Pecked to death by ducks (15 page)

But, I explained, the sanctuary at Falevai was intact. People were not taking the clams. Indeed, the success of the project at Falevai had been noted throughout Vava'u. Ten other villages had asked the government for assistance in creating their own clam circles. On the island of Taunga, one village had arranged its brood-stock circles in such a way that they spelled out a word.

"What word?" Helu asked.

"Ongomatu'a," I said.

Helu stared at me for some time, shaking his head, as if in disbelief. A slow, proud smile pulled at the corners of his mouth, and suddenly his face lit up brighter than the setting sun.

Ongomatu'a.

Parents.

Another breaker hit the cliff, and hundreds of waterplumes took on the gaudy tropical colors of the sky.

"This Dr. Lucas," Helu said, "I think he is an evil man."

There was the hard patter of falling water as the sea pulled back from the land.

"No, not evil," I said. "Just a bit of a ratbag."

LeckucjuitL

I loved this little room, one thousand feet below the surface of the earth. It had been my home for four days, and these last black seven or eight hours would be my final chance to savor the wonder. Alone.

The passage itself was tubular, about eight feet in diameter, and it was perfectly white, very crystalline, so that the walls and ceiling all shone glittery bright in the light from my helmet. The heat from my body loosened a few of the crystals from the ceiling so it looked as if it were snowing in Lechuguilla Cave.

The crystals were talclike gypsum, and the room was composed entirely of the stuff. I was sitting on my bed, an inflatable mattress, waiting until I stopped sweating.

Lechuguilla is a hot cave. The temperature is a constant 68 degrees, and the humidity is over 99 percent. The smallest effort causes a caver to burst into a sweat, and I had found, over the past few days of strenuous exploration, that the sweating process continued for about forty-five minutes after I stopped moving.

Because almost nothing lives in the cave—there are a few crickets near the entrance, no bats at all, and a host of invisible microorganisms—Lechuguilla was devoid of the familiar odors of life

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 124

and death that permeate the outside world. The air smelled clean, wet, and sterile, like freshly washed laundry, and it had a weight and feel to it, like the gentle caress of damp black velvet.

I liked camping alone in the cave, in the gypsum snow. I had never had any trouble sleeping in the silence and absolute darkness of Lechuguilla, probably because I was always so exhausted at the end of each day. There were, I knew, seven other cavers nearby. Some slept in groups; some, like myself, preferred solitary camping on the hard, sloping rock floors.

We had all eaten dinner together: freeze-dried food that we rehydrated and spooned up straight from the foil pack. My companions were among America's most noted cavers, and the topic of conversation was Lechuguilla Cave. We talked about "new leads," which might open up into huge undiscovered rooms. Such rooms could contain geological wonders that might keep the scientists at their microscopes for decades. These were quite realistic expectations.

Lechuguilla was discovered only four years ago, and it was unique in its size, in its origin, and in the strange formations found in its immense caverns.

I have been caving, in a desultory fashion, on and off, for about ten years. Still, Lechuguilla had been a surprise. It was so big, so hot, so intimidating, that it had taken me several days to come to something close to full comprehension of its marvels: Crystals the size of small trees, forests of aragonite flowers, huge-domed pits, rooms as high as a thirty-story building. That so many wonders existed in such profusion in one cave boggled the mind.

My dinner companions gibbered on about what further marvels Lechuguilla might offer. For the eight thousand or so active cavers in the United States, exploring caves is often a life-consuming passion. Men like the legendary Colorado caver Donald Davis describe it as the only activity in which a person of modest means can actually explore the unknown. Davis, who has personally mapped much of Lechuguilla, calls it "the cave I have been looking for my entire caving career."

It was, I thought listening to just this kind of talk over a

gluey freeze-dried macaroni dinner, as if someone had discovered the Grand Canyon in this day and age. In the summer of 1990 it was a staggering idea. The entire surface of the earth has been mapped. Some few areas are little known, but they have been photographed from planes or satellites. The moon has been mapped.

