It was night by the time I got back to the ranch. I excused myself with some impudent lie. But I didn't say a word about the cave, not even to Jim, my best friend, who slept alongside me; he tugged at my hammock to find out where I had really been all day, and I left him green with envy in the belief that somewhere in that almost uninhabited plain (for months on end you met only men, horses and cattle) I had found an easy-going girl. Jim gave me a dig in the ribs, the sign of a hearty delight in my good fortune and an equally hearty jealousy at the same time. But, as I said, I didn't give away my cave.
Our work on the ranch was strenuous, there were only a few of us, and one of those was ill; I had to wait another two weeks for my next day off.
Naturally, I rode off at first light (in a wide arc so that no one should see where I was going) to my cavern, equipped with a lantern in order to be able to penetrate the darkness, ready for anything except the possibility that I might not be able to find my cave. It was already midday by the time I was tramping uphill and downhill, perhaps quite close to the mouth of my cave, perhaps a mile away from it, for the same hills and hollows, the same thistles, cactuses, agaves appeared everywhere and in between them the damned poison oak shrubs. Exhausted and discouraged, without having found the cave, I rode back, more convinced than ever that this cave contained a fabulous treasure, gold perhaps, seized and then lost by Spaniards; hadn't those adventurers Vasquez Coronado and Cabeza de Vaca passed by here? The least I could expect were objects of historic value, but perhaps also Indian jewels, the whole treasure of an extinct tribe. Even when I thought about it rationally all sorts of things seemed possible. Naturally my friend grinned over my extreme weariness when I sank down in my hammock in the evening, and also over my silence. What's her name then? he asked, and I said: Hazel, and turned over on the other side.
Weeks passed like this.
My cavern in the rocks began to turn into a ghost that was impossible to find in reality, although I rode over into the region several more times, each time equipped with a lantern and a lasso, one pocket full of carbide, the other full of provisions, and I had really ceased to believe in my discovery when one evening, dusk was already falling and it was high time to ride back, I saw a cloud of bats. It was as though they were rising up out of the ground. Millions of bats. They were coming from my cave!...It proves not too difficult to climb down into the first cave with the lantern and the lasso, which you can loop round the jagged rocks the way mountaineers do. It is huge. As I was just able to see in the last light of evening, it is as big as the interior of Notre Dame. Apart from bats on the walls, which my lantern lit up only faintly, and apart from pot shards, there was nothing to be found. Probably this upper cave had really once been a shelter for the Indians. Bit by bit, as I walked on in this subterranean cathedral, I lost almost all my fears; true there were cracks here and there in the walls and my lantern lit up small chapels, but of course there was no sign of dragons with glowing eyes and sulphurous breath. I was beginning to feel very pleased with myself for having discovered such a considerable cave, and also a little disappointed at having got to the bottom of the mystery, when suddenly the light from my lantern—I shall never forget the moment!—was swallowed up by the floor. Breathless with fright at the abyss yawning at my feet, I didn't dare move. Quite simply: there was no longer any floor for my light to fall on. I looked up towards the mouth of the cave, towards the daylight, but meanwhile night had fallen over the earth too; I saw a few stars, a few sparks gleaming dully in the infinite distance, all around the close blackness of the rock, and remembering the bouncing stone whose echo had died away in ever increasing depths, I didn't dare even to walk back the way I had come; every step, it seemed to me, meant a fall to death. Finally, I knelt down, tied the lantern to my lasso in order to lower its dim light and sound the threatening darkness; it dangled in emptiness. In time, however (I was kneeling at the edge of the hole, as I said, hearing only my heart beating), I could make out a cavern, an equally large space not reminiscent of Notre Dame but of dreams, a world that was suddenly so different, not rocks with bats on them, but a fairy-tale cave with hundreds and hundreds of columns of glistening stalagmite. That was my first discovery. For someone who could climb it would not be impossible to clamber down into this fairy tale. But how would I get back up again? But I knew one thing: if I turned back now I should rue and regret it all my life. My anxiety turned into recklessness. With great caution and extreme effort (but without thinking of the way back) and after constantly grazing myself, I finally arrived, after a daring leap, in those miraculous depths where even the stars were no longer visible. Everything depended on the light from my lantern. Excited as I was, I nevertheless acted with a rationality that surprised me; I immediately marked the cliff up which I had to climb back with the soot from my lantern and wrote a large 'one' with this soot, as though I had been taught to do it. Only then did I look around. Enticed by a maze whichever way I shone my light, I tramped along behind my lantern, half blissful as though I had reached the goal of all my desires, and half horrified, as though I were already lost, condemned as the price for my amazement, never to return to earth, never again to see the sun, the stars of which I had just caught a glimpse or even the pale moon, never again to ride over the heath, to smell its plants, never again to see a human being, never again to be heard.
