side of the trail. A climbing rope was anchored to one of them, its hefty weave of nylon looking as insubstantial as a spider's web in the formidable throat of limestone.
'Boulder Falls,' Iverson told Anna. 'More a pit than anything, but 'Boulder Pit' lacked poetry. The descent is one hundred eighty-five feet. Half of it free fall. Me first-'
'Me last,' Holden finished.
Iverson hooked up his descent gear and, bracing a foot to either side of the line, walked backward, his weight on the rope, his body angled out over the shaft.
The descent didn't frighten Anna. She trusted her gear and her ability. It was the thought of going yet deeper into the ground, farther from the light of day, that made her queasy. She turned her back on the falls and looked at the already familiar face of Holden Tillman. He reached up and switched off his headlamp. 'You might want to do the same,' he said. 'Save batteries every chance you get.'
Anna clicked her light off and was instantly lost in a universe of such utter blackness that she had a sense of vertigo. Afraid to move so much as a centimeter in any direction, she sat down cross-legged where she was. An unwelcome wetness seeped through the seat of her trousers. Should anyone notice, she hoped they wouldn't think the moisture had originated from within. Given the shock of total light deprivation, it was not impossible.
As she sat in the seep puddle, the darkness began to harden around her. It was not a mere absence of light, it was a substance, an element, a suffocating miasma that filled her ears, clogged her nostrils, bore down on her shoulders and chest. When the pressure on her eyelids became such that she could feel the black leaking like raw concrete into her brain, she reached up and switched on her lamp.
Probably thirty seconds had passed since she'd turned it off.
The light pushed the cave back to its former size, and she breathed deeply, embarrassed that her sigh of relief was so audible.
'Lookie,' Holden said, politely ignoring her personal crisis. 'Cave pearls.'
To the left of the trail, in a shallow basin on the lip of Boulder Falls, was a formation cavers called pearls. They formed much the same way pearls formed in oysters. As water dripped from above, rolling around grains of sand, the limestone in the liquid began to coat them. Because of the movement the pearls stayed free rather than being captured in a static formation.
'There used to be one in Liberty Bell. A big one we called the Jupiter Pearl,' Holden said. 'It had a red dot on it. Every time you came through, the dot was in a different place, orbiting around its tiny solar system.'
'What happened to it?' Anna asked just to keep the conversation going. She didn't care, and that shamed her. People caught up in themselves, trapped in their own web of fear and greed, were the worst possible custodians of the wilderness.
'Some SOB stole it.'
Anna nodded, trying to communicate a concern she knew she should feel. To her the pearls lacked beauty. They were misshapen and dirt-colored; their wet convex surfaces looked like things not quite alive: stumps oozing, eyeballs set aside for unimaginable Frankensteinian monsters.
'Want a piece of candy?' Holden held out a red Jolly Rancher, and Anna accepted it gratefully.
'I'm sorry about the Jupiter Pearl,' she said to pay for the treat.
'So it goes,' Holden said. 'And then it's gone.'
The sadness in his voice cut through her cloak of self-pity. In more ways than one, the underground was the only true wilderness remaining. The lead where Frieda had been injured had been discovered Tuesday. Thursday of the same week Anna found herself sitting, staring at Holden's beloved cave pearls. She would be the twelfth or thirteenth person ever to walk where they were going, ever to see whatever it was they were going to see. No animal-human or otherwise- had made its home here. No planes flew overhead in any real sense. Helicopters couldn't airlift the lost and injured to safety. The cave was within easy walking distance in miles to restaurants and VCRs, yet the far rooms of Lechuguilla were among the most remote places on the globe. Intellectually, Anna could see the attraction. Viscerally, she still wanted to go home.
'Off-rope,' boiled up from the pit at her back. An echo accompanied it, hinting at cavernous spaces and irregular walls.
