The troika, waiting for us in the courtyard of the house, is a beautiful sight. Three noble-looking white horses, their cold breath like clouds of steam, stand in front of the sleigh. As well as a collar harness, the middle horse has a carved wooden arch over its mane, with tiny silver bells hanging from it. Mr Sokolov points it out. “That is the shaft bow; it’s attached to those two long poles which connect to the sleigh. The driver drives the middle horse, a stallion called Sasha. He trots at a fast rate, and pulls the sleigh along. The side horses are mares – Masha and Dunya. They canter, not trot. But of course, all three can can gallop too. At full speed, they can travel over thirty miles an hour.”
“They’re gorgeous horses.”
They are the Orlov breed – Russia’s finest horses! Although the ancestor of all the Orlovs came originally from Turkey…” Mr Sokolov is about to tell us the history of the breed, but Emily buts in.
“It’s cold out here. Are we ready to leave now?”
Sokolov calls out loudly, and a man in a tall woolen hat appears. He steps up onto the driving bench of the troika, and gestures to Emily and me to take the padded seats in the rear of the sleigh. A boy follows the man out, carrying blankets; as soon as we are seated, he lays them over our knees, then stands back from the sleigh. The man shakes the reins, and we set off.
The ride is smoother and faster than any horse-drawn carriage: in fact, it’s faster than almost any motor car I’ve been in. I’m astonished how rapidly the familiar surroundings of Yermak vanish, and how quickly the little town of Kungur, built on low rocky bluffs above the Sylva River, comes into view. Beyond it, we see higher, thickly wooded hills surrounding the deep valley of the river, where Mr Sokolov said the caves are.
As we approach Kungur, the snow is several feet deep across our road and the surrounding fields; the fences between the fields are buried in the drifts and almost invisible. The trotting stallion ahead of us gives a thrumming rhythm to our ride, counterpointed by the cantering of the mares either side, and the jangly melody of the silver bells. We pass through the houses of Kungur without slowing. Nor does the pace slacken when, on the far side of the town, our sleigh leaves the road and branches off onto a narrow track, a snowy trail leading into a deep forest.
The bare branches of every tree are thickly coated with snow; as we speed along, the morning sun flashes between the trunks. In the undergrowth of the woodland, a fairyland has appeared; domes, castles, ramparts and bridges of frosted white. A deer leaps across our path, but with a flick of the reins, the driver and horses swerve to avoid it. Our track begins to descend through the trees, and the speed of the troika and the sparkling sunshine make my head reel. The descent is long and winding. But finally, the driver pulls the horses to an abrupt stop.
We are at the bottom of the deep valley of the Sylva River, surrounded by high forested slopes topped with sheer crags. To our right and just below us, the river runs swiftly between snowy banks. But the driver gestures to our left. We see a small grove of pines at the foot of a snow-plastered rocky bluff. Among the pine branches, I see a hidden, dark space.
I glance at Emily. “Did Mr Sokolov say there would be a guide to show us round these caves?”
“Someone’s been here already today, Agnes – look. Maybe they are our cave guide.” She points out a single line of prints in the snow, heading towards the grove of trees. But the driver shakes his head.
“There used to be a guide, years ago, when the caves had many visitors. But that was before the war. Now, hardly anyone comes here. So you must guide yourself. Here is a map of the caves. Whatever you do, keep to the marked route. If you get lost down there, you have no hope of rescue.” He hands us a sheet of paper, and two flashlights. Then he sits back on the sleigh, wraps himself in the blankets, and closes his eyes.
We follow the footsteps through the snow, into the shade under the trees. The mouth of the cave is a flat dark shape among the rocks ahead of us, as if cut out of black cardboard. We switch on our flashlights.
It feels like stepping into a little stone-lined room, with a constructed floor of wooden planks. The space is tiny: I can reach and touch the rock walls either side. Ahead of us, a bare stony crevice burrows into the earth for a few yards or so, narrowing to a tiny, dry slit. There is no ice anywhere.
“Is this the cave? It looks very unimpressive.”
“It’s there.” Emily shines her flashlight on a hatch in the floor. “According to the map, we have to climb down there. When we reach the bottom, there is a paved trail to follow.” The hatch has no fastening; we lift it, and see a ladder descending into utter blackness. Emily looks at me.
“Are you okay with this? I’m used to mines that go deep underground, but how about you?”
“Of course. I’m fine.”
The steady descent, rung after rung, seems to go on for ever. But finally we reach a stony floor. “It was only fifty feet or so of descent” Emily says. I sense a vast unseen space around us, and Emily shines her flashlight ahead of us into the gloom. Rough slabs of stone are laid in a trail along the ground, leading us into the interior of the cave.
We walk forward. Almost immediately, I see what I hadn’t expected: water in front of my feet. Our flashlight beams illuminate the dark, cold expanse of an underground lake.
“Look!” Emily’s flashlight is waving in the blackness, picking out the far shore of the lake. What we see is astonishing. Above the waterline, a wall of enormous ice-crystals, patterned hexagonally like gigantic snowflakes, runs the whole length of the lake. The lake, as still as a mirror, reflects the lit area of the ice-wall in perfect symmetry. It looks like a giant honeycomb of glittering ice. Then, Emily’s rising beam picks out the ceiling. It is entirely covered with fantastically shaped crystalline ice-stalactites, like a host of jewelled chandeliers. Here and there the crystals glow with an unearthly light – some of them green, some blue, as if they were fluorescent emeralds and sapphires. Emily speaks in a hushed tone, as if we’re in a church.
“Those unreal colors – there must be mineral ores in the rocks up there, filtering into the water that flows down into this place. Azurite for sure, and maybe cobalt ores, but there are rarer minerals too. And the whole place is so – huge.” Emily is right: the scale is baffling, and we both stand, awe-struck. The wandering beams of our flashlights pick out marvel after marvel in the colossal cavern around us.
I hear a noise, as if a pebble has dropped into the black water.
“What’s that, Emily?”
“Probably a piece of ice melting and falling.”
“It can’t be. Everything in here is frozen hard as iron.”
“But the lake itself isn’t frozen, Agnes. So it can’t be really cold in this cave. Mr Sokolov said it remains at a constant temperature, even when it’s Arctic outside. Let’s explore… look, the path is paved with stone slabs here, along this side of the lake. Another relic of the days when this place used to have tourists.”
We follow the path, which winds along the very edge of the lake; in places the slabs form stepping-stones across the water. Some of the stones are only a few inches wide, and a few of them are covered with a thin film of ice. We step gingerly to avoid slipping into the lake. After ten careful minutes, we reach a narrow cleft between icy walls. We bend and squeeze through it.
Beyond the cleft, the cave widens again into a different kind of wonderland. Our flashlights reveal thousands of pencil-thin glassy fingers of ice stalactites. They hang from a wide, low ceiling, and reach down within inches of our heads. One either side of us, as far as our flashlight beams can penetrate, stumpy ice stalagmites, one below every stalactite, cover the floor, like a thick forest of tree-stumps. Most of them are about a foot thick, and the height of my waist. A narrow trail winds among the stalagmites, like a pathway among flower beds.