The sides bloated in behind him. The bottom ten feet of the opening fused shut with a kiss. A gap remained open near the ceiling, but it was easily nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit through there. No one could conceivably climb through.
'Ike?' called Ali.
It was as if he had just changed into solid rock.
The new wall quickly choked back the river. Even as Ali's boat of people sat there, the river's bottom grew more exposed, inch by inch. The corridor was filling with steam. It was going to be a race to keep ahead of the deprivation.
'We can't stay here,' someone said.
'Wait,' Ali commanded. She added, 'Please.'
They waited and the riverbed drained lower. In another few minutes their raft would be sitting upon bare stone.
Ali's cracked lips parted. God the Father, she prayed. Let this one go free.
It was not like her. True devotion was not quid pro quo. You never cut deals with God. Once, as a child, she had pleaded for her parents' return. Ever since, Ali had decided to let be what was. Thy will be done.
'Let him live,' she murmured.
The walls did not open. This was not a fairy tale. The stone stayed welded.
'Let's go,' said Ali.
Then they heard a different sound. Dammed on the far side, the river had built height. Abruptly, a jet of water shot through the molten aperture at the top.
'Look!'
Like Jonah being vomited from the whale, one, then two men came blasting from the hole. Sheathed in water, they were protected from the scalding rock and thrown clear into the lower river.
The two soldiers staggered downstream through the thigh-deep water, weaponless, burned, naked. But alive. The raft of scientists returned and pulled the two bleating,
shocked men onto their floor. 'Where's Ike?' Ali yelled to them, but their throats were too swollen to speak.
They looked to the hole of spouting water, and a shape sprang through the torrent. It was long and black with mottled gray, Ike's empty sea kayak. Next appeared his paddle. Ike came last.
He held onto the gunnel of his kayak, half cooked. When his strength returned, he emptied the craft of water and got himself in and came paddling down to them. He was burned, but whole, right down to his shotgun.
It had been the closest of calls, and he knew it. He took a deep breath, shook the water from his hair, and did his best to stop down the big grin. He looked each of them in the eye, last of all Ali.
'What are we waiting for?' he said.
Many hours later, the expedition finished its marathon beneath the seamount. They pulled onto a shoal of green basalt in cooling air. There was a small stream of clear water.
The two lucky soldiers were returned to Walker, naked. Their gratitude to Ike was obvious. The colonel's shame at abandoning them was like a dangerous cloud.
For the next twenty hours, people slept. When they woke, Ike had stacked some rocks to pool the stream for them to drink. Ali had never seen him so happy.
'You made them wait,' he said to her.
In full view of the others, he kissed her on the lips. Maybe that was the safest way he could think to do it. She went along with it, even blushing.
By now, Ali was beginning to recognize the archangel inside Ike's sausage skin of scars and wild tattooing. The more she trusted him, the more she did not. He had an esprit, an air of immortality. She could see how each brush with great risk would serve to feed it, and how eventually even a kiss might destroy him.
Naturally, they called the river Styx.
The slow current lofted them. Some days they barely dipped a paddle, drifting with the flow. Hundreds of miles of shoreline stretched by with elastic monotony. They named some of the more prominent landmarks, and Ali jotted the names down to enter onto her maps each night.
After a month of acclimation, their circadian rhythms were finally synched to the changeless night. Sleep resembled hibernation, profound crashes into dream, REMs practically shaking them. Initially they lapsed into ten-hour stretches, then twelve. Each time they closed their eyes, it seemed they slept longer. Finally their bodies settled on a communal norm: fifteen hours. After that much sleep, they would usually be good for a thirty-hour 'day.'
Ike had to teach them how to pace such a long waking cycle, otherwise they would have destroyed themselves with exhaustion. It took stronger muscles and thicker calluses and constant attention to respiration and food to stay mobile for twenty-four hours or more at a time.
If not for their watches, they would have sworn their biological clocks were the same as on the surface. There were many advantages to this new regimen. They were able to cover vastly more territory. Also, without the sun and moon to cue them, they began to live, in a sense, longer.
Time dilated. You could finish a five-hundred-page novel in a single sitting. They developed a craving for Beethoven and Pink Floyd and James Joyce, anything of magnum-opus length.
Ike tried to instill in them new awareness. The shapes of rocks, the taste of minerals, the holes of silence in a cavern: memorize it all, he said. They humored him. He knew his stuff, which took the burden off them. It was his job, not theirs. He went on trying. Someday you won't have your instruments and maps, he said. Or me. You'll
need to know where you are with your fingertips, by an echo receding. Some tried to emulate his quiet manner, others his unspoken authority with things violent. They liked how he spooked Walker's solemn gunmen.
That he had been a mountaineer was obvious in his economy and care. From his big stone walls in Yosemite and his Himalayan mountains, Ike had learned to take the journey one inch at a time. Long before the underworld ever came into his life, Ali realized, it was the climbing that had shaped Ike's tactile perceptions. It came naturally to him to read the world through his fingertips, and Ali liked to think it had given him an edge even on his first accidental descent from Tibet. The irony was that his talent for ascent had become his vehicle for the abyss.
Often, before the others woke each morning, Ali would see him flickering off upon the black water, not a riffle in his wake. At such times she wishfully imagined this was the real man within him. The sight of him slipping monk-like into the wilderness made her think of the simple force of prayer.
He quit using paint and simply blazed the wall with a pair of chemical candles and went on. They would float past his cold blue crosses glowing above the waters like a neon JESUS SAVES . They followed him through the apertures and rock meatus. He would be waiting on a scarp of olivine or reefs of iron, or sitting in his night-colored kayak, holding on to an outcrop. Ali liked him at peace.