by D J Mcintosh
“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
Nick 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 dropp
ed 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
The 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.
