the disappearing paint would also throw them off their own scent. They would have no way of retracing their own footsteps.
To reassure them, Shoat held up a small capsule he described as a miniature radio transmitter. It was one of many he would be planting along the way, and would lie dormant until he triggered it to life with his remote control. He compared it to Hansel and Gretel's trail of crumbs, then someone pointed out that the crumbs Hansel dropped had all been eaten by birds. 'Always negative,' he griped at them.
In twelve-hour cycles, the team moved, then rested, then moved again. The men sprouted whiskers. Among the women, roots began to grow out, eyeliner and lipstick fell from daily fashion. Dr. Scholl's adhesive pads for blisters became the currency of choice, even more valuable than M&M's.
Ali had never been part of an expedition, but felt herself immersed in the tradition
of what they were doing. They could have been whalers setting sail, or a wagon train moving west. She felt as if she knew it all by heart.
For the first ten days their joints and muscles were in shock. Even those hardy athletes among them groaned in their sleep and struggled with leg cramps. A small cult built around ibuprofen, the anti- inflammatory pain tablet. But each day their packs got a little lighter as they ate food or discarded books that no longer seemed so essential. One morning, Ali woke up with her head on a rock and actually felt refreshed.
Their farewell tans faded. Their feet hardened. More and more, they could see in quarter-light and less. Ali liked the smell of herself at night, her honest sweat.
Helios chemists had infused their protein bars with extra vitamin D to substitute for lost sunshine. The bars were dense with other additives, too, boosters Ali had never heard of. Among other things, her night vision grew richer by the hour. She felt stronger. Someone wondered if the food bars might not contain steroids, too, eliciting a playful round of science nerds flexing their imaginary new musculatures for one another.
Ali liked the scientists. She understood them in a way Shoat and Walker never could. They were here because they had answered their hearts. They felt compelled by reasons outside themselves, for knowledge, for reductionism, for simplicity, in a sense for God.
Inevitably, someone came up with a nickname for their expedition. It turned out to be Jules Verne who most appealed to this bunch, and so they became the Jules Verne Society, soon shortened to the JV. The name stuck. It helped that for his Journey to the Center of the Earth, Verne had chosen two scientists for his heroes, rather than epic warriors or poets. Above all, the JV liked the fact that Verne's small party of scientists had emerged miraculously intact.
The tunnels were ample. Their path looked groomed. Someone – apparently long ago – had cleared loose stones and chiseled corners to form walls and benches alongside the trail. It was hypothesized that the stonecutting might have been accomplished centuries ago by Andean slaves, for the joints and massive blocks were identical to masonry at Machu Picchu and in Cuzco. At any rate, their porters seemed to know exactly what the benches were for as they backed their heavy loads onto the old shelves.
Ali couldn't get over it. Miles went by, as flat as a sidewalk, looping right and left in easy bends, a pedestrian's delight. The geologists, especially, were astounded. The lithosphere was supposed to be solid basalt at these depths. Unbearably hot. A dead zone. But here was a virtual subway tunnel. You could sell tickets to this, one remarked. Don't worry, said his pal, Helios will.
One night they camped next to a translucent quartz forest. Ali heard tiny underworld creatures rustling, and the sound of water trickling through deep fissures. This was their first good encounter with indigenous animals. The expedition's lights kept the animals in hiding. But one of the biologists set out a recording device, and in the morning he played for them the rhythm of two- and three-chambered hearts: subterranean fish and amphibians and reptiles.
The nocturnal sounds were unsettling for some, raising the specter of hadal predators or of bugs or snakes with deadly venoms. For Ali, the nearness of life was a balm. It was life she had come in search of, hadal life. Lying on her back in the blackness, she couldn't wait to actually see the animals.
For the most part, their fields were sufficiently diverse to forestall professional competition. That meant they shared more than they bickered. They listened to one another's hypotheses with saintly patience. They put on skits at night. A harmonica player performed John Mayall songs. Three geologists started a barbershop routine, calling themselves the Tectonics. Hell was turning out to be fun.
Ali estimated they were making 7.2 miles per day on foot. At mile fifty they held a celebration, with Kool-Aid and dancing. Ali did the twist and the two-step. A paleobiologist got her into a complicated tango, and it was like being drunk under a full moon.
Ali was a riddle to them. She was a scholar, and yet this other thing, a nun. Despite her dancing, some of the women told her they feared she was deprived. She never gossiped, never joined in the girl talk when the going got raw. They knew nothing about her past lovers, but presumed at least a few. They declared their intention of finding out. You make me sound like a social disease, Ali said, laughing.
Don't worry, they said, you can still be repaired.
Inhibitions receded. Clothing opened. Wedding bands started to vanish.
The affairs unfolded in full view of the group, and sometimes the sex, too. There were some initial attempts at privacy. Grown men and women passed notes back and forth, held hands in secret, or pretended to discuss important business. Late at night Ali could hear people grunting like hippies among the stones and heaped packs.
In their second week, they came upon cave art that might have been lifted from Paleolithic sites at Altamira. The walls held beautifully rendered animals and shapes and geometric doodles, some no larger than postage stamps. They were alive with color. Color! In a world of darkness.
'Look at that detail,' breathed Ali.
There were crickets and orchids and reptiles, and nightmare concoctions that looked like something the geographer Ptolemy or Bosch might have drawn, beasts that were part fish or salamander, part bird and man, part goat. Some of the depictions used natural knobs in the rock for eye stems or gonads, or spalled divots for a hollow in the stomach, or mineral veins for horns or antennae.
'Turn off your light,' Ali told her companions. 'Here's how it would have looked by the flame of a torch.' She swam her hand back and forth across her headlamp, and in the flickering light the animals seemed to move.
'Some of these species have been extinct for ten thousand years,' a paleobiologist said. 'Some I never knew existed.'
'Who were the artists, do you think?' someone wondered.
'Not hadals,' said Gitner, whose specialty was petrology, the history and classification of rocks. He had lost a brother in the national guard several years ago, and hated the hadals. 'They're vermin who have burrowed into the earth. That's their nature, like snakes or insects.'
One of the volcano people spoke. With her shaved head and long thighs, Molly was a figure of awe to the porters and mercenaries. 'There might be another explanation here,' she said. 'Look at this.' They gathered beneath a broad section of ceiling she had been studying.
'Okay,' Gitner said, 'a bunch of stick figures and boobie dolls. So what?'
At first glance, that did seem to be the extent of it. Wielding spears and bows, warriors mounted wild attacks on one another. Some had trunks and heads made of twin triangles. Others were just lines. Crowded into one corner stood several dozen Venuses loaded with vast breasts and obese buttocks.
'These look like prisoners.' Molly pointed at a file of stick figures roped together.
Ali pointed at a figure with one hand on the chest of another. 'Is that a shaman healing people?'
'Human sacrifice,' muttered Molly. 'Look at his other hand.' The figure was holding something red in one outstretched hand. His hand was resting not on top of the figure's chest, but inside it. He was displaying a heart.
That evening, Ali transferred some of her sketches of the cave art onto her day map. She had conceived the maps as a private journal. But, once discovered, her maps