'I know,' Anna said irritably. 'Me next, you last.' Having gone meticulously through the drill: clipped in safety, called 'on-rope' to clear the fall zone, threaded the rack and replaced the JUMAR safety on a harness 'biner, she eased over the edge of the falls. The terrain revealed by her lamp provided footing as she gently touched the cliff face on the descent. Then the cliff undercut, and her feet dangled free. She held herself from the wall with her left arm, the right paying out rope from below the rock. In an instant the wall was a memory. She hung suspended in the middle of nowhere, of nothing.
She paid out twenty or more feet of line, then stopped. Perhaps she swung gently, held safe by a few links of metal and nylon, seventy feet above a floor she couldn't see-probably would never see but in the niggardly scraps afforded by a headlamp. With no up and no down, no walls, no horizon, all sense of motion was lost. Her light pried into darkness but reached no destination. All that existed was the bright yellow-and-blue weave of the line that held her, and the rough russet of her battered leather gloves. An ideal rappel for an acrophobe. Without any shred of visual evidence, the mind refused to grasp the situation fully.
Anna had stopped for a couple of reasons. The first was habit. Whenever possible on a descent she liked to stop partway down and take in the view. It was a time of absolute freedom: freedom from one's fellows, from one's job, even, in a way from the law of gravity. With this absolute freedom came absolute peace. In this instance, since the rope and her own gloved hands failed to fascinate, there was no view to speak of. But even given the peculiarities of the place, a remnant of peace remained.
For the first time in a long while, she was alone. The men, one a hundred feet above, the other nearly as far below, could have been on the face of the moon, such was her momentary isolation.
Time, snatched away by the urgency of Frieda's head wound, was by some alchemy of darkness and suspension, returned for the nonce, and Anna felt able to steal a minute or two to collect what had become a stampede of thought and emotion. Buffeted by personal terrors, hands numb and mind driven inward till it was as choked as the place she had crawled into, she was of no value to anyone. Worse, she was a danger to herself, to others, and to the fragile life of the cave. One of the tales of degradation she'd been told by Lisa as they readied her gear was of an aragonite bush deep in the cave. A delicate structure of pure white growing from the cave floor in intricate crystallized branches with minute 'leaves' that glittered like diamonds. On this surreal object of beauty someone had dumped his human waste, shattering the minuscule spires with ordure. This monument to human coarseness could never be washed away by rains, dried and whisked off by the wind. The cave had no way of cleansing and renewing itself. Each misstep left a track for all eternity.
Hearing the story, Anna was repulsed as she was meant to be. But, though she would not have admitted it to Lisa or Timmy, she could empathize with the transgressor. When fear and fatigue reached critical mass, the higher instincts were lost. In their place came a rough anger, a grasping for immediate needs regardless of the consequences, whether that need manifested itself in snatching the last mouthful of water or relieving oneself without taking the time and energy to assure no damage was done in the process.
It was toward this shameful and dangerous mindset that Anna knew she was headed. While she still had a modicum of control, she had to make one of two choices: go back or get over it. She sincerely hoped that in the extremity of her need, should she call for someone they would come. Frieda had called.
Going back was out of the question.
She took a deep breath and let the claustrophobia build in a vacant center of her skull. Terror gushed from her pores in a sweat that stank of fear. A metallic taste flooded her mouth, and her hands grew so cold and stiff she wondered if the rope would slip though the fingers of her right hand and leave her to plummet to the rocks below. Though she remained upright, she had the overpowering sensation of falling in all directions at once.
When terror had filled every cell of her being, she gripped the rope tightly and pressed her cheek against it. Screwing her eyes shut she braced herself against the detritus in her head and willed it to move. Not gone, she told herself, knowing that was too much to hope for. Just stored away in a vault. Later, when she was out of the cave and Frieda was safe, she would give herself permission to go completely insane if that was what was required.
Sharp pain cut between her eyes, and she could almost hear the creaking and snapping as she mentally bulldozed the mountain of neurosis to the back of her mind.
For half a minute more, she dangled with her eyes closed. Her head hurt, but feeling was returning to her hands. The fear was not vanquished. It hung over her, a huge and precariously balanced boulder ready to come
