12. The Road of Nowë
“Ow!”
This had been a pretty standard refrain for the past couple of hours. The passages were often tight, some so filled with water that there were only a few inches of breathing space between the water and solid rock. I don’t normally get claustrophobic, but there were a few moments there where I got the willies thinking of the millions of tons of rock overhead, waiting to fall on us.
This time it was Jodi saying the “Ow!” and I looked up at a view that I was unfortunately way too tired to appreciate, as I was crawling right behind her. “You okay?”
“Just another rock in the way of my head.”
“Is it opening up ahead?”
“Looks like it. It should be, from the map we have . . . yes, there it is. Flattening out.”
“I say we take a break for lunch. No one’s chasing us, that’s for sure.” We’d been going for a long time, and even if the NSS team had decided to try pursuit later—which I doubted very much—they hadn’t been prepared for a long-term caving expedition and would’ve had to give it up a while back.
Jodi nodded, though I could barely make that out, and a few minutes later we emerged into a room large enough to stand in, with some flat spots to sit down. “Whew. That’ll be a relief.”
“I’m starved,” Jodi admitted, shrugging off her pack and turning. “I—oy, Clint, your face!”
I flushed, which probably didn’t make me look any better. “Just my dumb feet. Went under again and tried to come up for air a little fast. Which would’ve been fine if there’d been two feet of air instead of four inches.”
“Are you all right? Jeez, you look terrible!”
I didn’t really mind Jodi fussing over my face. It probably did look pretty bad, and it actually felt better after she was done cleaning it off, maybe just because it was her doing it. “Thanks, Jodi. Hey, I love you.”
That got one of her best smiles. “I love you too, Clint. Hell, you sure know how to show a girl an . . . interesting time.”
“We Slades are never boring.” I killed the LED-based light I’d been using—sealed, efficient, waterproof—and got out a few candles to light us during the meal. We didn’t talk much for a while, seeing as we were both tuckered out. Finally I put away the sandwich wrappers and drink bottles and put the pack back on. “Not too much farther to go, eh?”
“To the Lisharithada? A long, long way. To Nowëmosdet? A couple more crawls and then we have to make it to the top of a tall, skinny room. After that, we’ll be in pure virgin cave for a ways, and then we get to the Road of Nowë.”
“Let’s do it. Either we’re past the worst of it, or we’ll find out we’re completely screwed. But we’ll be done with this stuff in any case.”
The “tall, skinny room” was the worst of it. We had to ascend nearly forty feet, some of it chimneying. I had to put in some pitons, just to be sure we wouldn’t fall. Finally I reached the top.
Blank rock greeted my gaze.
“Shit! There’s nothing here!”
Jodi gave a little sound halfway between a sigh and a groan. “There has to be something!”
I shook my head, raised the light higher. Nothing, nothing . . .
Wait. That shadow up on the side didn’t seem to move much.
What looked like a shadow was a dark, narrow opening that took us another five minutes to reach. We finally wiggled into it, crawling down a tunnel that Jodi said reminded her of the Gun Barrel in Knox Caverns for about fifty yards. This dropped out into an almost perfectly circular cavern with completely bare walls, with the large scalloping of slow-running water showing on the limestone. At this point I pulled out the laptop and checked the map, because there were three exits from this circular cave. Taking the leftmost one, we entered a chimney that sloped downward and, with water trickling constantly, was utterly treacherous. I backed up, with my white face reflected on the nearby rock, to hammer in several pitons to secure our descent. There was no way we could’ve made that descent alive otherwise, and I’d been lucky I could even back up when I did.