USING their wooden oars, the men pushed off from the stone dock. As they floated away in the two boats, Kosta K. spoke in rapid Greek. Nigel nodded patiently and then spoke aloud, his voice easily heard in the other boat. “Our boatman does not speak English well and has asked me to translate. You will notice that the lighting system is quite clever. High wattage lamps are placed strategically behind some of the wider stalagmites, making it appear as if the caves are magically lit.”
Strategically didn’t seem like the right word, Max thought. You didn’t need strategy to light this place. You could put a lamp anywhere. It was all crazy impossible. Walls of green-and-white stone seemed to undulate in the light like curtains. Just beyond them were clusters of tapered columns that mirrored each other, thrusting upward from the floor and dropping from the ceiling, as if two city skylines had grown over the ages and fused in the center. Vast islands rose up like forests of candles lumped with wax. None of the columns were alike, some thick and treelike, some stubby and broken, others as fine as needles. They were like baseball bats, like bones, like fingers, like icicles, like unruly hair that defied gravity.
All sounds were muffled in the close space. Together they were like gentle music—the dripping of water, Kosta K.’s rhythmic Greek speech, the occasional plash of oars in the water, and the gentle thunk . . . thunk as the boatmen pressed their oars against the rock columns to steer the boats.
“Fascinating,” Nigel said. “The gentleman explains that all of this rococo beauty is caused by the action of water dripping through the mountainside. It carries limestone from the soil, right down to this cavern. Over thousands of years, the microscopic bits of limestone collect at the ceiling, like a roof with a billion leaks. Slowly stalactites form. Then they drip to the bottom, where the remaining limestone collects once again. The limestone itself is largely white, but in different areas, the water will pick up other minerals in the soil, resulting in the blues, greens, and reds. Little by little, in this manner, stalagmites grow upward toward their brothers and sisters on the ceiling.”
“I could have told you that,” Max said.
“How do you remember which ite is which?” Alex asked.
“Stalagmite has a g for ‘ground,’” Max replied. “Stalactite has a c for ‘ceiling.’”
“Awesome, eh?” grumbled Kosta D. with a little laugh.
“You can say that again,” Max murmured.
“Awesome, eh?” Kosta D. repeated.
“Is it warm in here?” Bitsy asked from the other boat, wiping her forehead with a handkerchief.
“I find it actually rather cold,” Nigel said.
Alex leaned toward Max. “I’m worried about her. She’s going to freak at any second. We may have to go back. Do you see any . . . I don’t know . . . wet river horse shapes? Like the clue?”
“I don’t know! How can you tell?”
As the boat moved out of one vast chamber and into another one, Kosta K. began mumbling in Greek to Nigel again. The formations in this area were superfine, like rock candy crystal. They glowed with a lighter, green-blue tint.
“Some of these things look like monsters, or animals.” Alex pointed to a chaotic mass of knotted rock, jammed into a curve in the wall. “OK. That formation. What do you see?”
“Three giraffes throwing a beach ball? That’s definitely not it.” Max squinted at another formation. “How about that one?”
“I see Grumpy the Dwarf crushed by fallen bicycles.” Alex exhaled. “Who knows what Gaston saw? It’s all so subjective. Could be a rhinoceros or a swan. Maybe ‘ancient wet river horse’ is some kind of code, I wish we had more information!”
“OK, OK, let me think,” Max said.
There were rules to solving a problem. Break it down into its components. It made complex things seem simpler.
Red. Coat. Ancient. Wet. River. Horse.
Everything down here was ancient. And wet. And on a river. That narrowed it down to red coats and horses.
Which didn’t really help.
Now Nigel was lecturing from the other boat: “Our dear friend Kosta—ahhhh-choo!—is telling me that the early Greek explorers found bones down here. Occasionally they were the remains of buried human beings, but mostly—you’ll find this amusing—bones of hippopotami!”
Kosta D. let out a honking laugh, and he gave Max a tap on the shoulder. “Ippopotamos, eh?”
“Aaahhh!” Max blurted, nearly toppling the boat.
“Eh?” said Kosta D.
“No, aaahhh,” Max replied. “As in, aaahhh, maybe that’s it!”
“What’s it?” Alex said.
“Not a horse shape—horse bones.” Max turned to the other boat and called out, “Nigel, ask Kosta K. if they ever found horse bones!”
