by Ruskin Bond
‘An underground walk,’ Judy pointed out. ‘And probably with bats!’
‘Oh, belfries to you! Come on!’
Whether Judy would have come on had the day remained five is doubtful, but just then a distant roll of thunder was heard from across the valley. Opening her eyes and looking upwards, she saw that some ominous clouds had come up, though they had not yet obscured the sun. She sat up reluctantly. ‘Oh, well, if there’s going to be a storm we might as well be in your old Painted Cave, I suppose. Though I can’t think why it should choose today to rain. It hasn’t rained since we’ve been here!’
Trev merely said, ‘Good girl!’ approvingly, and began collecting the debris of the picnic. ‘We’ll nip down to Marc’s place, and dump the rucksack there and borrow a couple of torches. And then off we go!’
It did not take them long to get down to the shed in the meadow behind Marc’s home where he and his father, the Professor, kept their cave-exploring equipment.
‘Oughtn’t we to ask if we can borrow the torches?’ enquired Judy doubtfully.
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Trev, selecting two helmets and two torches. ‘Besides it looks as if everyone’s having a zizz.’
Below them the village was asleep in the sunshine, and there seemed no one but themselves about as they took the steep path that led up through the meadows to the cave entrance. It gave them quite a start when Le Chevrier—the idiot boy who herded the goats—popped out from behind a boulder as they came up to the cave-entrance and started gibbering at them and flinging his arms about.
‘Now what d’you suppose all that means?’ queried Trev.
‘I expect he doesn’t want us butting into his nice dry cave
where he’s going to shelter if it rains,’ suggested Judy.
‘Yep, that’ll be about it.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t want his company either,’ declared Judy. ‘I think he’s creepy!’
Trev chortled. ‘In more ways than one, I bet! But he’s quite harmless. Marc said so.’
‘Maybe. But I can’t do with caves and creepiness both at once, so I hope he isn’t thinking of coming in with us!’ But apparently he had no such intentions; when he saw they were set on going into the cave, he stopped gabbling at them and threw up his hands in a wild gesture. ‘Oh, nuts to him!’ said Trev and led on into the cave.
The entrance to the cave was on stepping-stones because out of its mouth flowed a small stream; but, once inside, it broadened out and there was room to walk beside the stream on a narrow beach of large water-worn stones. On the map the stream had the grandiloquent name of ‘La Cataracte du Diable’—the Devil’s Cataract—but Judy remarked that it was no more than an imp-sized one.
The light from the entrance lasted them for a good way in, but eventually the cave took a sharp turn and they had to put their torches on.
As Trev had promised, the journey to the Painted Cave was little more than a walk, though occasionally a rather scrambling walk over boulders, and they followed the stream all the way till it went under a narrow, shoulder-high arch. Here there was no beach, so they had to walk in the stream to get through the arch, keeping their heads well down to avoid banging them on its low rock roof. Once through the arch, they could stand upright again; indeed the cavern they were now in seemed very lofty but very narrow, and the stream turned sharply as it came out of the arch and ran away to the left through this rocky defile. In front of them was an almost perpendicular rock-wall, so Judy was turning left to follow the stream when Trev checked her.
‘No, it’s this way,’ he said, pointing to the right. To the right there appeared to Judy to be merely a continuation of the rock-wall, but when Trev shone his torch on it she saw that it sloped steeply backwards and that, though it was perfectly smooth, someone had driven several metal footholds into it so that it could easily be climbed.
‘Here, I’ll go first and give you a hand up,’ said Trev. ‘You have to squeeze through a sort of porthole at the top and then you just drop down into the Painted Cave.’
Judy could not resist saying sarcastically. ‘Of course it’s really just a walk!’ But, in fact, the footholds made it quite easy, and a few minutes later they were standing on the fine sand floor of a smallish cave with fairly smooth rockwalls. In the light of their torches these walls were an astonishing sight for they were alive with painted animals; there were deer and bison, reindeer and cave-bears, wild boars and wild horses, in red and brown and yellow and black, and they seemed to charge out of the walls as the beams of light swept over them.
Judy gasped. ‘Are they frightfully old?’ she asked.
