew it in hand over hand.

I could see the end of it slithering toward me as I pulled. When the last couple of feet came close I grabbed the end and held it up, brushing it with my fingers. Frayed. The pressure of the falling salt shelf had been so great as to weaken the rope enough that my weight finished the job, tearing it like a strand of thread.

Clearly an accident, then. Nothing like this could have been planned. But had Alaz known of the danger and not said anything, hoping for an accident to take our lives? After all, Kandovan was a small village. He probably knew Yersan well. Were they
working
together? Or was I just being paranoid?

I retrieved my phone from my inside jacket pocket and turned it on. Mercifully it hadn't broken in the fall. Close to midnight. I'd
been unconscious for at least six hours. The battery was almost done. I shut it off quickly. If Nick was coming for me, he would have shown up long ago.

That last thought sucked dry whatever hope I had left. Fatigue overwhelmed me. Blood still leaked into my mouth; my leg and back hurt like hell. I fished in my pack again and found the bottom was soaked—the fall had crushed my extra water bottle. One left. I flipped off the top and took a long drink, nauseated by the coppery taste of my blood as it slipped down my throat. I pressed my hand along my leg to try to feel whether it had broken. When I reached my knee, a knob of bone seemed displaced. I got the knife out of a zippered pocket in the front of the pack, slit my pants along the seam, then bent my head to train the light on my knee. It was swollen to three times its size and hurt so much I could barely touch it. Dislocated or broken, I couldn't tell.

I unbuckled the harness to brace my knee and thigh. Then I wrapped the coils of rope around my shoulder and tried to get up. I fell three times; whenever I attempted to stand on my bad leg the pain made me almost faint.

If only I had something to use as a crutch. Then I thought of the aluminum frame on my pack. I pried the straps off it and managed to bend the metal bar almost straight. Now I was able to stand without toppling over. It felt like a miracle.

God knows where my pick had fallen. It was useless anyway. Even if I recovered it, climbing that treacherous cliff again with my damaged leg would be impossible. Harder than scaling Mount Everest.

I found that by balancing on the bar, taking a step with my good left leg and dragging my right, I could move. Every step was excruciating, made more so by the weight of my pack and the rope. Progress was agonizingly slow but eventually I reached the waterfall. The plume cascaded into a dark pool and ran off as
the stream resumed its course. I thought of filling up my half-empty water bottle and then remembered Nick's warning about salty water. I positioned my head to shine the lamp on the stream. A wedge of bare rock ran beside it. I couldn't make out how far it extended but it seemed my only option.

This deep underground, I could expect to find no other entrance to the outside world. Still, the stream had to lead somewhere. I decided to follow it. It was either that or a slow death at the cliff base.

The cave roof grew lower and to follow the stream I had to stoop through a narrowing corridor. After a while the roof dropped to less than four feet. With my injured knee I needed to be upright to walk, so I had to get down on the rock floor and crawl along, using my left leg to propel myself. Soon I shifted the pack and the rope coils onto my chest and shunted along on my back—I couldn't stand the pain that flared up when I tried crawling frontward. Moving my body in this fashion took an age. I checked the time again. Over three hours had passed and I'd made little headway. I flipped back onto my chest. Ahead, my lamp revealed a fork in the tunnel. The stream continued to the left of the fork. The right branch of the tunnel opened up into a larger area with more salt formations.

I was bone tired, so exhausted I lacked the energy even to be afraid. I dragged my bad leg and could barely manage to move my good one. Shivering, I curled up with my back to the rock wall. The lamp battery would be good for six hours and I had only one more replacement. Without a light I'd be done for. I turned it off. An inky blackness swallowed me. As my thoughts began to drift, I wondered idly whether Helmstetter had taken this route. I'd never know.

I put my head down on my pack and sank into a dreamless sleep.

Forty

March 10, 2005

I
awoke to a rushing sound coming from the tunnel I'd just traversed. I fumbled for the lamp and switched it on. A low, gray fog rolled toward me, pushing stream water ahead of it in small waves. In minutes I'd be engulfed. As it approached it started to sound like fine sand flowing through a sifter and carried with it a dank smell tinged with iodine. Alaz's words came back to me.
“In a few days the whole landscape can change if enough water goes through.”
And Nick's nervousness about rain coming. Had there been a downpour above ground after all? Had water rushed into the cave system and absorbed tons of salt, turning the stream into a thick soup?

I shot up, ignoring how much I hurt, half dragging my pack and the rope toward the larger opening. My knee screamed in pain as I squeezed through the gap. I spotted a short rocky outcrop beneath some stalagmites, the only place that rose above the rock floor and offered any hope of safety. The mass of water swamped
the fork in the tunnel. It had enough volume to flow into the larger area, slapping at my feet and lower legs. By craning my head I could see the main channel of the stream. The sluggish water now filled the tunnel. If I hadn't woken, I would have drowned. I kept my light on, not daring to remain in the dark.

I hugged the outcrop, expecting to be washed away any minute. Eventually the viscous water diminished. It must have been a flash flood, the kind that would sweep down desert arroyos and catch hikers off guard, submerging them in its wake.

My throat burned. I took another swig from my bottle. The water tasted as pure and sweet as a mountain spring.

Time for me to move. But where? Logic suggested venturing farther into the wide cavern where I could easily stand upright. And yet somehow my instincts pointed me toward the tunnel and the now quieter stream. I'd followed it before, believing it might lead to safety. There was no reason to change my mind now.

My light flickered. I replaced the battery and lay on my back again, put the pack and the ropes on my chest, and resumed my ungainly, ass-backward crawl along the thin ledge that served as a stream bank, slick with water from the flood. It was so slippery I nearly toppled into the stream.

Why not simply stop here? Accept the verdict fate had handed me. Just stop trying. Every cell in my body screamed for rest; continuing seemed utterly pointless. And yet I kept on. Like some warped perpetual-motion machine, it was as if my brain had shut down but my legs and arms still moved. As I crawled on, the stream level began to rise over the edges of the rock ledge. The ceiling lowered yet again to barely two feet high. I had to take the pack and rope off my stomach, push them ahead of me with my hands, then inch my body along behind them. Soon I was backing through a couple of inches of water. The salt in it stung my hands like crazy.
My hair, spine, rear, and hips were sopping wet. My skin burned but I felt chilled at the same time.

I was about to give up and return to the cavern when I became aware of an unearthly glow. A greenish light dancing across the rock over my head. I turned off the headlamp. The tunnel ceiling glimmered with phosphorescence.

Stretching my arms out, I gave the pack another push. My hands felt a vacuum. A crevice in the rock? It was a hole—I had no idea how deep. I turned my lamp on, bit my lip against the knee pain, and shifted onto my stomach. The cleft in the rock was about three feet wide. It bisected part of the tunnel floor and wall on my right side. When my light shone through the cleft, it revealed another enormous cavern. Water filled the cleft, but I could see that it stopped just inside.

I couldn't tolerate the thought of trying to squeeze through the tunnel anymore. I was exhausted and thirsty beyond measure. Somehow I twisted myself through the crevice and crawled onto the cavern floor. A huge space. Larger than anything I'd seen in the entire cave system. Its roof soared as high as a cathedral. Here were more massive salt formations like huge white statues. The space resembled a giant's warehouse, a storage yard for long-forgotten artworks fashioned by some mad sculptor. I crawled to a relatively dry space, took one more drink of water. I ate an energy bar. Only one left now. My face was hot; I must be developing a fever. I pulled some tissues out of my pack, wiped my face and hair with them, then lay my head down on my pack and slept.