“We’ll rappel down and swing a little, maneuver into the cave. Now we
put on the cram pons and the harnesses.”
“What about the ice axes?”
“Not for here,” he said. “There’s very little ice here. For the cave.”
“There’s ice in the cave?”
But Neumann, busy unpacking, did not reply.
Ben and Peter used to go caving near the Greenbriar, but the caves there
were little more than crawl holes. He’d never had to deal with ice.
For a moment he felt his stomach knot. Until this point he had been
propelled by adrenaline and anger and fear, focusing on one thing only:
getting Anna out of Lenz’s clinic, where he was convinced she’d been
taken.
Now he wondered whether this was the best way. Climbing wasn’t
particularly risky if you did it right, and he was confident of his
climbing skills. But even very experienced cavers had been killed.
He had weighed storming the main gate, counting on the guards to seize
him, and thereby attracting Lenz’s attention.
But it was just as likely that the guards would shoot to kill.
Hard as it was to accept, this cave was the only alternative.
The two of them lashed the cram pons neoprene straps over the Vibram
soles of their weathered mountaineering boots. These affixed twelve
sharp spikes to the bottoms and toes of their boots, giving them serious
traction on the cliff side. Then they attached the nylon climbing
harnesses to their waists and they were ready to go.
“We use the dulfersitz, yes?” Neumann said, using the Austrian argot
for rappelling without a rack, using only one’s body to control the
descent.
“No rappel rack?”
Neumann smiled, enjoying Ben’s discomfort. “Who needs it?”
Without a rappel rack the descent would be unpleasant, but it saved them
having to bring racks. Also, they wouldn’t be tied to the rope, making
the rappel more dangerous.
“You will follow,” Neumann said as he tied a double figure-eight knot at
one end of the rope and then wrapped the rope around his shoulder,
around his hip, and through his crotch. He walked backward toward the
edge, lifting the rope a bit, his feet spread widely, and then he went
over the side.
Ben watched the older man dangling free, swinging slowly back and forth,
facing the cliff, until he found a foothold. From there, tensioning the
rope, Neumann moved his feet down the cliff face. He descended a little
farther, dangling in free space again, swaying back and forth, then
there was a crunching sound, followed by a shout.
“O.K.” come on, now you!”
Ben straddled the rope in the same manner, walked backward to the edge,
held his breath, and dropped over the side.
The rope immediately slid against his crotch, the friction creating a
painful burn even through the windproof pants. Now he remembered why he
hated the dulfersitz. Using his right hand as a brake, he descended
slowly, leaning back, his feet against the cliff, groping for footholds,
maneuvering downward, playing the rope. In what seemed like seconds, he
spotted his target: a small, dark ellipse. The mouth of the cave.
Moving his feet down a few more meters, he came to the opening, and
swung his feet inward.
This wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d hoped. It wasn’t a matter of
simply dropping into the cave mouth; it was more complicated than that.
The opening was flush with the sheer cliff face.
“Move in a little!” Neumann shouted. “Move in!”
Ben saw at once what he meant. There was a narrow inset ledge on which
he would have to land.
There was very little room for error. The ledge was no more than two
feet wide. Neumann was crouched on it, gripping a hand hold in the
rock.
As Ben moved his body forward, into the cave, he began to sway backward
and forward as well. He felt unstable, and he forced himself to hang
until the swaying slowed.
Finally he played out the rope, braking with his right hand, swaying
into the cave and then out again. Finally, when he was both forward
just enough and far enough down, he dropped to the ledge, cushioning the
impact by bending his knees.
“Good!” Neumann shouted.
Still gripping the rope, Ben leaned forward into the darkness of the
cave and peered down. Enough sunlight streamed in at an oblique angle
to illuminate the peril just below.
The first hundred or so feet of the entrance to the cave, a steep
downhill slant, was thickly coated with ice. Worse, it was watered ice,
slick and treacherous. It was like nothing he had ever seen before.
“Well,” Neumann called to him after a few seconds, sensing Ben’s
reluctance. “We can’t stand here on this ledge all day, hmm?”
Experience or no, negotiating that long icy slope was unnerving to
contemplate. “Let’s go,” Ben said with all the enthusiasm he could
muster.
They donned their lightweight helmets and Velcro-strapped them into
place, then their headlamps. Neumann handed Ben a couple of hightech
carbon-fiber ice axes with curved picks. One axe looped over each wrist
by means of a leash. They dangled from Ben’s hands like useless
appendages.
With a nod, Neumann turned his back to the cave mouth, and Ben followed
suit, his stomach fluttering. Each took one backward step, and they
were off the narrow ledge, their cram pons crunching into the ice. The
first few steps were awkward. Ben tried to maintain his balance,
driving his cram pons deep into the ice, steadying himself until he had
backed down far enough to grab the ice axes in each hand and chop into
the glossy surface. He saw Neumann scrambling down the steep slope as
if he were walking down a staircase. The old man was a goat.
Ben continued unsteadily, spider-crawling down, stomach to the ice,
leaning his body weight on the wrist loops of the axes. The crunch of a
boot, the chop of the ice axe, then again, and again, and by the time he
had begun to achieve some sort of rhythm, he had reached the bottom,
where the ice had given way to limestone.
Neumann turned, slipped off his ice axes and cram pons and began to
negotiate the gentler downward slope. Ben followed close behind.
The descent was gradual, a spiral staircase through rock, and as they
went the beam of Ben’s headlamp illuminated any number of passages that
diverged to either side of them, branches he might easily have taken
were it not for Neumann. There were no slashes of red paint here,
nothing to separate the right path from the many wrong ones. Fritz
Neumann was obviously navigating from memory.
The air felt warmer than it had outside, but Ben knew this was deceptive
There was permanent ice on the walls of the cave, which indicated the
temperature was below freezing, and the water that ran underfoot would
soon make it feel even colder. It was also extremely humid.
The floor of the cave was strewn with rubble and coursed with running
water. Here and there, Ben almost lost his footing as the debris on the
cave floor shifted. Soon the passage broadened into a gallery, and
Neumann stopped for a moment, turning his head slowly, his helmet lamp
illuminating the breathtaking formations. Some of the stalactites were
fragile soda straws, slender and delicate, tapering to points as sharp
as knitting needles; too, there were the banded calcite stumps of
stalagmites, the occasional column formed by the meeting of a stalactite
and a stalagmite. Water oozed down the walls and seeped down the
stalactites, the steady drip-drip-dripping into water on the cave floor
the only noise in the eerie silence. Hardened flowstone formed
terraces, and translucent sheets of calcite hung down from the ceiling
like drapery, their edges serrated and sharp. Everywhere was the acrid
ammonia stench of bat guano.
“Ah, look!” Neumann said, and Ben turned to see the perfectly preserved
skeleton of a bear. There arose a sudden papery thunder of hundreds of
batwings; a cluster of hibernating bats had been awakened by their
approach.
Now Ben began to feel the chill. Somehow, for all his precautions,
water had seeped into his boots, dampening his socks.
“Come,” Neumann said, “this way.”
He led them into a narrow passage, one of several corridors off the
gallery barely distinguishable from the others. The ground gradually
rose up before them, the walls growing closer together, almost to a
bottleneck. The ceiling was barely head-high; had Ben been any taller
than his six feet, he would have had to stoop. The walls here were icy,
the seep water at their feet frigid.
Ben’s toes had begun to go numb. But lithe Neumann scrambled up the
steep crevice with astonishing ease, and Ben followed more gingerly,
stepping over the jagged rocks, knowing that if he lost his footing
here, the tumble would be nasty.
Finally the ground seemed to level off. “We’re about on the same level