By now we’d been going almost three hours and the sun, beating onto the face of the cliff, was hot. Doc’s khaki shirt was wet with perspiration and I suggested we sit down for a drink and a rest. The ridge we were sitting on was, I judged, about a hundred feet from the top of the cliff but it appeared impossible to go any further. Down below us we could see the canopy of the rainforest, with one old yellow wood tree, its branches stretching clear to the sky fifty feet above the canopy of the forest and no more than a hundred feet below where we were sitting. Doc said it could well be a thousand years old. The cliff face was shaped in a wide arc and on our right, about a hundred feet below us, the waterfall gushed from the rock face, more a fine, misty spray than a gush really, but sufficient to feed the stream we’d camped beside.
Doc took his notebook from the rucksack and turned to a crude sketch he’d made of the cliff from the ground level the previous afternoon. ‘Ja, we are sitting now in the deepest ledge, above is harder rock and not so deep striations.’ He sighed, clearly puzzled. Doc didn’t like to be wrong about his observations which he would only have permitted himself to voice after a great deal of careful consideration. ‘Well, Peekay, we found dolomite and also there is water, but no cave. This is very strange. You can see the waterfall comes straight from the cliff, the stream must run deep inside the face of the cliff. There should be caves. Ja, this is so, absoloodle.’
I walked back to the wall at the end of the ledge and peeked over the edge, hoping to find a small ledge which would take us further across the face. About three feet below me a small ridge of rock, no more than six inches wide, ran for two or three yards and then took a slight turn so I was unable to see whether it continued. I swung my body over the edge of the ledge, dangling my feet until they reached the narrow ridge of rock. With my stomach against the cliff I edged my way along it. I’d hardly moved more than three feet when I found myself looking directly into a hole in the cliff, about two feet wide and three feet high. I was able to look some ten feet down the tunnel before it turned to darkness. It was quite clearly an entrance to a cave, and not simply a tunnel worn into the rock. A fire bush grew from a crack in the rock to the right of the opening to conceal it from being seen from below. Suddenly a bat flew out of the tunnel, blurred past me, and I heard the unmistakable squeak of bats deep in the rock face. I was certain I had found a cave.
‘I’ve found it! We’ve found our cave!’ I yelled. My voice, hugely magnified, echoed down the valley. It would take very little effort to lift myself up into the hole, but holes have a habit of containing surprises infinitely worse than a few hundred harmless bats. So I edged back to where Doc was waiting. Helping me back up onto the ledge, Doc too was excited. ‘So, I am right, Peekay,’ he said triumphantly. I explained that if we could secure a rope handrail it would be possible for him to follow me into the cave.
We discussed a way of doing this for some time. Then, hammering a couple of spikes into the floor of the ledge, we secured one end of the rope through the eyes of the spikes, both of us pulling on the rope to make sure the spikes were firmly bedded into the rock. Next we tied the rope to my waist and I tucked three spikes, the hammer and Doc’s torch into the back of my belt where I could reach back and get them comfortably. Doc paid out the rope as I slid backwards, down onto the thin lip of rock below the ledge. Had I fallen it was unlikely Doc would have been able to haul me back again but I was very sure on my feet and unconcerned by heights. In less than thirty seconds I was in front of the cave entrance. I lifted myself through the hole with comparative ease and commenced to crawl along the narrow tunnel which continued in a slightly upward direction for about twenty feet then widened out. I untied the rope from around my waist and removed the long silver torch from my belt. The daylight had disappeared by the time I’d crawled to the end of the tunnel so I switched on the powerful Eveready to find that the tunnel led into a cave which appeared to be about fifteen feet long and equally wide, while being high enough for me to stand upright.
The cave smelt powerfully of baboon and bats. As I played the torch around the walls I could see hundreds of bats hanging from the roof and the walls. I returned down the narrow passage to the cliff face, and sticking my head out yelled at Doc that I’d found a big cave. My voice echoed down the valley as the barking of the baboons had done the previous evening and again that morning.
‘It’s not too hard, Doc. I’ll hammer a couple of spikes into the tunnel wall and tie the rope and you can use it as a handrail to come across.’ I set about this task, drawing the rope tight so that it made a firm handrail from the ledge into the mouth of the tunnel. Doc was a fearless old coot and dropping himself backwards onto the rock ridge and holding the rope he quickly edged across the cliff face to the mouth of the tunnel. I pulled him in and now he was lying on his belly looking into the dark tunnel.
