I called out, for the thousandth time, “Hello? Thomas? Hello?” Nothing. Or maybe something, but too faint to hear. You can hear voices in drips, in cave breaths, just the way you can hear music in airplane roars. I drank water, my first sip in an hour or two, and blew grit from my nose into my hand; the smell of wet, cold rock suddenly became much sharper. I slumped back against a wall, to keep my legs from freezing up. My knees were purple and pruny. My right sock was red with either blood or dirt. I was doing, and had apparently been doing, something between crying and whimpering. The tunnel went on, but I’d decided, or discovered, that I wasn’t capable of following it. It wasn’t that I didn’t know which way the entrance was, but I could feel my sense of orientation wavering, going in and out like a radio signal, and I knew it would only get worse.
There was, I noticed when I went to wipe my hand, a puddle at the place where the wall met the floor, and there were drops falling into the center of it: pock, pock, pock, pock.
If I die here, I thought, that’ll be the last thing I hear. What I didn’t think right away, and again, I blame my mental state, was: Where is the dripping coming from? When I followed the shine on the ceiling with my light, I came to a crack right over my head, not much bigger than a pebble. I didn’t touch it, for fear of bringing the tunnel rubbling down on me, but it was that crack that gave me the idea, at a moment when I didn’t think I was capable of ideas: there was more to the cave than this tunnel I was in. If there could be water above me, there could be tunnels below me. I don’t know if this was even coherent thinking, but it was my thinking. There could be an actual voice.
I don’t know how long I spent scrabbling along with my ear to the ground (time was one of the many senses that had gone wobbly), but it was long enough for me to be sure that the voice was not just an echo, and that it was coming from somewhere below the part of my little chamber closest to where the tunnel continued. “Hold on! I’m coming! Wait!” So I did go on, now having to do a kind of military crawl on my elbows; by that point I was like a dog in the last frenzied stretch of a hunt.
It wasn’t until I came around a little bend that the voice suddenly became much clearer, and that I understood just how far down it was coming from. “Hello?” I called. “Hello?” And as I lay there, a trembling antenna, there was finally a moment of quiet, a pause in both of our yelling, in which I knew that I’d found Thomas and Thomas knew that someone had come for him; it gave me goose bumps on the inside of my skin.
The tunnel dropped off into what I thought at first was just a kind of pothole (if I’d had my light off I might have slid in headfirst), but what turned out to be something much deeper than that; it was as if I’d been crawling along in an air-conditioning duct and had suddenly come upon an elevator shaft.
“Help! Help! Help!”
“Thomas? I’m here. It’s Adam.”
“Help! Oh God, help.”
I was lying on my stomach, peering over the edge of the pit, struggling to find him with my light; the beam was barely strong enough to shine as deep as he was, and when I did finally find him, it was only his face, only the pale stretch of his forehead and cheeks, that showed up in all that dark. My heart was beating so hard that I thought I might faint or die before I’d even gotten to him.
“I fell,” he said. “I hurt my leg. I’m so thirsty. Please. Help.”
He didn’t sound anything like the Thomas who’d been rambling to me in the hotel; terror had sharpened his voice and raised its pitch. He must have been twenty or twenty-five feet below me. From what I could tell his pit was about the diameter of a well.
“Thomas? I’m going to come get you.”
“Yes. Yes. Please. Help. I need water. My light broke. I don’t have anything.”
“I just need to get down to you.”
“OK. Yes. Please.”
Again, I don’t know how long I lay there thinking of what to do, listening to the cave breathe and to my heart thud, staring down into the dark, but at some point the thought arrived in my mind, as if it had been spoken by another voice, one at an even greater depth than Thomas’s: You need to leave. And as soon as it had been spoken, a chorus of voices materialized to bolster it. How could I possibly get down to him without getting hurt myself? And how, if I did get down to him, would we possibly make it back up? I could tear up my sweatshirt and try to make a rope of it, but that would only reach a few feet, and it would never support a person, let alone two people, even if I could find something to attach it to. I could hurry back to the entrance of the cave and try to find someone to come back with me, but I’d never find anyone, and by the time I made it out and made it back, he’d probably have died.