Trev nodded. ‘Ten thousand years, at least, and some of them a lot more than that.’
‘They’re super. How could a lot of old cave-men draw so well?’ wondered Judy. ‘Come on, I want to go right round and see everything.’
‘Okay,’ agreed Trev, much gratified by Judy’s enthusiasm. They were perhaps three-quarters of the way round when they became conscious of a loud roaring noise.
‘I say, is that the thunder?’ exclaimed Judy.
‘I shouldn’t think one would hear that down here,’ objected Trev.
‘Then what is it?’ asked Judy uneasily. And then she pointed to the porthole entrance and exclaimed, ‘It’s coming from just out there!’
‘Give me a hitch up and I’ll see.’
Judy gave him a hitch and he got his head and shoulders through the porthole and looked out. What he saw in the light of his torch appalled him. A black wall of water, so smooth as almost to seem solid, was surging down the stream-bed towards him; it hit the ramp up which they had climbed, swirling it up to within a foot or two of the porthole, and then was sucked back in a whirlpool of foam to go boiling through the low arch—which it completely filled—and so out into the outer cavern. This then was the real ‘Cataracte du Diable’. He watched it horrified for a few moments, during which the black wall of water never slackened, and then dropped back white-faced into the Painted Cave.
But it did not need Trev’s tell-tale face to tell Judy that something terrible had happened. The rushing of the water, magnified by the enclosed space, was now like the roar of an express train. Shouting to make herself heard, she asked in a shaking voice, ‘What is it, Trev?’ He shouted back a brief explanation and then, on her insistence, gave her a leg-up so that she could see for herself.
When she had seen, she asked in a stunned sort of way, ‘What do we do now?’
As if trying to convince himself, Trev yelled, ‘It may stop after a bit.’
‘No!’ cried Judy with conviction. ‘No! Not with that name—it won’t. Oh, Trev, whatever are we going to do?’
‘We can just wait here and see if the water goes down, or…or we can make a search for some other way out while we’re waiting. Marc says there are dozens of ways out of these caves. What d’you say?’
‘I’m for searching then,’ shrilled Judy, though what she longed to say was, ‘Do something! Do anything! We’re trapped. We’re caught. But let’s pretend we can do something to help ourselves. If I stay still a moment longer in this horrible place, I shall go into screaming hysterics!’ With trembling fingers she picked up her torch. ‘Let’s start in the part we haven’t seen yet.’
But the rock walls seemed absolutely solid in that part of the cave, and it was not till they had got halfway round again in a second review that Trev noticed a narrow opening at floor-level.
‘I say, here’s something!’ he exclaimed. ‘I think I’d better explore this.’
Judy was aghast. ‘That little crack! Oh, Trev, you can’t! You’d never get through—if there’s anywhere to get through to!’
For answer Trev simply shouted, ‘I’ll give you a hitch up and you can tell me what the cataract’s doing. If it’s no different, I’m going to try this.’
They both knew from its sullen roar that it wasn’t any different, but Judy obediently inspected it. And now she could not be sure that it had not crept up imperceptibly;
no more than an inch or two, but, if it could do that, might it not… She dropped hastily back and mouthed, ‘You win—try the crack. But I’m coming too!’ As she spoke she felt absolutely sick with dread. She thought, ‘I cannot—no, I cannot go into that tiny black space!’ And then, ‘But I must.’ Trev protested, ‘It’d be much better, Ju, for me to go first and see what it’s like.’
‘No,’ persisted Judy. ‘If you can go, I can go. In fact,’ she added in a forlorn attempt at banter, ‘anywhere you can go, I can go better. I’m not so broad in the shoulders as you.’
‘Probably broader in the beam!’ retorted Trev, not to be outdone in putting a good face on things. ‘By the way, have you any eats on you? Wish I hadn’t dumped the rucksack. There was quite a bit of picnic left in it.’ They checked their pockets, but these only yielded a meagre return; Trev had half a small bar of chocolate and Judy no more than two rather sticky fruit-drops.
‘Better than nothing,’ commented Trev with forced cheerfulness. ‘Now come on and let’s streamline ourselves as much as possible. This is going to be what Marc calls, reptation. Lovely word, isn’t it?’
