Holland Suggestions (23 page)

He cut the top off a can of peaches and that was his lunch. I ate a sweet roll and a candy bar. Afterward Max turned his attention to the two largest of the four bundles of equipment; I had thought little of them to this point, but I watched in fascination as Max unrolled a long ladder made of lightweight wire. He attached it to the same rock that held the rope and unrolled it into the pit.

We shook hands.

Then he fastened a safety rope around his body, knelt, sat, dropped his legs over the edge, and disappeared into the black hole.

He was gone more than an hour. Ten minutes after he started down he called to me; he had found a horizontal cave branching off from the shaft and he couldn’t yet see the bottom. I guessed by his light that he was two hundred feet down. He stepped off the ladder into the cave; it went slack suddenly. He cast away his safety rope and was gone so long that I began to worry. I was about to call to him when I saw his light below. I had squirmed to the edge of the hole and was peering down as far as my headlamp would let me see. His lamp met mine and I took up his safety line as he came. He was breathing hard by the time he reached the top; he unhooked himself and we moved back away from the hole.

“What’s down there?”

“There’s a cave maybe a hundred fifty feet down. It’s more of a tunnel, I guess; it goes straight in from the pit, like it was bored there a long time ago. It joins another one; hell, there might be a honeycomb of tunnels and caves down there. I found a set of steps…”

“Steps?”

He laughed wearily: “I knew you’d say that. I swear to God, there’s a set of old steps cut into the stone. They go down to a lower level. I didn’t get to explore down there much; I figured you’d be impatient as hell up here.”

“You got that right. I’m about to jump out of my goddamn skin. Now what?”

“I think we can go all the way to the bottom from that middle level.”

“Well, let’s go.”

“I should tell you now, Jim, it’s a pretty hairy climb.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve already been through some hairy climbs.”

“Not like this. The mouth of the tunnel is set in about four feet from the shaft. It’s very old and apt to crack. You’ve got to step off that four feet from the ladder to the mouth of the tunnel; there’s no getting around that. I’ll go first and help you get close. But don’t go getting vertigo on me down there, friend.”

My mouth was dry at the prospect, but there was no stopping me now. I nodded and Max said, “Listen, you lower the stuff to me first, then I’ll help you all I can.”

“Do we really need to take all this stuff?”

“We can leave the food bag if you want to, but we’d better have most of the rope and the other ladder.” He sat at the edge of the hole. “Watch me go down, watch how I play out the safety rope, and you do it just the same way. Just remember, you can’t fall as long as you’ve got that safety rope around you.”

Max eased over the edge and started down. “See what I’m doing? One leg behind, the other in front; you hug this ladder like it was a woman on a cold night, and keep your safety rope tight as you go.” His face drifted out of sight, and then all I could see was the light from his headlamp. Then he had reached the level of the tunnel; he stepped off the ladder and cast away the safety rope. I pulled up the rope and used it to lower the equipment. “Be careful not to fray the rope against the rocks,” Max called. When the pack reached the tunnel Max shouted, and I held it there until he hooked it and took it in. We did it again and again, and the last pack took the longest of all. That was a small bag containing the gasoline lamp, and I was careful to avoid breaking it. When at last Max had it and the rope went slack, I looked over the edge and waited for him to call me down.

“Listen, I’ll let the ladder out a bit; try to give you some room for your feet. Now keep your rope tight and you can’t fall, remember that. Watch where you’re putting your feet.”

I gripped the cable with both hands and swung my feet over the edge. I fought down the pinpoint flashes of panic that raced through me in that instant before my feet found the first step, and I started down without any hesitation. I was down about thirty feet when I stopped the first time to look around me. It was a rock cylinder, perfectly round, like the chamber in the entrance cave, and slick with water. My headlamp played off the walls; they were green and slimy. Water seeped out of small cracks in the rock, coating the walls with a moving green slime.

“What’s wrong?”

I saw his headlamp far below, as far as ever, it seemed.

“Nothing; I just stopped for a minute to get my bearings.”