‘Wunderbar, Peekay, a cave. How big? A big one, yes?’ he panted.
‘You’ll have to crawl, it’s slightly upwards. Follow the torch, it’s only about twenty feet in.’
The cave was not high enough for Doc to stand upright so he squatted holding the torch while I lit the hurricane lamp which he’d brought with him in the rucksack strapped to his back.
I placed the lamp in the middle of the cave where it threw a dim but adequate light and Doc started to examine the walls with the torch beam.
The floor was covered with bat shit. ‘It should smell worse than this.’ Doc took out a box of matches and struck one on the side of his pants. The match flared, momentarily lighting his face. ‘A wind! In here is a wind, from some place else there is coming a wind.’ Doc was right, the flame from the match was flickering and then went out. He shone his torch into the left corner of the cave where a sharp buttress of rock protruded. The torch light played on the rock and as Doc swept the beam to the top of the buttress the light disappeared into a void. We realised that there was an opening beyond it from which came the unmistakable sound of water dripping. We both moved round the back of the rock to discover the opening about four feet above the ground which reached to the ceiling. Doc lit the opening for me to scramble through and he passed the lantern to me and then the torch before following. As he dropped to the ground I swung the powerful torch into the black void.
‘Holy Molenski!’ The torch showed a huge chamber, from the floor and the ceiling of which grew stalactite and stalagmite. The roof of the cave must have been at least forty feet high and the snowy white calcareous structures falling from it, some of which had reached the ground, looked like an illustration from a child’s fairy tale. Pools of infinitely still water on parts of the cave floor mirrored the grotesque shapes, creating an enchanted world which appeared to be carved in crystal.
I handed the torch back to Doc and took up the lantern as we moved forward to explore. Doc kept stopping to train his torch on one or another of the beautiful crystal columns. ‘Absoloodle, absoloodle wunderbar!’ he kept repeating. It was certainly the most amazing natural phenomenon I had ever witnessed and I followed Doc as we explored the huge chamber. We found several fissures in the walls, none of which were wide enough to climb through; we traced the source of the water to a point high in the ceiling from which a constant drip was too rapid for the formation of stalactites. The gradual movement of water seeping through rock collects a load of calcium carbonate, when it finally squeezes through to the ceiling of the cave and reaches the air it sheds its load of calcium carbonate and an infinitely small part of a stalactite is formed. Each drop adds its minute contribution. He pointed to a massive stalactite to our right. ‘Perhaps three hundred thousand years, maybe more.’ Doc’s voice was filled with awe. On the far wall, some sixty feet into the cave, a ledge of rock protruded about fifteen feet from the floor. Above it hung huge spikes of stalactite and clumps of glittering crystals, while directly under the ledge, like grotesque legs to a giant table, stalagmites had grown. A buttress of crystal stalagmite had grown to the one side of the platform to resemble steps leading up to it, so the entire effect was like a magnificent slab held high by crystal shafts with huge spikes of crystallised light suspended above it.
‘Look, Doc, it’s like Merlin’s altar in the crystal cave!’
Doc sucked in his breath, ‘Ja, in such a place went Merlin for sure.’ He pointed to the throne, ‘To lie on this altar and in a hundred and fifty thousand years maybe the body would be a part of this cave. A part of the crystal cave of Africa. Imagine only this, Peekay.’
I grinned. ‘Can you hold off for a while, please Doc, I still need you here.’ The thought of Doc dying had never entered my head. I often thought of him growing old, unable to do things we’d done in the past; but I never thought of him as disappearing, not being there, not being a part of my life. I understood death, it happened at any time. It was a brutal accident like the death of Granpa Chook or Geel Piet, or Big Hettie’s flyweight. Even Big Hettie’s death could be explained in that she was freakishly big and thus fell into the category of unexpected death. Doc did not fall into any of the criteria I had set aside in my mind for death. Doc was calm and reason and order and the kind of death I knew had no part in the expectations for our relationship.
He had walked ahead up to the crystal-like speleothems which formed the steps to the platform. Climbing these, his boots made a scrunching noise on the hard calcium deposits, and soon he stood on the platform. Suddenly, without warning, he squatted and then stretched out full length, so his body was lost from my sight.
‘Ah, come on, Doc! That’s not funny,’ I said, suddenly a little scared. Doc’s torch shone upwards, lighting the