But here, under the surface of the American desert, on national park land, only three miles from Carlsbad Caverns, a new cave had been discovered. The only entrance to Lechuguilla is set in a spare desert canyon alive with low scrub: with creosote, prickly pear, and lechuguilla, which is a foot-high plant with pulpy green leaves so sharp they can cut through a pair of pants. The canyon takes its name from the lechuguilla plant, and the cave takes its name from the canyon.

This new cave is big: It drops 1,501 feet and is the deepest cave in America. When I made my first descent, 48.1 miles of it had been mapped, but explorers—pioneer cavers, my dinner companions—add more passage to the map with each expedition.

Exploring Lechuguilla Cave requires some technical rope work. There are free-fall rope ascents and descents of two hundred feet and more, and all this work is done in the dark.

The entrance is a seventy-foot rappel followed by another very short rappel, and a downhill walk that culminates at Boulder Falls, a 150-foot rappel that drops free—the rope merely dangles in the darkness of underground space—for most of the way.

Just past Boulder Falls, about hour or so into the trip, there is a block of gypsum the size of a twenty-story building laid on its side. From below, looking up, I could see that the hard white mineral followed the descending flow of the cave, like a glacier dropping out of a mountain valley. Smaller blocks of gypsum were falling away from the central mountain, falling away in the slow-motion vastness of geologic time; falling away like icebergs calving off a tidewater glacier. The room itself is called Giacier Bay.

In ten years of caving I had never seen anything at all like Glacier Bay. My companions, Rick Bridges and Anne Strait, were veteran Lechuguilla cavers, and they dashed by the glacier with

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 12.6

hardly a second look. There was, I thought, a clear implication of other, more awesome treasures below. In most American caves, Glacier Bay would be a destination, not just a sight to be contemplated in passing.

The trail dropped out of Glacier Bay, and the big passages ended abruptly. Ahead, there was a great cleft in the mountain, a split that was often no wider than a man's shoulders. This area, the Rift, is set at an angle that varies from sixty-five to eighty-five degrees. I moved through it leaning to the left, climbing up over rocks that were wedged along the way. Where there were no rocks under us, we moved across narrow ledges, and when I looked down, my light was swallowed by the darkness. It was better not to look down.

Nothing about the cave was terribly technical—not the rope work, not the climbing—but it never let up, never gave me a break. A typical move might be likened to, say, getting up on a small table, crawling across, then getting down. Easy, unless you have to do it fifty times in a row, in the dark, with a fifty-foot drop under you. My forty-pound pack was hateful.

I found I required two headbands to soak up the sweat dripping into my eyes. There were sharp gypsum crystals under my soaking-wet T-shirt, and, worse, there were more crystals in my shorts. My eyes were already red-rimmed from salty sweat. I was, I realized, four hours into the first trip, badly chafed, and already totally exhausted.

The passages led downward through a series of rope drops, a painful crawl-through passage called the Tinsel Town Maze, and a long stand-up passage that opened up into an enormous cavern, the Chandelier Ballroom. Immense crystals of gypsum hung from the sloping ceiling like baroque drunken stalactites. At their base the crystals were as thick as the trunks of small trees, and they swept down off the stone in ragged arcs. Some of them were eighteen and twenty feet long. They were powdery white at their thickest upper reaches, but down toward the tips, some of which were at eye level, they began branching out, like elk antlers or claws. The tips were clear, crystalline, and there were tiny globules of water hanging from the ends of most of them.

It is estimated that there are about fifty of these formations over ten feet long in the cavern called the Chandelier Ballroom. They are the largest such crystals to be found anywhere. The chandeliers are like the geysers of Yellowstone Park: They are the jewels of this cave, its world-class wonders.

That first night I collapsed in my gypsum-snow cave, not far from the Chandelier Ballroom. Alone in the darkness, in the silence, I lay in a light jungle sleeping bag and slept for twenty hours. Lechuguilla required, I discovered, stamina as well as certain technical skills.

When I was finally able to walk again, my companions and I set off to look for "leads" in some of the known rooms. Rick Bridges and Anne Strait took me to a cavern called Darktown, below the bright layer of glittering gypsum.