I shouted, Hallo, and then, How are you? There wasn't even a proper echo here. Every ten steps, I made a mark with the soot. Up on the surface, I thought, it must be getting on for morning. Once I checked to see whether I could find the rock that was the start of the climb back (mark number one), whether I could rely on my trail marks. I could rely on them. But I was sweating by the time I found mark number one, and yet it was really very cool, of course. Shivering and by that very fact forced into further activity, but relieved, as though I possessed Ariadne's thread, I explored in the other direction, climbed further down, reckless despite all my precautions (I never forgot to make the soot mark) and scared by every echo of my slipping footsteps, which told me how vast this darkness in the bowels of the earth was, how many holes led on into ever more mysterious zones where no human foot had ever trod, yes, and wasn't my lantern the first light ever to shine on this fairy-tale world, the first light to reveal all these halls with their glistening columns? Behind me, the moment my lantern ceased to shine on it, everything returned to darkness as if it had never existed, and you couldn't see from the darkness whether it was the darkness of rock or the darkness of the void. In deathly silence, the dripping had been going on for thousands of years. Where was I trying to go? Probably I simply wanted to reach a cavern from which it was impossible to proceed any further, where uncertainty ended, where the stones that shifted under my feet did not bounce away into further depths. I didn't get that far. A human skeleton that was suddenly lying there in the light from my lantern so released my fears that I yelled out, at the first moment actually fled, stumbled, smashed a pane of my lantern and made my face bleed. The feeling that I was caught in a trap and would never be able to get out again, like my predecessor here, so that my only alternatives were to starve to death or hang myself with my lasso, paralysed me mentally and physically; I had to sit down, I licked the warm blood that was flowing over my face and had to call upon all my commonsense not to take the skeleton lying in the circle of lamplight for my own. I had somehow forgotten to reckon with time, with my supply of light, and probably that skeleton (so it seems to me today) was my salvation. Whether it was an Indian or a white man who had seen all these caverns before me, I don't know; I suddenly had no time to look for relics that would have answered this question—I reached the mouth of the cave as evening was falling. The sun was dying away behind a cloud of flitting bats and up on the surface it looked as though nothing had happened. My horse was whinnying with thirst. Exhausted as I was, I lay down on the warm earth, smeared with sand and blood, and tried to eat. For fear of starving like my predecessor down below, I hadn't taken a single morsel from my pocke
t yet. Naturally the rancid mutton (I was sick to death of mutton at that time) tasted like ambrosia. And although there was still a twilight sky, I left my lantern burning, as though if my lantern went out everything would go out, even the moon that was just rising over the violet plain, and the stars over the prairie, yes, even the sun beyond the mountains that was poised over the ocean lighting up China.
Back at the ranch they swore.
