by John Dunning
Max untied the rope and turned eagerly to the trail. It widened gradually from here; I felt better just looking at it. We walked together to the cave and I saw familiar objects just inside the mouth: a coil of rope, a backpack, a shovel. These things were in the pictures; they had been here undisturbed since the pictures were taken. Max knelt over the backpack and examined it with his fingers.
“It’s falling apart; it’s been here a long time.”
“Any telling how long?”
“Years.” He loosened the buckles. “I can’t say for sure, but they weren’t left here yesterday.” He opened the backpack and took out a faded blanket and a canteen bearing the initials KB.
“Kenneth Barcotti.”
Max looked at me. “Do you know him?”
“He was Robert Holland’s best friend. Remember I told you about Robert; well, Kenneth Barcotti disappeared sometime in the mid-fifties. He was exploring…somewhere…in Colorado.”
Max met my eyes and nodded. He turned on his headlamp and looked deeper into the cave. We were in that cove of rocks that protected the cave from sunlight and made the pictures so underexposed. The mouth opened between the rocks, and easily visible in the flattest part of the rock was the Maltese cross.
“There it is, Willy.” I felt very close to him then and I wanted him to share what I was feeling, though I knew he never could. He was going through a range of emotions that had nothing to do with Robert Holland or Kenneth Barcotti. “I wonder,” he said at last, “if those old tales Harry tells are maybe true after all. Did you ever get him to tell you about Caverna del Oro?”
“Yes, he told me.”
He arched his head toward the cross. “Let’s look a little closer.”
The rock around the cross was damp; it had worn away in years of erosion. A slight hollow appeared in the face of the rock where the water flow was heaviest; it washed directly across the lower arm of the cross and had all but obliterated it
“I think we’ll find your Mr. Barcotti,” Max said, “in there.”
I felt a chill as he moved into the cave. Inside we found more supplies; another canvas bag, tools, and a box of canned goods. Emptied cans and their tops were scattered around, and in the center of the cave Max found the ashes of an old fire. We moved around the fire, and now the light from my headlamp joined his.
“Jesus,” I said, “this could go on forever.”
“Yes, it really could,” Max said; “some caves run for ten, twenty miles. Some of the really big ones go three or four times that. This probably joins the other cave somewhere along the line. It sure would be easy to get discouraged if you stop and think about it.”
He went deeper and I followed a few steps behind. The passageway turned and dropped sharply. “Careful,” he called. He sat and wormed his way forward. About fifty yards in we came to a vast hole which consumed the entire width of the cave in a sheer drop. Max could not keep the excitement out of his voice.
“Everything fits,” he said, as if to himself; “it’s all here.”
He slid on his belly to the edge of the hole. He dropped a stone; several seconds later we heard the clatter far below. He dropped another, timing the fall with the second hand of his watch.
“Six seconds—Christ, that’s deep; five hundred feet, maybe more.”
“Look at this.” I had crawled up close to him and was examining the remains of an old rope. It had been fastened to a sturdy rock column and dangled over the edge. Max felt it and found it limp. He pulled it up, counting off about two hundred feet to the end.
“There’s your answer,” he said; “that’s what happened to your Mr. Barcotti.”
“You think so?”
“I’ll bet on it. We’ll find his body at the bottom.”
There was a long pause while we reflected soberly on the dangerous journey to the bottom. “I’ll have to go back along the ledge and get the equipment,” Max said at last. “That might take a couple of hours.”
“What about me?”
“Just sit tight and wait.”
“Can’t I help?”
“I doubt it; no, you’d just be in the way.”
“At least I can carry the stuff from where the trail breaks off.”
“Yes, you can do that. Let’s get started, eh?”
The sun was high when we finished. Max rigged a pulley of sorts over the crumbled section of the trail; from there he attached the packs and I pulled them over and carried them to the cave. With the work behind us, we sat at the mouth of the cave thinking about the work ahead. Max suggested that we eat something. “We probably won’t have much time for lunch once we’re in there; it’s almost noon anyway.”
He cut the top off a can of peaches and that was his lunch. I ate a sweet roll and a candy bar. Afterward Max turned his attention to the two largest of the four bundles of equipment; I had thought little of them to this point, but I watched in fascination as Max unrolled a long ladder made of lightweight wire. He attached it to the same rock that held the rope and unrolled it into the pit.
We shook hands.
Then he fastened a safety rope around his body, knelt, sat, dropped his legs over the edge, and disappeared into the black hole.
He was gone more than an hour. Ten minutes after he started down he called to me; he had found a horizontal cave branching off from the shaft and he couldn’t yet see the bottom. I guessed by his light that he was two hundred feet down. He stepped off the ladder into the cave; it went slack suddenly. He cast away his safety rope and was gone so long that I began to worry. I was about to call to him when I saw his light below. I had squirmed to the edge of the hole and was peering down as far as my headlamp would let me see. His lamp met mine and I took up his safety line as he came. He was breathing hard by the time he reached the top; he unhooked himself and we moved back away from the hole.
“What’s down there?”
