The Loner, page 22
At the top of Poetic Justice, Mark entered a low passage, less than eighteen inches high, with a flat floor and a flat roof. There were a large number of columns on either side, which gave the illusion of supporting the roof. There were shallow puddles in the floor, which were impossible to avoid. There was no room to crawl on hands and knees; the only way forward was flat-out, drawing oneself along on elbows and toes, or by pushing with knees and feet.
Mark had not crawled more than a few feet, when he felt a bump, and sensed his helmet had met an obstruction in front of him. He had his head in a sideways position, and on turning to see what was directly ahead, he saw the obstacle was Bob’s foot.
“Does this go on very far?” he asked.
“Twenty feet or so,” came Bob’s muffled reply.
“What kind of passage is this called, Bob?”
Pablo overheard Mark’s question and called from behind: “It’s what you do after an ugly tart has got you drunk, Mark – it’s called a bedding plane crawl!”
Bob groaned: “Not that old joke!” he called.
They stayed motionless for some minutes. Mark asked what they were waiting for.
Bob was getting bored of the other’s continuous stream of humourless questions. “It’s what’s known as congestion,” he replied impatiently. “There’s a pitch ahead, and everyone’s taking their time.”
And so, by slow degrees, the queue in the bedding plane moved forward, and Mark emerged onto a ledge above a narrow passage, which ended abruptly in a pitch. There was not much room, as all the available space in the passage was taken up by the man holding the lifeline. By the time Mark was tied onto the rope, he was so cold and shivering that he was only too glad to get onto the ladder. Once again he looked down and saw the bottom was not far. He made it again without losing his nerve.
The Liverpool group waited until they were all down the ladder before moving on. That was another painful wait while Mark got cold again. Then they followed another long winding narrow passage with a small stream. Soon they climbed out of the stream into the bed of an abandoned watercourse. Mark felt warmer, as their pace increased. Then the roof lowered, and they crawled through an aperture into a more spacious part of the system.
The passage they had entered was high and wide, large enough to accommodate six or more people standing abreast. There was a sand floor, and the Easegill Beck flowed over it, an underground river fed by tributaries from narrow inlets, as well as from its main sink. The level of the water was so low that it hardly covered their ankles, but Bob pointed upwards, for the sake of those who had not seen the Easegill Caverns before – there was mud and blades of dead grass sticking to the roof.
“This is part of the Master Cave,” he said. “It takes all the water from the Beck. When the weather’s bad, it floods to roof just here. The dead grass on t’roof didn’t grow here; it was washed down.”
A moment later Bob let out a cry of laughter. He bent down into the water and picked up an object. “Grass isn’t the only thing that gets washed down here,” he exclaimed. “Look at this – false teeth!”
He held up a set of teeth which grinned eerily in the dim light. They looked at Bob in a puzzled way – until Pablo saw the joke.
“Trust you, Bob, to think of something like this,” he said. “Who else would have mistaken a sheep’s jawbone for a set of false teeth?”
“Ah, you’ve ruined the joke, Pablo,” Bob retorted, holding the jawbone and opening and closing it in a macabre manner. “They’d have all fallen for that one if it hadn’t been for you!”
The upstream end of the passage was only a few feet from the inlet where they had entered the Master Cave. A mass of huge boulders had fallen from the roof and choked the passage. The beck gurgled out of the boulders, and Mark went to examine the place where the water rose.
Mercifully Bob had had enough soakings for that day. “I wouldn’t go that way if I were you Mark,” he advised. “You might get very wet.”
Bob climbed up into the roof. Another bedding plane lay in front of them. Mark’s elbows and knees felt very sore, and he was aware that his clothes now had large holes, which no longer protected the joints, and that he already had several cuts and grazes. The crawl seemed to go on, inexorable and interminable, but still he did not complain. After a long and painful ordeal, he followed Bob down a hole in the floor, and then he waded in thigh deep water, under the upstream end of the boulder choke, until they emerged into an enormous chamber.
Someone announced this was Stop Pot, where the route from Lancaster Pot joined the Easegill Caverns. Pablo, who was the only member of the party with an electric light, shone it up into the roof, so that they could appreciate the height of the cavern. A slope of boulders and scree ascended one side of the Beck for more than seventy feet.
They stopped for a moment to rest, before proceeding upstream. The way on lay through a long and large cavern. It was the first of a series of similar chambers. It was an old abandoned watercourse, in places twenty or thirty feet high, with a width in places of more than twenty feet. Where Mark could see the floor, a coating of compressed mud and silt covered it. Over the millennia, huge blocks had fallen from the roof, some of them as big as houses, but all with smooth and slippery surfaces. It was necessary to scramble up, over, and across these, picking and choosing the way forward with care.
The boulder-strewn caverns seemed to go on for ever. At length Mark climbed down from the final rock block, and found himself on a sandy floor. Some tape was laid to mark both sides of the path they took. Bob warned Mark and others not to cross the tape, as they were coming to Gypsum Cavern, and there were natural gypsum crystal formations outside the tapes, and these should not be disturbed, as they were very rare.