‘I think it’s beastly. I suppose it means crawling about like a reptile?’
‘That’s about it. Now fix your torch in your helmet. And don’t come in absolutely on top of me or I’ll be putting my toe in your eye!’
The next few minutes were the worst that Judy could remember. The rock crack, or siphon, was just large enough to admit their bodies, and no more. Trev, who did not suffer from any fear of enclosed spaces, wriggled through fairly happily. But for Judy, in spite of her slighter form which went through more easily, every inch of the way was torture—mental torture. When Trev finally helped her out on the other side, she was trembling from head to foot with nervous reaction.
‘That’s a girl!’ Trev commended her, and swung his torch to see what the siphon had brought them to. The slight beam of light hardly seemed to pierce the immensity of gloom in front of them. Trev’s heart sank. Supposing that instead of finding a way out they were merely going deeper underground? Well, they could always turn back; meantime the thing to do was to press on and see.
At least the vast cavern they were in had a smooth floor so they were able to explore it fairly rapidly and they soon found a gallery leading off one corner of it. Trev, full of relief that it was not another siphon, led the way into it confidently, but the going was not good because the floor sloped down to one side and was slippery with water that dripped from the roof above. As they went on, the tilt of the floor increased so that it was hard to keep a footing on it, and then a swing of Trev’s torch showed that an ominous-looking crevasse had opened at its lower edge. Suddenly there was a cry from Judy as her foot slipped and she slid down with her legs hanging over the black depths of the crevasse. Trev flung himself down to prevent himself from slipping too, and so pulled her back to safety; but her torch went down into the abyss and, with a shudder, they heard it strike the rock once and then again far below, and then the ghost of a splash echoed up to them. Very shaken, they traversed the rest of the gallery on hands and knees.
At last this nightmare progress ended on a solid rock platform, and here Trev insisted that they should stop and rest and eat their two fruit-drops. ‘Seeing that I’m in need of glucose!’ he announced. But Judy could not raise a smile or make a comeback to this remark.
From the platform several caverns, which presented no particularly difficult features, led on from one to another and their spirits began to recover. Then in the last of these they could find no outlet at all except a small hole, high in one corner, which could only be reached by what looked like a smooth rock-fall. When Trev touched it, however, he found it to be a horribly glutinous kind of mud. Somehow they clawed and kicked their way up this mud-bank to the hole, and found that it led into another rock gallery, solid this time but too low to stand upright, and with a floor of jagged, upended rocks over which they must drag themselves painfully crouching.
So they went on for what seemed like hours, stumbling, creeping, crawling, often falling, through a bewilderment of galleries and caverns, some beautiful with stalactites, some full of flittering bats disturbed by the torchlight, and some in which the black silence was broken by the monotonous drip of unseen water; and nearly all of them were difficult, if not perilous, in some new and unforeseen way. Trev led on doggedly—because he must. He knew that his optimistic words about turning back were no longer true; they had long since passed the point of no return. And Judy followed where he led, struggling gamely on after him.
At last they stumbled out into what seemed to be just another vast cavern. The rock-floor was very broken, but at least they could ease the aching muscles of their backs by walking upright. They had not penetrated far into it, however, when Judy gave a deep sigh of exhaustion and flopped down on the ground, half-sitting and half-lying against an upstanding rock.
‘I c-can’t go any further for a b-bit, Trev,’ she groaned, her teeth chattering from the deadly chill of these subterranean depths.
‘Let’s have a rest, then,’ agreed Trev, keeping his teeth from chattering too by a great effort. He sat down beside her and asked. ‘What about a bit of chocolate?’
‘No, I don’t want any,’ said Judy indifferently.
‘But you have some if you like.’
‘Nope. I’ll wait and have it with you later.’
‘What time is it?’
Trev turned the torch on his watch, but it was smashed. ‘Oh, heck! I must have bust it in one of those falls. What about yours?’
‘F-forgot to put it on this—this morning…’ Judy began.
And suddenly the thought of the sunlight through the little casement window of her bedroom at La Terrasse, and the smell of the pines blowing in through it as she had lain in bed that morning—was it only that morning, or days, or years ago?—was too much for her. She turned her head away from the tell-tale glimmer of the torch while the tears slid silently down her face.
