Chester watched him with concern. If Will didn't pull through this, he didn't know how they would be able to go on. The Deeps weren't the sort of place that gave you any leeway; you had to have all your wits about you if you wanted to stay alive. The grim spectacle of Cal's demise chillingly confirmed that hard truth. All Chester could do now was keep them on course by the side of the canal, which had altered direction and seemed to be taking them directly toward one of the flickering points of light. With every hour, the light grew brighter and brighter, like a guiding star. Guiding them to what, he didn't know.
On the second day, they came close enough to the light to make out the unsteady illumination it was shedding on the curving rock wall around it. They were evidently at the limits of the Great Plain. As Chester crept stealthily, Will just ambled along behind, not giving his surroundings the slightest attention.
They arrived at the source of the light. A metal arm, about a foot and a half long, sprouted from the rock wall with a blue-tinged flame dancing at its end. It hissed and spluttered in the breeze as if disapproving of the boys' presence there. Under this gaslight, the canal continued undeterred, straight into an opening in the wall so perfectly round that it had to be man-made, or at least Coprolite-made. But there was no ledge, or anything else that would afford them a way beside it.
"Well, that's that," Will articulated miserably. "We're snookered."
He backed away from the canal, totally disregarding a small stream issuing from the wall beside it. Water was trickling out of a fissure at about chest height and had worn a smooth groove down the cavern wall. It ran into an overflowing basin of water-polished rock. From there it flooded over the lip and down several small plateaus until it drained into the canal. The passage of water had left a brownish stain around its path, but this didn't deter Chester from sampling a mouthful.
"It's good. Why don't you try some?" he called over to Will. It was the first time he'd attempted to speak directly to him in nearly a day.
"Nope," Will replied morosely, flopping down on the ground with a forlorn sigh. He hugged his knees to his chest, rocking gently, and lowered his head so his face was hidden from Chester.
His frustration building to the bursting point, Chester resolved to snap his friend out of it, and stomped over to him.
"OK, Will," he said in a level, carefully controlled voice, so much so that it didn't sound natural at all and alerted Will to what was coming next. "We'll just sit here until you make up your mind you want to do something again. Take your time. I don't care if it's days or even weeks. Take as long as you want. That's fine with me." He blew through his lips. "In fact, if you want to just stay here until we rot, that's fine with me, too. I'm very sorry about Cal, but it doesn't change the reason why we're here… why you asked for my help to find your dad." He didn't speak for a moment, hovering over Will. "Or have you just forgotten about him?"
The last sentence had the effect of a jab to the stomach. Will gasped, but still he didn't raise his head.
"Suit yourself," Chester snapped at his friend, then retired a short distance, where he lay down. He didn’t know how much time had passed when he heard Will talking. It came like words in a dream, and Chester realized he must have nodded off.
"…you're right, we must keep going," Will was saying.
"Huh?"
"Let's be on our way." Will got briskly to his feet and went directly to the trickling stream to give it a cursory investigation. Then he began to study the opening where the canal passed into the cavern wall, shining his lantern just inside the entrance, in the hard shadows where the gaslight didn't penetrate. Nodding to himself, he focused his attention on the vertical rock face above it.
"We're all right," he announced, returning to where he'd left his backpack and shrugging it onto his shoulders.
"Huh? We are what? "
"I think it's clear," was Will's inscrutable response.
"Yeah, clear as mud!"
"Well, are you coming or not?" he harshly asked Chester, who stared at his friend, suspicious of the sudden change that had come over him. Will was already by the side of the canal, clipping his lantern onto his shirt pocket. Ha faced the wall for a few seconds, then began to heave himself up it. Finding foot— and hand-holds, he climbed in an arc that took him under the spluttering gaslight but over the entrance of the slow-moving canal, until he was safely on the opposite side.
"Not the first time that's been done," he declared. He called to Chester, still on the other bank: "Come on, don't just stand there. It's a piece of cake — not difficult to get across. Someone's chiseled out some grips."
Chester looked indignant and impressed in equal measures. His jaw dropped, as if he was about to say something, but he thought better of it, muttering only, "Business as usual."
Although Will wasn't following any discernable path, he now seemed to be so convinced they were going in the right direction that it was Chester tagging along after him again. Marching swiftly, they moved deeper into the featureless expanse, not encountering any other landmarks, until they eventually arrived at a place where the floor became looser and began to gradually ascend. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the canopy above their heads was also increasing in height but, with every step the boys took, the winds around them seemed to be blowing with much greater force.
"Phew, that's better!" Will said, running a finger around the inside of his sweat-soaked shirt collar. "Bit cooler now!"
Chester couldn't have been more relieved that Will appeared to have pulled himself out of the appalling melancholy into which he'd sunk. In fact, he was chatting away quite normally, although it felt so much quieter without Cal there to badger them. As if his mind were playing tricks on him, Chester had the oddest feeling that the boy was still there with them. He found himself glancing around in an effort to locate him.
"Hey, this feels sort of chalky," Will noted as they clambered up the slope, slipping and stumbling as the light-colored substrate shifted beneath them. For the last stretch, the incline had become more pronounced, and they had been forced to climb it on all fours.
Will suddenly stopped to pluck a rock the size of a tennis ball. "Wow! A fine specimen of a desert rose." Chester saw the pale pink blades that radiated out from a central point to the pale pink blades with his nail. "Yep, this is gypsum, all right. Nice, isn't it?" he said to Chester, who didn't have time to answer before Will was spouting forth again. "A fine example." He glanced around. "So there must have been evaporation going on here for the last century or so — unless, of course, this was buried and it's much older. Anyway, think I'll keep it," he said, slipping off his rucksack.
"You're going to do what? It's just a hunk of rock!"
"No, it's not rock. It's actually a mineral formation. Imagine some sort of sea right here." Will opened his arms expansively. "As it dries up, the salts all come out of solution and… well, the rest of what you see is sedimentary. You know about sedimentary rocks, don't you?"
"No, I don't," Chester admitted, studying his friend carefully.
"Well, you have three classes of rock: sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic," Will blathered on. "My favorites are sedimentary, just like we're finding down here, because there's a story in them, from the fossils you get in them. They're formed…"
"Will," Chester said gently.
"…formed generally on the surface, mostly underwater. Why would you find sedimentary rocks so deep in the earth? I wonder." He looked mystified at his own question, then answered it. "Yes, I suppose there must have been a subterranean lake or something here."