REVELATIONS
2,475 feet below the surface
Milo carefully walked to the edge of the camp. Sitting down, he leaned against the stone cavern wall, again marveling at the great rock wedged between two chasm walls as though suspended between the pillars of the earth itself. He dangled one leg over the infinite black nothingness, headlamp tilted down toward the journal in his lap.
Lord Riley DeWar was an engaging writer, comfortable in his trademark style of charming affability and genuine wonderment at the natural world. He and his twenty men began with a wagon train from the German-controlled colonial port of Dar es Salaam before journeying up the coast of Tanzania by local steamship. The young lord felt buoyed by both good luck and providence, his promised funding having materialized when needed, his men and horses vigorous and healthy. Arriving in the township of Tanga, DeWar directed his men inland toward Mount Kilimanjaro, the convoy trekking across the rolling Tanzanian plains.
Milo read DeWar’s account of the cave for the first time, confirming Dale’s theory. Having learned about the remote cavern entrance several years prior from German ivory hunters, DeWar came to believe it was part of the extensive Amboni cave system, theorizing an underground highway hundreds of miles in length, and quite possibly a source of vast, untapped mineral wealth.
The large party soon fell in with elephants, which DeWar described as “prodigious grey beasts who moved atop the savanna.” He and his men shot a great many for sport, abandoning their bodies to scavengers but burying their sawed-off ivory tusks in a hidden cache. Attempting to cook one of the smaller pachyderms, he reported finding the meat “most disagreeable” when compared to the abundant antelope. Despite his hunting habits, DeWar had a naturalist’s eye for animal life, describing and drawing multitudes of giraffe, ostrich, rhino, zebra, lion, and hyena. Often awestruck, DeWar would lapse into flowery biblical prose, describing the animal stocks as “King Solomon’s Menagerie,” an unspoiled Garden of Eden.
After days of steady travel, DeWar arrived at the entrance of the cavern, a green, fertile opening surrounded by a massive confluence of elephant herds. There were too many to hunt; DeWar hid his men in trees and had them shoot off their rifles in quick succession. The frightened masses retreated, eventually allowing the explorers to approach the vast, yawning entrance.
Milo smiled as he read the description of air movements at the cavern mouth; DeWar compared the gentle winds to the soft breath of a lover. But the lord was considerably less impressed with the aboriginal artworks along the gallery, describing “lowly, savage depictions of carnal knowledge, the natural beauty therein despoiled,” though he did begrudgingly admit to admiring the “properly bloody hunts.”
The lord’s spelunking party soon reached the elephant graveyard. The earlier gunshots had startled one of the calves into the pit, where it “cried most piteously atop a pile of long-dead young” until cleanly speared through the heart by a porter.
Overall, DeWar’s writings were a picture of barely restrained jubilance. As the rest of his party worked out a solution to reach the bottom of the main shaft, he patiently described a multitude of stalagmites, columns, and fossils, complete with hand-drawn images and cross-sections of crystals and calcite straws. He took a particular interest in the great colony of bats, remarking on their fine quality and the potential for lucrative guano mining.
Milo couldn’t help but admire the long-lost lord. Like so many cavers, he too was a consummate equipment geek, devoting many pages to the impressive performance of his then-cutting-edge carbide headlamp and its gentle acetylene glow, though suggesting a multitude of improvements for future development.
Drawings revealed how DeWar had devised his descent down the shaft, though his descriptions strangely omitted any mention of a cascading, thunderous waterfall. He’d ordered a wooden lowering platform built, with long ropes and winch measured precisely to the plumbed and surveyed depths and a counterweight made from net-suspended rocks. To DeWar, the machine was a “picture of efficiency,” allowing virtually every member of the party to reach the bottom save the three porters manning the station from up top.
Observations dwindled as DeWar slowly normalized to the subterranean environment. Finding fewer and fewer novel geological features to comment upon, the journal lapsed into food consumption tables and the sort of petty grievances that plagued any expedition. As DeWar began the painfully slow exploration of the anthill, it became increasingly clear to Milo that the water level was much lower a century ago. Though DeWar’s servants found a natural spring from which to provision and wash, the diary described almost none of the pools or rivers that now snaked many sections of the cave.
Writing less and less, DeWar would occasionally describe a fossil or a unique formation, sometimes wishing for a Darwin to accompany him or, as he put it, a “true scientific mind, for I am but a humble explorer.”
Abruptly, there were no entries for three whole days, until DeWar picked up his journal again and began to scribble with the same vigorous, hurried style that characterized so much of his correspondence.
“I have found it,” he wrote. “A great room in the furthest depths, beyond the termination of a long, twisting passage. I found the most monumental of natural cathedrals, within which resides a glittering stone formation, a guardian with crystal sword carved by nature herself. Beneath this majestic wonder is a narrow tunnel from which emits the most magnificent golden light. Below a pagan altar is the aura of angels, buried under an avalanche of broken stone. I will not rest until I have seen the source and laid my eyes upon this lost golden room.”
Milo realized he was breathing hard, nearly skipping over words in his haste to read further. He took a deep, long sigh, steeling himself as he rubbed his eyes to continue. There were no more entries for another week, then another explosion of ink-splattered, manic enthusiasm upon the page.
“My men work in a joyous state of exaltation,” read the journal. “We are like madmen in our efforts to clear this damnable rubble. No sooner do we make progress than the stones shift, risking the burial of my servants and porters. You will not believe me, good reader, but I labor beside them untiringly. We have required no sleep, nor lantern, nor food, nor water, we are sustained by the ethereal manna of this golden light. With great ecstasy, we are all lost within our fondest memories; cleaved betwixt two worlds, one of goodly labor and the other of remembered pleasures.”