Luckily, Trev didn’t notice anything. He was saying, ‘It must be night-time by now.’ And then, ‘I think, while we’re resting I ought to put out the torch, Ju. Just while we’re resting, you know. D’you mind?’
‘No,’ said Judy in a muffled voice. And then, ‘But hold my hand, Trev, so that I know you’re there.’
Trev didn’t answer but seized her muddy, ice-cold hand in one equally chill and muddy, and held it hard. Then he switched off the torch and they were alone with the vast darkness.
So they sat for some time in silence. Judy had her eyes closed, but she could feel the blackness pressing on her eyeballs, and all the time her body shook with cold and her teeth chattered like typewriter keys. From somewhere a chill current of air blew upon her face and dried the tears in stiff salt runlets upon her cheeks. But there was something else about this little wind, something familiar—something… Hovering, in her exhaustion, on the borders of consciousness, she spoke without knowing what she said, ‘I smell pine trees.’
Trev sat bolt upright in dismay. What could this mean? Was Judy’s mind wandering? ‘What did you say, Ju?’ he asked her anxiously.
Judy opened her eyes dreamily and lay staring upwards through the darkness that suddenly no longer seemed to weigh on her. ‘I smell pine trees,’ she repeated. And up there—up—up, I see the sky—and a star!’
Now convinced that she was delirious, yet compelled by the strange conviction in her voice, Trev looked upwards too, straining his eyes through the darkness. And then he saw it too—a tiny prick of light far, far above them in a darkness that was by the merest fraction less solid than the surrounding blackness. And, at that, the truth flashed upon him.
‘You’re right, Ju!’ he croaked. ‘It is a star! That is the sky! We are—we must be at the bottom of that pit Marc calls “Le Grand Trou”—the Big Hole!’
‘Oh, Trev, then we aren’t underground any more!’ whispered Judy.
‘Well no. Not exactly. We’re way down, but we aren’
t underneath.’
‘I’m so glad! Oh, I’m so glad!’ Judy’s voice was the mere ghost of a whisper now. ‘I don’t mind anything with the sky up there. I don’t mind—dying…’ Her voice trailed away and Trev felt the cold little hand in his relax.
‘Ju!’ he cried desperately. ‘Ju!’ He fumbled for the torch and switched it on with trembling fingers and as it came on its rays fell full on the smooth face of the rock-wall beside him. In his distracted state he saw, but did not take in, what it revealed—a picture of a cart, strangely drawn with no perspective so that its wheels were spread flat, and the oxen that drew it lay flat on either side of their shaft, and little flat men ran alongside it. He swivelled the torch to light Judy’s face and saw it ashen and with closed eyes. At first he had an awful fear that she was dead. ‘Ju!’ he called wildly. ‘Ju!’ She did not stir or answer; and when, with a sick feeling of dread, he shifted his fingers from her hand to her wrist, searching for her pulse, he could not at first find it. Then suddenly he found the place and, with a surge of relief, he felt it beating feebly but steadily under his fingers.
And yet what was the use? Here they were at the bottom of the ‘Grand Trou’; a thousand-feet deep Marc had said it was, and unclimbable, except with steel ladders and all sorts of complicated apparatus. And no one knew they were here. How did the open sky and that tantalizing star above them help? They might just as well be under a thousand feet of solid rock. They would die anyway, of exhaustion and cold or thirst and starvation; it did not really make much odds which.
If that were so, wasn’t it better that Ju was already unconscious and going the easy way. Trev dropped his head on her breast, and now his teeth chattered unrestrainedly and sobs shook him; not only for Ju, dear as she was to him, but for himself too. To be alone in the darkness; to die alone there…
But he only let go for a minute or so. Then he sat up and wiped away the tears determinedly. While there was life, there was hope. That was the truest thing anybody ever said, and he’d got to concentrate on it. He’d not got to give; he’d got to do everything he could to keep life in them for as long as possible in the hope that—in the hope that—well, better not dwell on exactly what hope; that wasn’t his end of the business.