“You don’t need your goddamn bearings. There’s no place to come but down.”

I started down again. As I went deeper I felt that the walls were closing in on me and the water flow was heavier. I stopped for another look and found that it was true; the shaft had narrowed to about half its width and the walls were fairly dripping with greenish-brown liquid. My light revealed a large crack in the wall where muddy water poured out and blended with the dirty slime around it. Max called to me again; I could not make out the words, but his tone was clearly short. It started me moving downward. Soon I saw the light from his headlamp just under my feet; then the rock wall fell away into the huge hollow that Max had described. The tunnel opened from the center of the hollow, and Max stood in the mouth, reaching out to me. He had fastened a safety rope inside the tunnel, and that held him fast in the shattered mouth. Now I saw what he meant: the whole face of the tunnel was a mass of fractured rock, and the hollow made the step a long one.

I reached out to him and our hands touched; but just the fingertips. I lunged for his hand and the ladder turned; my grip slipped and one of my feet slipped off the rung. I wrapped my body around the cable, clutching the safety rope tightly under my arms.

“Easy, don’t twist like that,” Max said. “Get yourself together again and just hold still.”

My struggling foot found the rung as Max reached out from the tunnel. Again our fingertips touched; he stretched and had my hand. I could hear the wire scrape against the rock above as he pulled me inward. My right foot swung in an arc and touched the floor of the tunnel, but a piece of it broke away. I jumped back, as though the rock would suck me with it to the bottom of the shaft. Our hands slipped apart and the ladder swung out into the shaft. Max pulled back and dropped to his knees with a sigh.

“You know you’re going to have to come off that ladder,” he said.

“I can’t.”

“You’ve got to, unless you can goddamn fly in here. It’s either that or back up.”

“No…let’s try it again.”

“All right.” He stood and stretched out to the end of his safety line. “Now listen, get another grip on my hand and just hold still, okay? I can pull you almost to the edge. It’s just a baby step after that. And remember, you’ve still got your safety line, so you can’t fall, okay?”

His face was warm and encouraging in the glow of my headlamp. We stretched toward each other and our hands met. Max clasped me tightly around the wrist and pulled me close. “Now,” he said, and I jumped out, flinging the ladder away with such force that it clattered against the opposite wall of the shaft. My foot hit solid rock and I slipped forward to my knees. I rolled over and lay on my back, breathing hard, while Max knelt beside me. I was still spread-eagled when Max got up and walked away in the gloom. “Those steps I was telling you about go down from here,” he said.

I joined him at the end of the passage. It opened into a large circular room, not unlike the others we had been through, and five or six tunnels branched away from the room in various directions. The steps dropped from the third tunnel on the left as we came into the room, a long winding column into darkness.

“Slave labor built those,” Max said; “I don’t think there’s any question about it.”

“Indians?”

“Sure.”

“Have you been to the bottom yet?”

“To the bottom of these steps, yes.”

The steps were long and gradual; they went in a full spiral and ended on another level perhaps a hundred fifty feet below. It was almost a copy of the upper chamber, with six twisting caves branching away from a central room. At the edge of the room the wall had been broken away, making another entry to the shaft. Max went close to the break and looked down. “At least I can see a bottom from here,” he said.

I joined him at the ledge. “The rock seems to be stronger here.”

“Wetter too. Watch you don’t slip.”

He gripped my arm and I looked out into the shaft. Grimy water dripped down my neck. Far below I saw a blurred whiteness, just outside the effective range of my light. In some distant corner of the cave I heard the sound of falling water.

“What’s that white stuff?”

“Sand, surely.”

“Then we’re almost there.”

“Depends on what you mean by almost. It might be a hundred fifty feet or another four hundred. I’d guess something between.”

“Can we make it?”

“We can try it. There’s another cable ladder in the big bundle. Let’s look through some of these caves first; if we can find more steps, maybe we won’t have to use the cable.”

