Hel took off his headphones and sat on the rim of the gouffre. There was nothing more he could do, and he did not want to hear Beñat go, if he went. He lowered his eyes and brought himself into middle-density meditation, narcotizing his emotions. He did not emerge until he heard a shout from the lad at the winch. Mark 40 meters was in the blocks. They could take him on the line!
Hel stood at the narrow crevice of the gouffre mouth. He could hear Le Cagot down there, his limp body scraping against the shaft walls. Notch by notch, the lads brought him out with infinite slowness so as not to hurt him. The sunlight penetrated only a meter or two into the dark hole, so it was only a few seconds between the appearance of Le Cagot’s harness straps and the time he was dangling free, unconscious and ashen-faced, from the pulley above.
When he regained consciousness, Le Cagot found himself lying on a board bed in the shepherd’s artzain xola, his arm in an improvised sling. While the lads made a brushwood fire, Hel sat on the edge of the bed looking down into his comrade’s weatherbeaten face with its sunken eyes and its sun-wrinkled skin still gray with shock under the full rust-and-gray beard.
“Could you use some wine?” Hel asked.
“Is the pope a virgin?” Le Cagot’s voice was weak and raspy. “You squeeze it for me, Niko. There are two things a one-armed man cannot do. And one of them is to drink from a xahako.”
Because drinking from a goatskin xahako is a matter of automatic coordination between hand and mouth, Nicholai was clumsy and squirted some wine into Beñat’s beard.
Le Cagot coughed and gagged on the inexpertly offered wine. “You are the worst nurse in the world, Niko. I swear it by the Swallowed Balls of Jonah!”
Hel smiled. “What’s the other thing a one-handed man can’t do?” he asked quietly.
“I can’t tell you, Niko. It is bawdy, and you are too young.”
In fact, Nicholai Hel was older than Le Cagot, although he looked fifteen years younger.
“It’s night, Beñat. We’ll bring you down into the valley in the morning. I’ll find a veterinarian to set that arm. Doctors work only on Homo sapiens.”
Then Le Cagot remembered. “I hope I didn’t hurt you too much when I got to the surface. But you had it coming. As the saying is: Nola neurtcen baituçu; Hala neurtuco çare çu.”
“I’ll survive the beating you gave me.”
“Good.” Le Cagot grinned. “You really are simpleminded, my friend. Do you think I couldn’t see through your childish ploy? You thought to enrage me to give me strength to make it up. But it didn’t work, did it?”
“No, it didn’t work. The Basque mind is too subtle for me.”
“It is too subtle for everybody but Saint Peter—who, by the way, was a Basque himself, although not many people know it. So, tell me! What does our cave look like?”
“I haven’t been down.”
“Haven’t been down? Alla Jainkoa! But I didn’t get to the bottom! We haven’t properly claimed it for ourselves. What if some ass of a Spaniard should stumble into the hole and claim it?”
“All right. I’ll go down at dawn.”
“Good. Now give me some more wine. And hold it steady this time! Not like some boy trying to piss his name into a snowbank!”
The next morning Hel went down on the line. It was clear all the way. He passed through the waterfall and down to the place where the shaft opened into the great cave. As he hung, spinning on the cable while the lads above held him in clamps as they replaced drums, he knew they had made a real find. The cavern was so vast that his helmet light could not penetrate to the walls.
Soon he was on the tip of the rubble heap, where he tied off his harness to a boulder so he could find it again. After carefully negotiating the rubble heap, where stones were held in delicate balance and counterbalance, he found himself on the cave floor, some two hundred meters below the tip of the cone. He struck on a magnesium flare and held it away behind him so he would not be blinded by its light. The cave was vast—larger than the interior of a cathedral—and myriad arms and branches led off in every direction. But the flow of the underground river was toward France, so that would be the route of major exploration when they returned. Filled though he was with the natural curiosity of a veteran caver, Hel could not allow himself to investigate further without Le Cagot. That would be unfair. He picked his way up the rubble cone and found the tied-off cable.
Forty minutes later he emerged into the misty morning sunlight of the gouffre. After a rest, he helped the lads dismount the aluminum-tube triangle and the anchoring cables for the winch. They rolled several heavy boulders over the opening, partly to hide it from anyone who might wander that way, but also to block the entrance to protect next spring’s sheep from falling in.
They scattered stone and pebbles to efface the marks of the winch frame and cable tie-offs, but they knew that most of the work of concealment would be done by the onset of winter.
Back in the artzain xola, Hel made his report to Le Cagot, who was enthusiastic despite his swollen arm throbbing with pain.
“Good, Niko. We shall come back next summer. Listen. I’ve been pondering something while you were down in the hole. We must give our cave a name, no? And I want to be fair about naming it. After all, you were the first man in, although we must not forget that my courage and skill opened the last of the chokes. So, taking all this into consideration, I have come up with the perfect name for the cave.”
“And that is?”
“Le Cagot’s Cave! How does that sound?”
Hel smiled. “God knows it’s fair.”
All that was a year ago. When the snow cleared from the mountain, they came up and began descents of exploration and mapping. And now they were ready to make their major penetration along the course of the underground river.
For more than an hour, Hel had slept on the rock slab, fully clothed and booted, while Le Cagot had passed the time talking to himself and the unconscious Hel, all the while sipping at the bottle of Izzara, taking turns. One drink for himself. The next on Niko’s behalf.
When at last Hel began to stir, the hardness of the rock penetrating even the comatose sleep of his fatigue, Le Cagot interrupted his monologue to nudge his companion with his boot. “Hey! Niko? Going to sleep your life away? Wake up and see what you have done! You’ve drunk up half a bottle of Izzara, greedy bastard!”
Hel sat up and stretched his cramped muscles. His inactivity had permitted the cave’s damp cold to soak in to the bone. He reached out for the Izzara bottle, and found it empty.
“I drank the other half,” Le Cagot admitted. “But I’ll make you some tea.” While Beñat fiddled with the portable solid-fuel cooker, Hel got out of his harness and paratrooper jumpsuit specially modified with bands of elastic at the neck and wrists to keep water out. He peeled off his four thin sweaters that kept his body warmth in and replaced the innermost with a dry jersey made of loosely knitted fabric, then he put three of the damp sweaters on again. They were made of good Basque wool and were warm even when wet. All this was done by the light of a device of his own design, a simple connection of a ten-watt bulb to a wax-sealed automobile battery which, for all its primitive nature, had the effect of keeping at bay the nerve-eroding dark that pressed in from all sides. A fresh battery could drive the little bulb day and night for four days and, if necessary, could be sent up, now that they had widened the bottleneck and double dihedron, to be recharged from the pedal-driven magneto that kept their telephone battery fresh.
Hel tugged off his gaiters and boots. “What time is it?”