They turned a corner, and Mark’s eyes opened wide with surprise. The chamber they had entered was a big one, about thirty feet in width. The sandy floor rose from the centre on all sides in anticline. The rock roof was grey in colour and flat: it rested on perpendicular walls. From the roof there hung a forest of stalactites, which covered the whole ceiling, each no more than about eighteen inches long, and tapering into slender hollow tubes, with diameters no greater than a drinking straw. These straw stalactites had a smooth, glossy, white colour, and were so thin and delicate as to be almost translucent; they seemed to glow with the refracted light of their lamps. The contrast of glossy, marble, white against the greyness of the rock, and the yellow sand, was exquisitely beautiful. They sat down on the sand and spent a long time admiring the view. Bob unpacked his camera and took photographs. For once, no-one complained. Even the cold from their damp clothes was worth bearing for a while in such splendid surroundings.
Mark walked up to the very end of the cavern, and noted, high up in the wall, the entrance of what appeared to be another bedding plane crawl. He asked Bob where it went.
“I don’t think you can get through here,” Bob replied. “But, if you could, this crawl would take you to Easter Grotto.”
“What’s Easter Grotto?”
“It used to be a beautiful place,” Bob said. “I saw it soon after it was discovered. I went there another way. Easter Grotto is about half the width of Gypsum Cavern. The roof is less than four foot high. There were columns, and thousands of straw stalactites hanging down from the roof until they almost touched the floor. The Grotto is longer than Gypsum Cavern. So you had to crawl under the formations to see them all.”
“That was the trouble. The place is ruined now, and very little is left.”
“Why?”
“I suppose it was inevitable,” Bob continued. “You see, even the most careful caver could not go very far without breaking a straw or two. Even so, only a year or two ago, it was still the prettiest place in any British cave – you couldn’t say the same today.”
Mark sat down and viewed the Gypsum Cavern formations again. He tried to imagine what Easter Grotto had been like. It was an unforgettable sight, and he studied the stalactite ceiling of the chamber with an almost religious fascination.
Then they set off on the return journey: through the boulder strewn chambers, along the bedding plane crawl after Stop Pot, into the Master Cave, and out along the passages leading to the Poetic Justice pitch. Mark climbed the ladder effortlessly, and the drop down the chimney was a simple exercise.
Then they came to Spout Hall. Bob climbed up into the spout.
“What are you doing that for?” Pablo called. “Aren’t we going the dry way?”
“I don’t know how to get to it from this end, Pablo. So we’re going to have to get wet again.”
“You’re a liar and a bastard!”
So Mark and the others followed Bob up the waterfall. If Mark had ever had the chance to dry out, he got completely soaked all over again.
Half an hour later, they had climbed the final ladder and emerged onto the fell. Bob and Pablo walked back to the farm together.
“What do you think of Mark Flitley?” Bob asked.
“Not much! Why?”
“I’m wondering if we’re being too hard on him.”
“What do you mean, Bob?”
“He’s very keen, isn’t he?”
“You mean he’s not going to get pissed off!” There was a note of regret in Pablo’s voice.
“Aye! We’ve given him a fair trial. We didn’t have to take him down or up the Spout. He doesn’t seem to mind getting bruised, cut, or wet. We’re not going to get rid of him so easily, Pablo!”
Pablo nodded.
“And he got up P.J. on his own. If he can do that without a rope, he can do most of the climbing you need to be able to do in a cave.”
“Yes, you’re right,” Pablo observed. “The only trouble is he can’t climb ladders!”
“Short ones don’t seem to bother him, Pablo.”
“That’s not the point! Most Yorkshire caves have at least one big pitch in them! Oh! All right, Bob, I take your point. I don’t mind if Mark comes with us. We’ll just have to be very careful with him on ladders, I suppose. But what about t’hard trips?”
“What hard trips, Pablo? You know, as well as I do, we have our priorities right in this club; what’s important is the social side – wine, women, and song. That’s what really matters – caving has always taken second place!”
CHAPTER 15
A New Friend
Fiona sat at her usual place in the William Brown Library. She was trying to concentrate on the text book in front of her, doing her best to sweep away the surge of boredom that was rapidly engulfing her. Her long, dark, shoulder-length hair fell in front of her eyes. She pushed it back before it could totally obscure the print which she was meaning to read. She thought about the imminent exams and yawned. She considered her home and the people she knew – her boyfriend; the warmth of his embrace and company...her thoughts began to wander from the task in hand.
It occurred to her that there must be a reason for her lapse of concentration. Perhaps she was tired – there had been the long party of the previous night. But if she was tired, the answer was to take a rest. She had been staring at her books, with her head bent well forward – and making no progress at all. This would not do, she told herself. So she tried leaning back. She was reading Sociology. So, how better to re-invigorate her waning enthusiasm than by observing the behaviour of the other occupants of the room?
She noted the tramps, and idly wondered what had brought them to ruin. Had they lost hope after a family breakup or bereavement? Had the sudden blow of unemployment shattered their self-respect? Had their spirit been broken by a long spell of imprisonment?