"Look around you," Bridges said, and when I did, I could see hints of shimmering metallic glitter in my light. There were, I finally saw, thin strands of clear gypsum crystal, called angel hair, hanging all across the expanse of this huge dark room. The angel hair looked a bit like the tinsel you might hang on a Christmas tree, but it was clear, and some of the strands were thirty feet long. It was an incredibly fragile room, and walking too rapidly through it could create a breeze that might snap the delicate strands of angel hair. Nothing at all like these elongated crystals is known to exist anywhere else.

On another day we left the Chandelier Ballroom through a low-crawling passage that led to the Prickly Ice Cube Room. The ceiling of the room was as high as a twenty-story building. The floor was littered with gypsum blocks that had calved off of another gypsum glacier perhaps thirty-five feet high. Drops of water falling from the ceiling had eroded away the tops of the blocks, creating little spikes that stuck up eight and ten and twelve inches. From above, the white blocks looked like huge prickly ice cubes.

We caught up with another team of cavers, including Patty Kambesis, Chris Stein, and National Geographic photographer Nick Nichols. The combined teams were crawling through what is called a boneyard maze, a series of dry, dusty passages that

wound around and over and through each other like tunnels in an anthill. At one point there was a walking passage that skirted a funnellike pit that dropped off into darkness. I slipped, fell, and began sliding rapidly.

The funnel was a foot deep in powdery "rock flour," and I was sliding down on my belly, not entirely uncomfortable, although the events of the immediate future concerned me. Patty Kambesis was below me, and she reached out a hand. Patty weighs one hundred pounds. I weigh two hundred, and had gathered a bit of momentum. It occurred to me, in passing, that if I took Patty's hand, I'd pull her down with me, and she would share my uncertain future. I declined her offer, rather gallantly, I thought.

A sharp rock ripped through my T-shirt and gashed my chest. I could now see that there was a low archway just below. I got a leg up and managed to stop myself—bam!—like that.

Everyone was looking at me, and the combined force of the lights on their helmets felt hot, like fire. I wasn't badly hurt, only embarrassed.

Cavers wear message T-shirts that emphasize the individual's responsibility to move through passages safely: if you die, we split

UP YOUR GEAR.

And yet, had I so much as broken an ankle, the two teams would have struggled for days to pull me up the ropes and through the Rift. It wouldn't have been any fun for anyone, but they would have done it.

"I'm okay," I said quickly.

Chris Stein, who was closest, took my hand and pulled me out of the rock flour. "Hey," he said by way of comment on the acrobatic nature of my fall, "the Romanian judge gave you a nine-point-six."

After two hours in the dry, dusty boneyard maze, we ducked under a stone archway and stood on the shores of Lake Castro valva. It was sixty feet to the opposite shore. The water was twenty feet deep, and it glittered and shimmered in my light like a pool of liquid sapphire. We stripped off our filthy clothes so as not to foul the pool and swam to the far shore. The banks were smooth and reddish brown, so delicate and crystalline that we walked over them barefoot.

The ceiling was hung with white stone icicles and with long, thin white columns that looked like giant soda straws. To my right, the far reddish-brown bank rose up in a sloping hillside that was guarded by huge formations that looked like otherworldly pagodas or huge melted Buddhas.

The most fantastic formations, however, were under water. Circular stone lily pads, some of them ten feet in diameter, stood just under the surface of the turquoise water. They were balanced, like tables, on stone columns that extended from the floor of the pool. These shelf stone lily pads were reddish brown, but their outer edges were scalloped in a slightly thicker smooth white stone, like buttery frosting.

I stood barefoot on the smooth bank and thought that Cas-trovalva was the most beautiful place I had ever been.

That night, I sat on my inflatable mattress in my snow cave and waited to stop sweating. The conversation over dinner had been a familiar one: cave preservation, and what explorers can do to minimize their own impact on the cave.

The cavers wear nonmarking boots—the kind of shoes you must wear on a gymnasium floor—rather than mar flowstone floors. In places like Castrovalva people go barefoot or wear clean sneakers they carry in their packs for the purpose. The pools, which are still and clear, are not for bathing. The project even puts clean pitchers nearby so the water isn't fouled by organic material in a canteen. (The only exception to the no-swimming policy is when a pool must be swum for the purposes of exploration.)