The Last Notebook of Leonardo (9 page)

We crawled outside. Noma had made hot pancakes for us, and I sat on her front steps and ate them with maple syrup. They were delicious, but Dad couldn't digest them, so he ate three cabbages.

After breakfast, we walked to the barn. Noma thought that some of the old farm equipment might be useful for climbing a cliff. I didn't see how anything in a goat barn would help us. But it turned out
that the barn had been used as a garbage dump and a storage shed, and was piled up to the ceiling in places. It was a good thing we hadn't tried to sleep in it the night before, because we would have walked into about six rusty circular saw blades, and a roll of wire fencing, and a broken tractor engine, and an old fashion car that had been taken apart so it could fit in through the front door, and shovels and picks and saws and screwdrivers and wooden boxes of roofing nails, and lots of old furniture, and a stack of newspapers from about fifty years ago, and the dried up skeleton of a ground squirrel that had crawled in there in the distant past, and I don't know what else was buried in that pile.

“Oh dear,” Noma said standing in the doorway, the sun shafting in behind her and lighting up the jumble on the concrete floor, “I had forgotten how full it was.”

Dad rummaged around, climbing over the teetering piles of junk into a back room, and after some banging and crashing sounds, he came back out with a big wooden spool of rope. When the rope from the barn was tied onto the rope from our wagon, we had about four hundred feet of it, and that seemed like enough.

We walked along a path through the snowy woods until we reached the cliff. The bottom part of the
cliff rose up jumbled and broken out of the forest. The slant was shallow enough that we could climb up quite a long distance. Noma seemed to have an easy trail worked out; she stepped from one rock to the next without a lot of strain. Then the serious part of the cliff rose up out of the rubble, and that's where we had to stop.

Probably that cliff had been straight up and down once, a thousand years ago, but a giant wedge of the front surface had fallen off. That must have been where all the rubble came from. The cliff face was slanted the wrong way. It didn't slant back away from us; it slanted out over our heads. If you climbed it, you would be hanging out over empty space most of the time. Maybe if you had sticky pads on your feet and hands you could climb it, but even then I wouldn't have wanted to try, because the rock all along the cliff looked brittle and full of shards that might break off as you grabbed them.

“There it is,” Noma said cheerfully, pointing up. “There's the cave.” About three hundred feet up the cliff the sunlight poured into a gaping hole. From underneath we could see a bit of the roof of the cave, but that was all. It looked like a good-sized opening.

“Right,” Dad said, looking up and around and inspecting the cliff closely. I couldn't see how he would succeed, but he didn't look discouraged. He
scratched at his head and then limbered up his fingers and toes, and then wound the rope around his waist so that he could lower it down to us once he got to the cave. I mean,
if
he got to the cave. For the first time, I began to worry about him.

“Right,” he said again. “ This should be easy. Should take a minute. Three minutes, tops. I tell you. Look at it. I can go from here to that spot with the crack there, and then to that other spot with the twisty plant growing out of it, and then to. . . . Well, I'll figure it out once I get to that spot. Here goes.”

He crouched on all fours and then, as if he had springs coiled up in his arms and legs, Boing, he leaped into the air about fifteen feet. I had never seen him do that before. It was incredible. He was so heavy that I didn't think he could leap very high. But he didn't look heavy now. He looked as light and agile as a spider. He turned over in mid air and landed splayed out against the rock face, clutching on by his hands and feet. Then he paused for a moment, looking around for the next hold.

“Dad!” I said. “That 's amazing! How did—”

“Jem,” he said, “don't talk. I need to think.”

I closed my mouth. Noma and I sat on some comfortable smooth rocks that were lying nearby. I think maybe Noma had put them there a long time ago as seats. It was a nice place to sit in the morning, the
sunlight on our faces, the rocks and the snow sparkling around us, but I couldn't enjoy it while Dad was clinging above us and might fall any second.

He seemed frozen to the spot, only his head moving, swiveling around like a giant bug searching for prey. Then one hand let go and moved two inches to a new spot. That was all. Then he was still again for about five minutes. I thought he had given up and was about to jump back down. I thought he had finally realized how impossible the cliff was. But suddenly his arms and legs went into motion, and he zipped up the cliff about another ten feet. He seemed to know exactly where to put his hands and feet. I suppose he had worked out the whole sequence in his head. Then he stopped again for another three or four minutes.

I could see that having four hands was useful, but I could also see that he was climbing mostly with his brain. After every little bit that he climbed, he would pause and think very carefully for minutes. Sometimes, after a pause he would climb back down to a previous point, and try again in a different direction. Sometimes it seemed like he was climbing sideways more that up. A few times, after five or ten minutes all he did was move one hand. At other times he might go fifteen or twenty feet all in one spurt. It was horrible and shivery to watch, but fascinating
too. I never once saw him lose a hold on anything. He seemed to choose carefully, and nothing broke under his hands. Every now and then I saw him hang on with three limbs and pick the loose bits of rock off the cliff with his free hand, just to make sure that they didn't get in his way. The rock pieces fell down and smashed on the ground.

After about an hour he came near to the cave mouth, but it was no good; he couldn't reach it from that angle. Even I could see from below that the cave had a lip that stuck out. He couldn't get over it on one side of the cave and would have to try the other side. So down he came, about one hundred feet, backing off of the cave entrance to try another approach. That one didn't work either. But the third time he did better. I could see he was about six feet below the cave near the easiest corner. But the last bit shelved out from the cliff so steeply, and so smoothly, I didn't see how he could climb over it. He stayed in that one place just below the cave, perfectly still, looking tiny and black against the gray stone, hundreds of feet up. That was his longest pause. He stayed there for about fifteen minutes. Then suddenly those springs in his arms and legs let off again, and he boinged off of the cliff face, jumping out and up, and I screamed. I couldn't help it. I said, “Ack!” because if he missed his hold, he would fall a long
way onto a hard ground and smash like a tomato. But he got his fingers over the cave ledge, and in another half a second had pulled himself up and disappeared in the cave.