It was difficult to tell Jim what I had seen, impossible with my rudimentary knowledge of geology. I explained to him: they are limestone rocks, strong enough to span amazing distances. Jim didn't trust my estimates, and yet later examination of these caves (tourists now get to them by bus from Carlsbad, New Mexico) produced quite different measurements: the great hall is six hundred feet across; three hundred and fifty feet high, it lies seven hundred feet below the surface and is far from being the lowest cavern. At some point in time the underground river that hollowed out this mountain range dried up; why, I don't know. It must have been a mighty river, several times larger than the Rio Grande that flows peacefully through the nearby valleys. Whether it vanished into ever greater depths as a result of hollowing out the rock, or whether the climate changed and no longer fed it, I don't know; in any case, the underground river dried up and the caverns it had washed out in the course of hundreds of thousands of years were left empty. Rock falls enlarged the caverns, falls that went on until a particular stratum proved capable of bearing the load above it; the debris from these rock falls is no longer to be seen, the points of fracture have been covered over by stalactites. The little rainwater that filtered in from the green surface through small cracks and fissures dripped into the empty caves and evaporated and set the second phase in motion: as the water evaporated, the ex-crescences on the rock walls, including the limestone itself, came away to form stalactites hanging from the roof and stalagmites rising from the floor, formations which are so large that geologists estimate they took fifty to sixty million years to come into being. Eons, we call that, time spans which man, though he can calculate them, cannot comprehend with his time sense, cannot even picture with his imagination. It isn't easy to describe the things that have formed in those caverns and are still forming, drop by drop, but oceans of water have dripped and a human liftetime is just enough to measure this stone growth millimetre by millimetre. In any case, Jim didn't believe me, and yet to begin with I only told him about the upper cave. The deeper you go the more wonderful and improbable, the richer become these formations that hang from the roof like alabaster veils, whitish, yellowish, glistening in the light of our lanterns, but not only veils, whole cathedrals hang down, Gothic stood, on its head, then again cataracts of ivory, mute and rigid, as though time had suddenly stopped. Then again you see sharks' teeth, chandeliers, bears, elsewhere there's a hall filled with flags, a museum of timeless history, all with fabric folds like those on Greek statues, and interspersed among them the tails of Nordic dragons. All the shapes the human soul ever dreamed up are repeated here in stone and preserved, it seems, for eternity. And the deeper you descend the more luxuriant the shapes that rise from the floors of the caves, like coral; you tramp through forests of snow-covered firs, then again you see a pagoda, a goblin or an extinct fountain from Versailles, according to the angle at which you look at it, a strange Arcadia of the dead, a Hades such as Orpheus entered; there is no lack of stone ladies who, it seems, are slowly being swallowed up by their pleated veils, by veils of amber, never to be freed again by any human love, and in a greenish pool something like waterlilies are blossoming, but they too are stone of course, everything is stone. Again and again there are dark fissures that a lantern cannot light up; you drop a stone into them and shiver with horror long after its bouncing has stopped, knowing there is no end to the labyrinth, even if you could cross the abyss. And yet you are drawn on and on. Ducking under the bundle of spears you enter the room of a queen who never lived; her throne is dripping with marble tassels and above it are a cloud of glimmering canopies. You can see everything here: there are monuments to the phallus, towering hugely, row upon row, and between them you walk on something like cauliflowers and grasp slender necks that might belong to a bird or a bottle; plants and animals and human dreams, everything is gathered together here as in a subterranean arsenal of metaphors. The last cavern I came to is different again: filigree, a sarcophagus decorated with porcelain lilies, and here you couldn't even guess at the presence of rock, let alone see it; nothing but stalactites and stalagmites, smooth and glassy, not in the form of ornament, not even as ornament more intricate than anything Arabian; it has all grown together, from above and below, the hanging and the rising embrace each other, a jungle of marble that is devouring itself, soundless and breathless as the cosmos and yet not timeless. Even this work of the eons, you can see, has to fulfil itself and become extinct; there is transience even here.
The next time I went with Jim.