We decided to make separate excursions into the tunnels, to save time. Max warned me about straying, or going too far, but the first tunnel came to a dead end at a small room just thirty feet in. The walls of the room were dry, and I guessed that they had been cut into the tunnel. It looked like an old storeroom; a few ancient tools and the remains of old wood boxes were stacked in a corner. I touched one of the boxes with my boot and it collapsed. There was nothing more to see here, so I went out to the large room and paused for a moment at the second tunnel. I heard a noise, undoubtedly Max returning, so I waited there for him. The noise stopped, and still Max did not come. I listened for a long time and heard it again, a click-click-click from the mouth of the shaft. It came louder as I moved closer. At the opening I lay flat and inched my way to the edge. All I could see from there was that blurred whiteness. I turned off my lamp and lay in absolute darkness; for a long time I did not move, and the only sounds were the drippings of the slimy water around me. Then it came again, sharp metallic clicks from below. For half a second I thought I saw the reflection of a flashlight somewhere, but I blinked my eyes and it was gone. The noise stopped too and it did not come back. I fought down an impulse to call to Max, for surely it
was
Max moving around on the bottom; but I kept silent and pushed my body back from the edge. I turned on my headlamp and shrugged it off; decidedly, I was wasting time, and I moved ahead for a look at the second tunnel. This too dead-ended after a few feet. The third tunnel was deeper; it turned only once, then went straight back into the rock for about fifty yards, where I found a crude dungeon cut into the rock in an L shape. The bars were thick logs, rotted almost to mush now. They sealed off the entire room and were broken only by a heavy wooden door. The door too was mushy, but it was reinforced by steel bars and plates. It was held in place by heavy steel hinges; a steel pin held it shut. I tried to pull the pin, but rust had fused the metal around it. So I looked into the prison by peering with my headlamp between the bars.

Almost immediately I saw two corpses chained to the walls. My light caught the first one suddenly; a white skeletal face, less than two feet away, grinning hideously at me from the darkness. I jumped back, slipped, and fell, then realized that these bones had been here for a very long time. I looked again. Both were heavily shackled, with leggings and hand irons. The one nearest me had been chained by the neck as well; the iron collar held his face upright and forced him to look straight out at me through the bars. His arm had fallen off; it lay on the floor beside him, the iron still clamped tightly around the wrist.
So this was what the Spanish did to Indians who didn’t behave.
I moved my light and saw other bones deeper in the L of the dungeon. There were at least five, maybe more. One still wore armor;
Spanish armor.
Then these bodies were not Indians, but Spaniards.
The Indians revolted and killed the masters;
it all fit Harry Gould’s version of the Caverna del Oro legend. Behind me, sunk into the wall, I found an old torch; the wall above it was charred black. That made it easy to figure: this was a Spanish torture chamber; when the Indians rebelled they turned the torture against the torturers and left them chained here for all eternity. I tried to imagine the scene as the torch burned down and left the men hopelessly imprisoned in total darkness. I shivered. And I got out.

Max was waiting for me at the edge of the shaft. He had brought down two of the large bundles from the upper chamber and was unrolling the other cable ladder. “I take it you didn’t find any more steps,” I said.

“There was another staircase, yes, but it’s buried under rubble. It looks like part of the roof fell in. How about you?”

“There’s an old dungeon at the end of this tunnel; four or five people were chained there and left to die. Spaniards, I think.”

He looked up and my light fell full on his face. I saw that he was very excited and the high pitch of his voice confirmed it. “No doubt about it, about the Spanish activity, is there?” He came close to me and took a huge nugget from his pocket “Look at this.”

“Gold?”

“Gold ore, and really rich; you can bet me on that. And I think we’ll find the main mine at the bottom somewhere.”

I stood nervously near the shaft the whole time he was working on the ladder. I was listening again for the noises that I thought had been Max but now knew had not. I looked over the edge, but now I heard nothing and saw nothing. Except for the sound of a faraway waterfall, the place might have been a tomb. I pondered it: The light might have been imaginary, but the noise had been real; if the noise had been real the light had probably been real too.

“How far down did you get before you came to the cave-in?” I asked him.

“I didn’t get down at all. I had just found the steps, and it was all buried from that point on. Why?”