“He did it!” I sang out. “Look at that! He got up there!”

Noma was smiling so hard she couldn't talk. Her eyes had disappeared in the wrinkles on her face.

Then, way up the cliff, my dad's head stuck out from the cave entrance and looked down at us.

“Ahoy!” he said, his voice faint from the distance. “Hello! What a view! Wow! Jem, you look like a bug! And Noma, your house looks as small as a sugar frosted mouse house! Hey! Watch out! Stand by! Get ready! Rope coming down!”

Slowly, the dark snake of the rope dangled down and down, until the end came down right in front of our faces and touched the ground at our feet.

“Noma first!” Dad shouted down. “Jem, you make sure she gets tied on securely.”

Noma knew all about ropes and knots, and she made a kind of rope swing that she could sit in while holding tight. She also tied a safety loop around her waist, in case she lost her grip on the way up. “Oh my!” she said, when she started to rise up into the air, and then she was too far up for me to hear her brittle voice. Because the cliff was slanted out over
our heads, she rose straight without bumping into anything. She had a cloth bag in her hands full of supplies that she had brought along, and it dangled beneath her and swayed. Dad pulled very fast, and I saw her disappear over the lip of the cave.

Then the rope came back down again. “Your turn, Jem,” Dad called down. “Be careful!”

I sat in Noma's swing, held tight to the rope, and felt my feet lift off from the ground. I tried not to look down. I spun around on the rope as I was jerked upward, and a bird flew past me and glared at me out of its little shiny black eye as if it was outraged at the sight of a person flying. Before I had time to relax or get used to the motion, I was up, and Dad had lifted me over the lip of the cave and into the entrance.

“I told you it'd be easy,” Dad said.

The view really was amazing. I could see out over the woods and hills for miles. The morning sun poured down onto everything, and I saw a stream far away shining from reflected sunlight as if it was a light bulb filament. I could see Noma's house practically under us. If I had thrown a stone, I might have gotten it down her chimney. The gravel road snaked away from her house and disappeared here and there under the snowy trees, until it reached a paved road, and the paved road stretched on down the hillside like some black paint that had run down the slope.
Much farther away I saw a collection of roofs sticking up like mushrooms. It must have been Ipskunk, New York. Even farther away I saw a lake that was a dull white, and I wondered if it was frozen over. I saw a car driving around the lake, and the car was only as big as a flea.

The mouth of the cave was about forty feet wide, and had a flat place in the front like a landing pad that was cluttered with sticks and dried up leaves. Birds must have brought them up there. Noma's whole house could have fit nicely into that front entrance. Farther back, the cave narrowed and turned into shadows and darkness.

Noma was standing with her hand on the cave wall to steady herself, peering over the edge at the humongous landscape. The wind blew around a few strands of gray hair that had come loose from her ponytail. The look on her face was eager and focused and alive. She took five or six deep breaths and then turned to us and said, “Now I've done everything, and I've seen everything. Carl Martin, you have made me happy.”

Dad grinned at her, his orangutan mouth wide open and all his giant pegs of teeth showing.

“Let's explore,” Dad said. “I can see there's enough room here to land an ornithopter. But he wouldn't have left it exposed. I'm sure it's in a back chamber of the cave somewhere. Jem, we should have brought candles. How silly of us!”

“Very silly,” Noma said, smiling. “Luckily you brought someone less silly.” She reached into her cloth bag of supplies, brought out three flashlights, and handed them around.

“Fantastic!” Dad said. “ Thank you! You're brilliant! This is it. Jem, I can hardly breathe. Might be the altitude, but I think it's the excitement. I swear I thought it'd take us years, and here we've found the place already. Wow.”

“Don't be too sure, Dad,” I said. I didn't want him to get his hopes up too high. Now that we were in the cave, and I saw the rubble and sticks and dirt
and leaves here and there, and the snow piled on the floor where the wind had left it, and no sign that anyone had ever been here before, I thought that Noma was probably right. It was just a regular cave. I looked around the walls, but I didn't see anything like initials, or any carving or cave painting. I wasn't very hopeful. But Dad was bounding up and down in excitement, his eyes wide open and his hair flying around.

“Come on!” he said. “Quick! Into the cave! Don't fall down any holes! Don't trip! Be careful! Hurry! Stay together! Don't get lost!” Shouting whatever came into his head, he bounded toward the shadows at the back of the cave.

The front entrance narrowed to a kind of passage that led into the cliff, slanting very slightly upward. I had never been in a cave before, and I was excited to explore it. But we had hardly gone anywhere, only about fifty feet, when the passageway ended. There was no more cave. No other caverns. The wall was solid, carved into funny twisty shapes by water. It glittered in the beams of our flashlights. There was no sign of a cave-in that might have blocked off an inner chamber. No, the cave simply ran out. We had found the end of it.

My dad stood dumbfounded. He had stopped bouncing and was perfectly still, looking at the back
wall, his eyes stretched wide open and all the excitement gone from his face. I felt sorry for him. There wasn't any ornithopter. If anyone had ever been in this cave, there was no trace left. I shined the beam of my flashlight around the stone face, from side to side and top to bottom, looking for any carving. I thought that da Vinci, being an artist, might have carved a face or a foot or something. But no, there was nothing. Only a few small holes in the wall. I walked around peering into those holes, shining my flashlight into them, but they were nothing more than shallow pits. The largest one was about the size of an oven. It was a hollow spot where a big rock must have fallen out of the wall. There was still a fragment of rock lying inside it about the size of a bread loaf.