Breed and Maki weren’t saying much.
No bickering, no whining from Maki, and no insults from Breed. Boyd figured that was a pretty good barometer. It told him that they were feeling the forbidding atmosphere of this place same as him.
McNair and Jurgens led them into what looked like a stope that had been chiseled from the limestone, but Jurgens said it was probably hollowed by subterranean waters long, long ago. Just how long he did not even begin to speculate. And you could plainly hear the disappointment in his voice. A network of underground caves was bad news. It meant maybe abandoning the series of drifts above and channeling in a different direction. Things the company would not like because that meant time and money. Things Jurgens was supposed to be saving them whenever possible.
The stope went on for maybe another fifty or sixty feet, the floor littered with debris and collapsed shelves of rock that had fallen in long ago. Some were so big they had to climb right over the top of them. But they pushed on, the lanterns creating jumping shadows that crept along the crumbling walls.
Then it opened up into a massive cavern.
Boyd just whistled at the sight of it.
“Holy shit,” Maki said.
It was incredible. They stood there in awe, feeling like the first men to set eyes on the Carlsbad Caverns. Before them was an immense grotto. Even with the long-barreled flashlights, they could barely see the roof above. It had to have been well over a hundred feet straight up. There were huge stalactites and stalagmites, great shelves of rock that had been sculpted and polished by eons of dripping water into great columns and blobby, candleflow heaps of stone. Minerals sparkled in the walls. Crystal formations rose like pillars of salt. Great boulders the size of two-story houses had been perfectly rounded by ancient waters. There was a briny stink in the air.
“Gentlemen,” McNair said, “we are about to step into the history books.”
Maki just stood there with his mouth hanging open as the flashlights scanned about, their beams thick with suspended dust and droplets of moisture. He swallowed, licking his lips. “Did somebody dig this out?” he said.
“No, no, this is a natural cavern,” McNair was quick to point out before imaginations started running wild. “All of what we’ve seen so far has been channeled out of the limestone by ancient floodwaters. This cavern, too. It’s really incredible.”
“But that shaft I almost fell down…it was so smooth and round.”
“That could have been volcanic rock laid down by a lava flow,” Jurgens pointed out. “Lava can form shapes that look man-made if it rapidly cools.”
McNair nodded. “Exactly. It’ll take years and years of study, gentlemen, to answer all this. For now, just enjoy.”
Thing was, all this might have gotten a paleobiologist excited, but Boyd and the others had mixed emotions. Something this big and this old, well, it inspired a certain superstitious dread that made their mouths go dry. They were almost afraid of it and, at the same time, desperately curious.
“What’re you thinking?” Boyd said to Breed.
The dazed look in his eyes finally faded. He laughed. “I was thinking of those comic books I read when I was a kid. Those guys in there were always finding places like this and they were always full of dinosaurs and shit.”
It was McNair’s turn to laugh. “I don’t think we’ll find any dinosaurs.”
“Good,” Breed said. “Because I left my rifle in the truck.”
They all got a little chuckle out of that.
The floor of the cavern was about twenty feet down from the opening of the stope. But it was a gradual incline littered with rocks and boulders and there was no trouble climbing down. Jurgens and McNair went first. Boyd and Breed followed. But Maki just waited above.
They put their lights on him.
“C’mon, peaches,” Breed said. “I’ll hold your hand.”
But Maki was not moving.
“You don’t have to come with us, Maki,” Jurgens said. “All of this, it’s above and beyond. I can’t even say how safe it is.”
“I’ll stay with you if you want,” Boyd told him.
That got Maki down. He was looking pale and his lower lip kept jumping with a tic. He was scared and nobody made fun of that, not even Breed. Maybe they were all feeling what Boyd had been feeling all night: the sense of impending doom. Like a can of something crawly had been opened up in their guts.
The floor was irregular, sometimes smooth and flat, other times hilly with mounds of rocks and jutting spokes of limestone. There were pools of water and lots of cracks that led down far below. Jurgens and McNair were having themselves a good old time, theorizing about the age of the cavern and the waters that must have cut it out, chipping off rock specimens and prodding at fossils…of which, there were many. Outcroppings of them everywhere: corals and brachiopods and crinoids.
“This is definitely late Permian,” McNair said as he took photographs of the fossiliferous rock. “The index fossils are fairly conclusive. My God, look at these specimens. Trilobites and mollusks and ammonites. Enough to fill a dozen specimen cases.”
“Sure, great scientific stuff,” Jurgens said. “But my bosses won’t be thrilled. I can tell you that much. If we have to divert those drifts, it’ll cost thousands, hundreds of thousands.”
“They’ll live,” Boyd said to him. “Besides, I bet museums will pay plenty for the stuff down here. Christ, people’ll want to tour this. This will be a cash cow for Hobart. They’ll rake it in.”
“Yeah, he’s right,” Breed said.
Jurgens and McNair kept taking samples, discussing matters geological and paleontological, taking pictures. Boyd and the others wanted to explore, to see what was ahead. But it was hard to get them to move on. They wanted to study what they were finding. Finally, Breed and Maki moved off. Boyd went with them.
“Hey, we got bones over here,” Breed called.
That got them moving.
Jurgens and McNair came right over, holding their lanterns out. There were bones. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Some were protruding from the floor and others thrusting out from shelves of rock. All of them were fossilized, of course.
“Amazing,” McNair said, photographing them. “Absolutely amazing.” He held his lantern over the fossil imprint of a fish that was sinuous and eel-like. “Ancanthodian. Last remaining forms died out in the Permian Extinction event.” He looked around at the fossiliferous deposits. “Permian fishes…reptiles…amphibians. All heaped together like this. It’s unusual. I suppose the waters must have brought them together.”
“What’s unusual about it?” Boyd asked.
“Well, some of these are land forms and others are marine animals. It’s hard to imagine what could have scattered them all into the same basin. I suppose it could have been a streambed. Animals have a habit of dying around streams and in the shallows. The water might have washed them here.”
Boyd just looked at all those knobs of bone and things like the slats of ribcages, jaws, and skulls, and you name it. The bones of animals from land and from the sea all tossed into this basin like McNair said. No, it didn’t make sense. Not even to a guy like him. If there were a pile of bones like this in the modern world, he would have thought somebody collected them up and put them there. Or dumped them there.
Sure, he thought, like the litter pile of bones outside the cave of a beast. When it was done eating, it just tossed them in a litter pile.
But he didn’t say that. It was probably unscientific as all hell. McNair, no doubt, would have a better explanation and who was he to argue with the man? How it looked to him and how it probably was were two different things. Boyd figured that was probably true.
“Lookit this one,” Maki said. “A freaking crocodile, eh?”
McNair and Jurgens came over, looking at what appeared to be the near-complete fossil skeleton of a reptile maybe twenty feet in length.
“Good God,” McNair said, down on his hands and knees next to it. “This is a therapsid. And a big one, too.”
“What’s that?” Maki said.