They were regulars in that room: the man who creaked every time he moved because of the layer of newspapers under his clothes; the man who hid himself in clouds of acrid smoke behind bookcases; the man who reeked of methylated spirits, and kept turning the pages of the same book over and over again without reading them – but all of them quiet, seeming eager to look as though they belonged to the place – until closing time, when they would feel obliged to shuffle out into the cold and onto the street, or perhaps to a Salvation Army hostel. Fiona felt sorry for them.
Then there was the student with the law books.There was something familiar about him which made her wonder where she might have seen him before. He was also a regular user of the room, as indeed she was herself, although she had not started using it until a few weeks ago. Now the student was not exactly a tramp, but she could not help but detect that he had certain tramp-like qualities: he had a nervous twitch; he kept biting his nails; he frowned at odd moments for no apparent reason, and his face went through a strange sequence of peculiar expressions without any clear purpose. But in one respect at least, he did not resemble the vagrants: his eyes were not glazed or helplessly vacant as theirs were. She could not fail to be aware of him looking at her occasionally, and then shyly turn his head away when she saw him, as if he was afraid of her.
On this occasion, he was sitting on the same table, almost opposite her.
It was, of course, conventional not to begin a conversation with a strange man. But then, she thought, she was unconventional, and in this age of female emancipation, the old rules should not apply. She wondered vaguely if there was any purpose in getting to know the student. But then, she reflected, she had so many other friends that the effort was not really worth making. Such a pity, she thought absently, so many days had gone by with both sitting on their own in the same room – and not a word had passed between them. She turned back to her books and started reading again.
Quite suddenly her concentration (if indeed she could have been said to be concentrating) was disturbed. Someone asked her rather loudly what she was studying. Her head flew back with a jerk. The sense of shock was embarrassing. She was completely taken by surprise. She looked up to see if the familiar but unknown law student really had picked up courage to address her.
“Sociology,” she whispered in reply, while at the same time, she was reassured to find that it was indeed the law student.
“What’s that like?” the other asked.
“It’s very interesting.” That was a lie. She yawned. She really had had enough of her boring books. It was time for a break. “I’m going for coffee,” she announced. “Are you coming?”
The law student hesitated. “Do they sell coffee here?” he asked.
“No, of course not. There’s a restaurant in the Art Gallery. Have you never been there?”
They left the Library, and walked uphill to the building next door. This was approached through a portico of grand Doric columns. It was one of the few public buildings which either had not been damaged in the War, or if it had, looked as though it had been restored to its original condition. A large open hall led to a grand staircase with paintings lining the walls. They climbed the stairs and passed through a series of spacious rooms with a fine collection of pictures. The dying hero lay on the deck of his flagship in the moment of victory; an eighteenth century gentleman and his lady rode two finely drawn horses on a neat country estate; from separate paintings, Queen Elizabeth and King Henry watched the onlooker with expressionless eyes, while in another room, Giotto struggled to obtain a true sense of perspective. At the same time, a severe puritan inquisitor gently inquired of an innocent child: “And when did you last see your father?,” and an array of coloured geometrical figures masqueraded as masterpieces of Art.
Finally, they entered a room with large round tables and a counter with the usual equipment for the preparation of beverages and food. The patrons of this establishment were as varied an assortment as the pictures in the gallery. The students from the library, in jeans, pullovers, and other informal clothes, were there in large numbers. So were the lawyers, in their dark formal suits and highly polished shoes, passing their time drinking coffee, while waiting for their cases to be called in the courts across the road. There were many other people too, who were not so well dressed as the lawyers but better attired than the students. One might guess that these included probation officers, social workers, the witnesses, jurymen, and accused who were also expecting an appointment before a judge. Then too, there were probably the administrators of the various public buildings which were clustered together in that part of the city.
Fiona and her companion bought their coffees. Fiona was surprised that the other had hardly spoken a word since leaving the Library; he had not even offered to pay for her coffee.
They sat down. Neither spoke. She offered him a cigarette. He declined the offer. She lit one, and there was a further silence on his part.
At length, he asked: “Where are you studying?”
“I’m at the College of Commerce,” she replied. “I think I’ve seen you there, haven’t I? Are you studying Law?”
The other replied that he was at the college and was studying Law.
“Do you enjoy the Law?” she asked.
“It’s all right,” he replied, without showing the least trace of enthusiasm. “I only do it to get a job,” he added in a dreary tone.
She laughed. “Yes, I know the feeling,” she confessed. “Sociology’s like that. And now the exams are near, and we have to do some work! Isn’t it boring – not at all the sort of thing I came to College for! Tell me, do you watch football?”
“Not really. I’ve never been to a football match. Are you interested in that kind of thing?”
She shook her head. “It’s horses which fascinate me,” she said.
“I used to go riding.”
“Did you really? That’s interesting. Haven’t I seen you before somewhere?”
“I’ve given up riding now,” he added in a flat tone.
The girl was beginning to find her new companion extremely boring, and sipped at her coffee very quickly. She wondered if he was interested in anything at all. Now where, besides at College, had she met him before?
“Do you do any sport yourself?” she asked, without expecting an interesting reply.
“No,” said the law student. He paused, and then added, as an afterthought: “except potholing. I sometimes go potholing.”