Now that there were two of us, so that we could back each other up, and better equipped than before (two lanterns, fuel for a hundred and twenty hours, provisions for almost a week, mutton in particular but also apples and liquor, as well as two lassoes, a piece of chalk to make white marks with and a watch, which is important), we ventured far beyond the skeleton of my predecessor and reached the so-called Dome Room, where the accident happened. This was in the sixty-seventh hour of our joint adventure, that's to say on the third day, if we had experienced days as up on earth, not seconds and eons, and it wasn't far from the place where nowadays tourists are given lunch before going up in the lift back to the sunlight. Jim had slipped and landed a few yards lower down, he was groaning and immediately accused me of not making him fast with the lasso, which is rubbish; because I was walking in front, in no less danger than my friend and it was entirely his business to make fast the lasso. Our nerves were on edge, hence the cursing. Of course we immediately made up. It seemed Jim had probably broken his left ankle. What now? I consoled him, gave him some liquor and silently wondered what to do. I could only carry my friend as far as I could go without having to climb, that is to say not upwards, not up to the surface. I also took a drink and said: Just play it cool, Jim, we'll get you up to the top somehow. We examined his ankle and treated it too with alcohol; perhaps it wasn't broken but only sprained. Despite his pain and my commonsense, Jim insisted on immediately putting on his boot again. Was he seriously afraid I should suddenly leave him in the lurch? We had both hardly slept up to now; the rest and the liquor made us feel it. My plan was pure commonsense: to put out the lanterns in order to save fuel, and sleep for a few hours, then set off with fresh strength on the return journey, which would be painful for Jim, to be sure, and exhausting for me. We had food left for three days, the light would be more of a problem. Our second argument began when Jim refused to put out his lantern. Every hour's fuel might cost us dear! I said: If you're not sensible now we're done for. Jim said: You want to fill me with liquor and then make off, while I'm alseep, that's what you call sensible. I laughed, because I didn't deserve this distrust, not yet. After a few hours, since neither of us was sleeping, but only shivering, I said: Okay, let's go! With his arm round my neck, doggedly and determined to stick out the pain, he hobbled along, but without giving up his load, his lantern, his knapsack, his lasso. We got along better than I had expected; where we couldn't walk side by side Jim followed on all fours; later, because of his constant fear that I might go off and leave him, I let him crawl along ahead of me. The chalk marks proved pretty successful; occasionally we had to admit that we had gone astray and retrace our steps, getting even more lost in the process, so that we drew a sigh of relief when a few hours later we had at least got back to the last mark we had seen; and we also had to admit silently that hobbling and crawling were a long way from climbing. But (as we know today) we were seven hundred feet below the surface! I confess I was afraid of the moment when it became clear that I couldn't pull my friend up the rock face, which in places was almost vertical. What then? We had
light left for about fifty hours, if Jim wasn't lying to me: he had the watch. I said: Show me! Jim grinned and showed me the watch face only at a distance: There you are! I wondered if he had perhaps turned the hands back. What good could it do him? A lie won't make light. I felt sorry for him, of course, with his painful ankle; but this was less and less the point. The point was time. Did I know how many hours'it would take me to get to the surface on my own? Since the accident we had eaten nothing. The place where the remains of our friendship were wiped out is called today the Rock of Ages. Jim suddenly began to wail: I'll never get out. I said: Nonsense, nonsense. After two unsuccessful attempts to hoist Jim up on the lasso—he was terrified I would simply climb up ahead and then untie the rope, a perhaps understandable fear—we were not only both exhausted but both injured. I had gashed my forehead. I don't know whether Jim had suddenly tugged the rope for fear I should untie it or whether he had slipped on the glassy stalagmite, especially as he could only stand on one leg; anyhow, the jerk had been enough to pull me down. He denied having done it on purpose. Worse than the gash, the blood from which ran into my left eye, were my torn hands. I was in utter despair. Jim said: Nonsense, nonsense. His confidence only made me distrustful, as wide-awake as an animal waiting to pounce despite my exhaustion, as Jim bandaged my hands, even sacrificing his own shirt-sleeve. He was touching, but what use was that? One of us, in fact Was always very touching, at one moment Jim, at another me. It was like a seesaw. Meanwhile time was passing. When I once again broke the terrible silence to ask: What time is it now? Jim refused to show me the watch, which I took as a sign that we were now openly at war; aid or no aid. Jim said: Why do you keep watching me like that? I said the same thing to him. Once, when I had stopped watching him for a while, he began secretly to eat the last of his mutton. What we have in our stomachs, he probably thought, the other can't snatch from us, and in fact the moment was gradually approaching when the mutton in our pockets would be just enough for one of us, the stronger. A broken ankle, sure, and two torn hands, so what? Pain, but in the last resort you can climb even with pain, or at least try to reach daylight, to reach life, while you still have your strength. But that's just the point: you must try while you