Blinking his eyes, Milo read the final lines.
“Perhaps the oracles of old have mistaken the word of God; whereas the heavenly kingdom slumbers in the cool earth beneath us; and the tortured souls of hell, should there be such a thing, tumble in the abyss of the black sky above. I think we break through tomorrow. I shall be the first man through the passage.”
Excited, Milo quickly flipped to the next pages, but found only gibberish. DeWar had entirely changed his writing style, packing four times as many now-tiny words into the same page, every scrap and margin of the fragile paper written over twice, three times with splattered ink.
Milo scratched his head, trying to come up with an explanation for the sudden turn to illegibility. His first thought was that he’d ruined the journal when trying to save it, that the ink had transferred from page to page. But the closer he looked, the more he could see the pattern—it was manic, yes, but intentional. Patterns slowly emerged; a kind of strange, brilliant logic and symmetry—
“How are you doing?” Bridget spoke softly as she sat down on the ledge, dangling her legs beside his own.
“I’m okay,” said Milo. His voice felt hoarse, his eyes irritated and tired. Even his neck hurt from cocking his head over the pages.
“You’ve been here for hours,” said Bridget. “You make any progress?”
Milo started to say something like no, it hasn’t been that long but checked his watch instead. Bridget was right—he’d been reading the journal for nearly four hours, though it felt like mere moments.
“What’d you find?” asked Bridget. “Can I see?”
“Sure,” said Milo, flipping the journal to one of the better drawings and passing it to her. Bridget admired the inked rendering of the giraffe, running her fingers down the corners of the page, careful not to smudge the antique image.
“Any clues as to what happened to our predecessors?”
Milo shook his head. “Not yet,” he said. “DeWar made it a lot further into the cave than I would have thought. He and his men explored the main routes in the anthill all the way down to the cathedral chamber. The water levels were lower then—they didn’t have to swim, they just walked into the glowing room. They were trying to dig through the breakdown pile to the source of the light—but then the narrative abruptly ends.”
“Ends?” said Bridget. “So what happened? Maybe a cave-in while they were digging?”
“I misspoke,” said Milo, flipping to the gibberish pages and turning to show Bridget. “It doesn’t exactly end. The rest of the journal is completely filled with this stuff. Dale couldn’t figure it out either.”
“That’s a little disconcerting,” said Bridget, sucking in a sharp breath. “Did DeWar go nuts?”
“Maybe,” said Milo. “That’s what Dale wants to know. But I’m not so sure—I’m starting to see the underlying order to everything he wrote. At first, none of the scribblings made sense; but the longer I look, the more I can pick out.”
“Like what?”
“Like only a fraction of it is in English. The rest is a complete hodgepodge of at least six languages that I recognize, maybe more. The sentence structure is completely experimental; he used whatever convention or word suited him at the moment. It’s as though he picked the best word or taxonomy for each concept he’s trying to relate.”
“I don’t understand,” said Bridget. “Six languages? But why?”
“Let me put it another way,” said Milo. “You know how some words simply don’t translate to any other language? Like schadenfreude, German for taking pleasure in another’s pain. No other language possesses the term, they only borrow it.”
“Oh,” said Bridget. “Like je ne sais quoi in French.”
“Exactly,” said Milo. “But the same goes for entire academic fields . . . chemistry, biology, physics, history, linguistics, and so forth. There are always words originating from a particular language or discipline that address a concept better than any others. And then on top of that, DeWar has reverted to a totally nonlinear sentence structure and whole sections with only mathematical formulas. I can’t even get the gist of it.”
“It sounds as though he were trying to rewrite the English language,” said Bridget, confusion filling her voice.
“Not just the English language,” said Milo, closing the journal to put it away. “All languages. And it wasn’t a rewriting. It was almost more like a . . . grand unification.”
“Is this what’s next for us?” asked Bridget. “Are we going to start speaking in formulas? Lose our minds?”
Milo looked down past his feet, into the dark. Only the echoing nothingness below. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I’ll have to ask Logan what he thinks. He’s better with languages than me . . . maybe he has some insight. Is he back yet?”
“No,” said Bridget, swiveling around to double check. “He’s still gone. Everybody else too; they’re probably all sulking in their respective corners.”
“I guess we’ll see what they look like when they come back,” said Milo. “Joanne was pretty pissed.”
“Well, I hardly blame her,” said Bridget with a shrug. “On a separate note, have you seen the blood pressure cuff? It’s about time for another reading.”
“No,” said Milo. “But I can look around. Any idea where it ended up?”
“Couldn’t say,” said Bridget. “But Logan’s stuff might be a good place to start.”
Spontaneously, Milo leaned over and kissed Bridget directly on the top of her head, giving her shoulders a tiny reassuring squeeze. She felt thinner than he remembered, her muscles tense and knotted, betraying the stress behind her smile. Embarrassed, Bridget snuck a look over one shoulder to make sure nobody had seen the gesture.
Without another moment wasted, Milo stood up and walked over to Logan’s area, not much more than an open backpack with a thin sleeping pad beside it. The search of the backpack revealed little more than still-soggy socks, a few pieces of climbing equipment, and a Tupperware container full of individually bagged rock samples.
Sighing, Milo sat down heavily on the sleeping pad, almost losing his balance as the camping mat slid backward. He saw a flash of smudged white chalk out of the corner of his eye. When he looked down, he saw part of the letter “D” peeking out from behind the pad. Drawing himself up to his knees, Milo lifted it up to see the rest of Logan’s hidden message.