Underground has a chapter on it. There was a young caver who died.’
‘Where did it happen?’
‘Some way into the system from the show cave. A place called Moss Chamber.’
‘That’s an odd name. How could there be moss, when there’s no light down there?’
‘The chamber is named after the caver. He was called Neil Moss.’
‘I see.’
‘This was back in the late fifties, when the system was first explored to any extent.’
‘Neil Moss was the first to discover this chamber, I suppose, if it was named after him?’
‘No, he didn’t discover the chamber itself, but a tiny fissure
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that goes down inside the wall. You can’t see it now - only a sort of depression filled with small stones.’
‘Who was this man?’
‘Neil Moss? He was a philosophy student at Oxford University; about twenty years old at the time. In March 1959 he joined a party exploring beyond the Mucky Ducks. When they saw the opening in the rock, Moss volunteered to try it out, to see how far it went. The thing about this shaft is that it’s only about two feet wide. A human body barely fits into it, and it must have been a really tight squeeze for Moss. It also descends at a steep angle, and about eighteen feet down there’s a corkscrew twist which he just managed to get round. Moss reached the bottom. But on the way back up, he got stuck.’
‘Damn.’
‘The shaft was so narrow that he couldn’t bend his legs or move his arms. He couldn’t do anything to raise himself. Unfortunately, he wasn’t belayed - they’d assumed that the shaft was too tight for him to fall through it. It was only when he got stuck that a line was lowered. But it was a light hand-line, not meant for hauling the weight of a human body. They struggled for nearly three days, trying to get Neil Moss out.’
‘Three days?’
‘If he’d been able to move just a few inches, it would have made all the difference,’ said Page. ‘But carbon dioxide sinks. And at the level where Neil Moss was trapped, it began to build up, fouling his air. On top of that, his acetylene lamp went out, adding carbide fumes to the mix. Cave rescue techniques weren’t as good then as they are now. The party had no oxygen with them - you know lack of oxygen causes brain damage?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, Moss became weaker and weaker, until he was unconscious. Eventually, his father sent a message that he didn’t want any more people risking their lives trying to save
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his son. So Neil Moss died down there. He was unable to move or, finally, to breathe.’
Cooper was hardly aware of his surroundings now. Mentally, he’d put himself in the young caver’s place and was trapped in a two-foot cleft in the rock, unable to move his arms and legs, with his air almost exhausted.
‘You can take the book with you, if you want,’ said Page.
‘Thanks.’
‘It wasn’t the best of times for the cave rescue organizations. They took a lot of flak over that lad’s death, and it put exploration back for years.’
Cooper picked up the book. It was the sort of thing you’d only find in a secondhand bookshop or a library. Mansell Quinn had found one in the prison library at Sudbury, perhaps donated by some benefactor. What had been his fascination with it?
‘Can you explain how far into the cavern it was that Moss died, Alistair?’
‘I can do better than that - I can show you.’
Page unfolded a huge map of the Peak-Speedwell cave system and spread it out on the floor, which was the only flat surface big enough. He crouched over it eagerly, like a child showing off a favourite game.
This shows the whole system, as far as we know. It links up Peak and Speedwell caverns, as you can see.’
‘It’s vast,’ said Cooper. ‘Is it possible to get all the way through from one show cave to the other?’
Page poked a finger at a point in the middle of the map. ‘Well, for a long time a boulder choke at the end of the Trenches here was the limit from Peak Cavern. But in the eighties some cavers managed to force a way through into a low passage they called Colostomy Crawl. That was the first time non-divers could get into Speedwell.’
Cooper looked for the Peak Cavern entrance. ‘Visitors only see a very small part of it on the show cave tour, don’t they?’
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‘Only as far as the top of the Devil’s Staircase these days. They used to be taken through Five Arches, but the passage floods completely in wet weather and it gets too muddy. On the exercise, we took you past that. And the party Neil Moss was with went way beyond Five Arches.’
Page continued to move his finger slowly along the route of the wandering passages.
‘The Inner Styx is the river at the foot of the Devil’s Staircase. You’ll have heard it from the show cave. Downstream is a sump - a section that’s full of water right up to the roof. The only way past that is by diving. But the other way, through Five Arches, you’ve got an ascending passage and a short crawl to the Mucky Ducks. The ducks are stoops in deep water. Normally, there’s just enough air space, provided you keep your head down.’
‘And there’s still a long way to go.’
‘Yes. There’s a boulder passage, and about a hundred and fifty metres from Mucky Ducks you find a tube up in the right-hand wall. That’s another crawl you do partly full length, with an awkward bend almost blocked by another sump. Above that is a narrow eyehole that it’s just possible to wriggle through, and then you go up a mud slope, wade through a pool and locate a small fissure in the scree. And that’s it. That’s where Neil Moss died.’
Cooper sat back, feeling exhausted and stunned. ‘It sounds like a week’s journey to me. Even if you could face