“There’s a cave maybe a hundred fifty feet down. It’s more of a tunnel, I guess; it goes straight in from the pit, like it was bored there a long time ago. It joins another one; hell, there might be a honeycomb of tunnels and caves down there. I found a set of steps…”
“Steps?”
He laughed wearily: “I knew you’d say that. I swear to God, there’s a set of old steps cut into the stone. They go down to a lower level. I didn’t get to explore down there much; I figured you’d be impatient as hell up here.”
“You got that right. I’m about to jump out of my goddamn skin. Now what?”
“I think we can go all the way to the bottom from that middle level.”
“Well, let’s go.”
“I should tell you now, Jim, it’s a pretty hairy climb.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve already been through some hairy climbs.”
“Not like this. The mouth of the tunnel is set in about four feet from the shaft. It’s very old and apt to crack. You’ve got to step off that four feet from the ladder to the mouth of the tunnel; there’s no getting around that. I’ll go first and help you get close. But don’t go getting vertigo on me down there, friend.”
My mouth was dry at the prospect, but there was no stopping me now. I nodded and Max said, “Listen, you lower the stuff to me first, then I’ll help you all I can.”
“Do we really need to take all this stuff?”
“We can leave the food bag if you want to, but we’d better have most of the rope and the other ladder.” He sat at the edge of the hole. “Watch me go down, watch how I play out the safety rope, and you do it just the same way. Just remember, you can’t fall as long as you’ve got that safety rope around you.”
Max eased over the edge and started down. “See what I’m doing? One leg behind, the other in front; you hug this ladder like it was a woman on a cold night, and keep your safety rope tight as you go.” His face drifted out of sight, and then all I could see was the light from his headlamp. Then he had reached the level of the tunnel; he stepped off the ladder and cast away the safety rope. I pulled up the rope and us
ed it to lower the equipment. “Be careful not to fray the rope against the rocks,” Max called. When the pack reached the tunnel Max shouted, and I held it there until he hooked it and took it in. We did it again and again, and the last pack took the longest of all. That was a small bag containing the gasoline lamp, and I was careful to avoid breaking it. When at last Max had it and the rope went slack, I looked over the edge and waited for him to call me down.
“Listen, I’ll let the ladder out a bit; try to give you some room for your feet. Now keep your rope tight and you can’t fall, remember that. Watch where you’re putting your feet.”
I gripped the cable with both hands and swung my feet over the edge. I fought down the pinpoint flashes of panic that raced through me in that instant before my feet found the first step, and I started down without any hesitation. I was down about thirty feet when I stopped the first time to look around me. It was a rock cylinder, perfectly round, like the chamber in the entrance cave, and slick with water. My headlamp played off the walls; they were green and slimy. Water seeped out of small cracks in the rock, coating the walls with a moving green slime.
“What’s wrong?”
I saw his headlamp far below, as far as ever, it seemed.
“Nothing; I just stopped for a minute to get my bearings.”
“You don’t need your goddamn bearings. There’s no place to come but down.”
I started down again. As I went deeper I felt that the walls were closing in on me and the water flow was heavier. I stopped for another look and found that it was true; the shaft had narrowed to about half its width and the walls were fairly dripping with greenish-brown liquid. My light revealed a large crack in the wall where muddy water poured out and blended with the dirty slime around it. Max called to me again; I could not make out the words, but his tone was clearly short. It started me moving downward. Soon I saw the light from his headlamp just under my feet; then the rock wall fell away into the huge hollow that Max had described. The tunnel opened from the center of the hollow, and Max stood in the mouth, reaching out to me. He had fastened a safety rope inside the tunnel, and that held him fast in the shattered mouth. Now I saw what he meant: the whole face of the tunnel was a mass of fractured rock, and the hollow made the step a long one.
I reached out to him and our hands touched; but just the fingertips. I lunged for his hand and the ladder turned; my grip slipped and one of my feet slipped off the rung. I wrapped my body around the cable, clutching the safety rope tightly under my arms.
“Easy, don’t twist like that,” Max said. “Get yourself together again and just hold still.”
My struggling foot found the rung as Max reached out from the tunnel. Again our fingertips touched; he stretched and had my hand. I could hear the wire scrape against the rock above as he pulled me inward. My right foot swung in an arc and touched the floor of the tunnel, but a piece of it broke away. I jumped back, as though the rock would suck me with it to the bottom of the shaft. Our hands slipped apart and the ladder swung out into the shaft. Max pulled back and dropped to his knees with a sigh.
“You know you’re going to have to come off that ladder,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“You’ve got to, unless you can goddamn fly in here. It’s either that or back up.”
“No…let’s try it again.”
“All right.” He stood and stretched out to the end of his safety line. “Now listen, get another grip on my hand and just hold still, okay? I can pull you almost to the edge. It’s just a baby step after that. And remember, you’ve still got your safety line, so you can’t fall, okay?”
His face was warm and encouraging in the glow of my headlamp. We stretched toward each other and our hands met. Max clasped me tightly around the wrist and pulled me close. “Now,” he said, and I jumped out, flinging the ladder away with such force that it clattered against the opposite wall of the shaft. My foot hit solid rock and I slipped forward to my knees. I rolled over and lay on my back, breathing hard, while Max knelt beside me. I was still spread-eagled when Max got up and walked away in the gloom. “Those steps I was telling you about go down from here,” he said.