do still have your strength and while you still have fuel, at least enough for one lantern. Jim asked: What's on your mind? I asked: What are we waiting for? For my part, in spite of my hunger, I was saving my mutton, a tactic that would enable me to wait for him to be exhausted by hunger and then be the stronger, whereas at the moment Jim, with the mutton in his stomach, probably had more strength; a tactic which, on the other hand, forced me to stay awake at all costs, otherwise I should be robbed and done for. So, for I don't know how many hours, we held each other in check, chatting about our plans up there on the green earth; Jim was drawn to the city, especially New York, and the women he had missed for so long on our ranch, and I (during those hours) was attracted by the life of a gardener, if possible in a fertile region. What on earth were we doing in this godforsaken darkness? Our two lanterns were still alight. Jim was right: it's a waste, an idiotic waste. Why didn't he put his out? Because he distrusted me, because, although he kept on talking about our friendship, he considered it altogether possible that I might abandon him, my only friend at the time, to the deadly darkness. I enquired about the state of his pain, his hunger, his thirst. Jim, he said to me—you see, at that time I was also called Jim, a very common name in America—Jim, he said to me, we mustn't leave each other in the lurch, you know, we must be sensible. I said: Then put out your lantern. He said: We haven't time, Jim, we must get moving, we must give it a try. After five hours, at a guess, we had reached the next cave, but in a state of exhaustion, so that we had to lie down. I put the knapsack containing my last piece of mutton under my cheek with the strap round my right hand, so that I should wake if Jim tried to steal my mutton. When I woke I found he had smashed my lantern in order, as he said, to put an end to this idiotic waste. At the same time he asked me for half my remaining mutton. He wailed: You can't let me die of hunger! Ahead of us, lit up by our single lantern, gleamed the almost vertical rock wall, the difficult bit which, however, I had once overcome all on my own. Jim was already exhausted from crawling and I told him openly what I thought: Jim, give me the lantern, I'll leave you the last few mouthfuls of my mutton and try to climb this wall on my own. Because it was ridiculous to dangle on the rope with another exhausted person, I with my torn hands, he with a broken ankle, at a point where you had to climb like a monkey. I said: If I succeed then you're saved too, then we'll come and fetch you, that goes without saying. He said: And suppose you fall, Jim, along with my lantern? And suppose you slip, Jim, with your broken ankle, and drag me down like you did before, good God, what will you gain if we're both lying down there below? He refused to give me the lantern. Jim, he said, you can't leave me alone in this darkness, you can't do that? As always when one person has the courage to reveal frank selfishness, the other came along with his damned morality. I know, I did exactly the same thing. Jim, I said you can't expect me to starve along with you, Jim, just because you've broken your ankle and can't climb, you can't ask that of me, Jim, if you're my friend. Once more, for the last time, we became sentimental, reminding one another of our time together on the ranch, of all kinds of nice things, and in fact there was no doubt about our friendship, yes, during those cowboy months without women we had indulged in acts of tenderness such as do occur quite frequently among men but which had been unknown to Jim and me until then. Now too, while he held firmly on to the lantern in such a way that I couldn't get hold of it, his other hand, the left, stroked the hair out of my bloody gash and we were pretty close to putting our arms round each other and sobbing; if it hadn't been for the lantern. I calculated that our light would last for six or seven hours; in my experience the climb to the upper cave, where the distant daylight might be of some help, took seven to eight hours, barring errors. A decision had to be made, right now, in front of this rock wall. What was the use of talking? We both wanted to live, if possible with decency; but suppose the other fellow was trying to kill me with my decency? I said once more: Give me the lantern, Jim, and I'll give you the last of the meat. Jim laughed as I had never heard him laugh before, so that his laughter scared me. Jim, I asked him fearfully, what are you planning to do? Without a word, because it was quite clear, he answered with action. He hobbled over to the rock wall as fast as his broken ankle would allow him, obviously determined to reverse the roles, to hang onto the only lantern and try if he couldn't climb the dangerous face, leaving me the last of the mutton in exchange. Jim, I said and grabbed him just before he reached the wall, that cataract of green stalactite, where he was looking for handholds, having already found the chalk cross, our sign for the place to climb. He said: Let go of me! I drivelled with fear: If you were ever my friend and so forth. At the moment when, by the light of the swaying lantern, which Jim was holding at arm's length to the other side, so that I couldn't grab it, we saw the familiar skeleton of our predecessor, that skeleton of a man sitting hunched over, who had died at this spot all alone (or had there been two of them as well?), who had in any case perished like a dog, at that moment, since there was nothing left to restrain the silent horror that had been held back for hours, there was of course only one thing left, the thing we didn't want: a fist fight; a murderous struggle between friends, terrible, but brief, because whoever slipped first was done for, would hurtle into the darkness, be smashed to pieces, silenced.