When Nigel asked Kosta K. the question in Greek, the boatman burst into laughter and looked at Max as if he were a cute but slightly annoying toddler.
He took that to be a no.
As they approached a sharp turn, Kosta K. pushed his oar against a stalagmite to change course, all the while speaking Greek to Nigel.
“Our intrepid guide has noticed you’re interested in the bones,” Nigel said. “And he thought you’d like to know that many of those bones were found in this very area just ahead!”
Nigel gestured to a chamber beyond a stone archway, which glowed with an eerie pinkish light. “Apparently this is an unusual cavern, even for the Cave of Vlihada. In the soil directly above, there is a rich source of copper. The rainwater has carried this mineral into the limestone, which gives the formations here a distinct hue.”
Max sat bolt upright so sharply the boat teetered.
Red. The room was red.
“Max . . .” Alex said.
Kosta K. muttered something in Greek to Nigel, who shrugged.
But Max’s eyes were focused on the walls of this new, high-arching chamber. The color was subtle, closer to pink really. The walls were a complex construction of ancient twisted limestone, but behind them were small, shadowy holes in the cavern wall.
Max had his eye on a dog-sized opening in the wall just at the edge of the light. A yellow rope was drawn across the opening, along with a sign with very small print. He squinted. Half of it was in Greek, the other half in English, but the English part was coming into focus:
SPELEOLOGICAL SITE. PLEASE KEEP OUT!
“I need you to make a distraction,” Max said to Alex. “Now.”
Alex spun around. “What?”
“Ssssh.” The other boat wasn’t too far ahead of them, but Kosta K. was droning on and on. No one seemed to be hearing Max and Alex’s conversation. Max hooked his arm under the strap of his backpack. He looked for the hole against the cavern’s opposite wall, but it had disappeared behind the formations. “Alex, do you remember what Nigel said when we first got down here?”
“No. It was Greek!”
“Sto potamós!”
“I can’t believe you remember that.”
“Potamós is the Greek word for ‘river.’”
Alex cocked her head. “Right . . . and river is one of the words in the clue.”
“Exactly! OK, so I was thinking, earlier today when Nigel was trying to accelerate up the mountain, he called his car a horse. Only the word he used for horse was the Ancient Greek one, ippos.” Max leaned closer to his cousin. “Put those two words together, Alex.”
“Potamós-ippos?”
“Ippopotamos!” Max said. “Stick on the h for good measure. Hippopotamus comes from the Greek word for ‘river horse.’ So you plug that into the clue. ‘The red coat of the ancient wet river horse’ really means ‘the red coat of the ancient wet hippopotamus’!”
Alex’s eyes were as bright as lamps. “Max, any animal that’s ancient is dead. And a dead animal is a skeleton. And a skeleton is bones. So we’re looking for hippo bones with some kind of . . . red coat.”
Max nodded. “If the bones exist down here, in this room, they would be coated with red from the copper.”
“We approach what is known as the Great Gate . . .” As Nigel’s voice echoed in the silence, Bitsy daubed her forehead with a handkerchief.
“They can’t see me do this,” Max said. “Distract them!”
“OK, OK!” Alex said. “I’m thinking.”
Max began slipping on the backpack. Alex stood, her eye on Bitsy, as Nigel droned on: “ . . . so called because it appears that these two massive columns were constructed specifically to mark the—”
“Claustrophobia!” Alex blurted out.
Bitsy’s body went stiff.
Nigel fell silent. “My dear?”
“Wow, this ceiling is low . . . and I feel claustrophobia!” Alex said. “Do you feel claustrophobia?”
“Ohhhhh . . .” Bitsy moaned. She was reaching for the sides of the boat, her hands shaking. “I have to go back!”
“Ti?” Kosta K. said.
“I’m sorry,” Bitsy said. “I can’t do this. I’ll go back by myself. In the water. It’s shallow. I’ll be fine. You guys go ahead.”
“Bitsy, dear, you can’t walk back,” Nigel said.
As Bitsy tried to step over the side of the boat, Kosta K. took her by the arm. Bitsy threw off the boatman’s hand. “You leave me alone, or I’ll have you in an international court by Tuesday!”
Now Kosta D. was frantically poling the boat toward Kosta K.’s. Max shot a look at Alex. She winked back.
And Max, with the pack on his back, slipped into the waist-high water.