I joined him at the end of the passage. It opened into a large circular room, not unlike the others we had been through, and five or six tunnels branched away from the room in various directions. The steps dropped from the third tunnel on the left as we came into the room, a long winding column into darkness.
“Slave labor built those,” Max said; “I don’t think there’s any question about it.”
“Indians?”
“Sure.”
“Have you been to the bottom yet?”
“To the bottom of these steps, yes.”
The steps were long and gradual; they went in a full spiral and ended on another level perhaps a hundred fifty feet below. It was almost a copy of the upper chamber, with six twisting caves branching away from a central room. At the edge of the room the wall had been broken away, making another entry to the shaft. Max went close to the break and looked down. “At least I can see a bottom from here,” he said.
I joined him at the ledge. “The rock seems to be stronger here.”
“Wetter too. Watch you don’t slip.”
He gripped my arm and I looked out into the shaft. Grimy water dripped down my neck. Far below I saw a blurred whiteness, just outside the effective range of my light. In some distant corner of the cave I heard the sound of falling water.
“What’s that white stuff?”
“Sand, surely.”
“Then we’re almost there.”
“Depends on what you mean by almost. It might be a hundred fifty feet or another four hundred. I’d guess something between.”
“Can we make it?”
“We can try it. There’s another cable ladder in the big bundle. Let’s look through some of these caves first; if we can find more steps, maybe we won’t have to use the cable.”
We decided to make separate excursions into the tunnels, to save time. Max warned me about straying, or going too far, but the first tunnel came to a dead end at a small room just thirty feet in. The walls of the room were dry, and I guessed that they had been cut into the tunnel. It looked like an old storeroom; a few ancient tools and the remains of old wood boxes were stacked in a corner. I touched one of the boxes with my boot and it collapsed. There was nothing more to see here, so I went out to the large room and paused for a moment at the second tunnel. I heard a noise, undoubtedly Max returning, so I waited there for him. The noise stopped, and still Max did not come. I listened for a long time and heard it again, a click-click-click from the mouth of the shaft. It came louder as I moved closer. At the opening I lay flat and inched my way to the edge. All I could see from there was that blurred whiteness. I turned off my lamp and lay in absolute darkness; for a long time I did not move, and the only sounds were the drippings of the slimy water around me. Then it came again, sharp metallic clicks from below. For half a second I thought I saw the reflection of a flashlight somewhere, but I blinked my eyes and it was gone. The noise stopped too and it did not come back. I fought down an impulse to call to Max, for surely it was Max moving around on the bottom; but I kept silent and pushed my body back from the edge. I turned on my headlamp and shrugged it off; decidedly, I was wasting time, and I moved ahead for a look at the second tunnel. This too dead-ended after a few feet. The third tunnel was deeper; it turned only once, then went straight back into the rock for about fifty yards, where I found a crude dungeon cut into the rock in an L shape. The bars were thick logs, rotted almost to mush now. They sealed off the entire room and were broken only by a heavy wooden door. The door too was mushy, but it was reinforced by steel bars and plates. It was held in place by heavy steel hinges; a steel pin held it shut. I tried to pull the pin, but rust had fused the metal around it. So I looked into the prison by peering with my headlamp between the bars.
Almost immediately I saw two corpses chained to the walls. My light caught the fi
rst one suddenly; a white skeletal face, less than two feet away, grinning hideously at me from the darkness. I jumped back, slipped, and fell, then realized that these bones had been here for a very long time. I looked again. Both were heavily shackled, with leggings and hand irons. The one nearest me had been chained by the neck as well; the iron collar held his face upright and forced him to look straight out at me through the bars. His arm had fallen off; it lay on the floor beside him, the iron still clamped tightly around the wrist. So this was what the Spanish did to Indians who didn’t behave. I moved my light and saw other bones deeper in the L of the dungeon. There were at least five, maybe more. One still wore armor; Spanish armor. Then these bodies were not Indians, but Spaniards. The Indians revolted and killed the masters; it all fit Harry Gould’s version of the Caverna del Oro legend. Behind me, sunk into the wall, I found an old torch; the wall above it was charred black. That made it easy to figure: this was a Spanish torture chamber; when the Indians rebelled they turned the torture against the torturers and left them chained here for all eternity. I tried to imagine the scene as the torch burned down and left the men hopelessly imprisoned in total darkness. I shivered. And I got out.
Max was waiting for me at the edge of the shaft. He had brought down two of the large bundles from the upper chamber and was unrolling the other cable ladder. “I take it you didn’t find any more steps,” I said.
“There was another staircase, yes, but it’s buried under rubble. It looks like part of the roof fell in. How about you?”
“There’s an old dungeon at the end of this tunnel; four or five people were chained there and left to die. Spaniards, I think.”
He looked up and my light fell full on his face. I saw that he was very excited and the high pitch of his voice confirmed it. “No doubt about it, about the Spanish activity, is there?” He came close to me and took a huge nugget from his pocket “Look at this.”
“Gold?”
