The Second Coming

had fewer leaves now and they were more speckled. He picked a small one shaped not like a three-fingered hand but like a mitt with a thumb. As he sucked the stem, air stirred against his cheek. It was not cooler or warmer than the cloud but different. The cloud smelled of complex leaf rots, bark tannin, and funky anise from the gorge. The cave air was simpler. It had a wet metal culvert smell. He opened his mouth. Clean ferrous ions blew onto his tongue.
    Pushing aside a branch of sassafras, he stepped into an inconsequential niche of rock which would have appeared as no more than a lichened recess even without the sassafras, then squeezed sideways through a crack (the Confederates were thinner, even, than he), in the same movement turning past a lip of rock as easily as stepping into the jogged entrance of a fun house, and was in the cave. It pleased him that the great cave should have such a banal entrance. Far below in the valley at the proper entrance to Lost Cove cave an underground river flowed into the sunlight through a cathedral arch of stone.
    You disappeared, one second standing in a lichened niche, then a little jog and into the cave. Lewis Peckham said the entrance was too neat and therefore probably man-made or at least man-shaped, by the Confederates as an escape hole in case they got hemmed up below.
    Down, down he crawled, letting himself feet first down a rockslide, first prone then supine because he needed the flashlight. There was no way, he figured, to go wrong going down. He wished for a miner’s head lamp and, thinking of it, seemed to catch a whiff of acetylene. The slide leveled gradually and entered a crawl. Dry rock gave way to wet clay. The crawl was longer than he remembered, a good hundred yards. There were places where the ceiling came so close to the floor that he had to turn his head sideways like a baby getting through a pelvis. Progress could only be made by a slow scissors kick and rowing with his elbows. Once he got stuck. The mountain pressed on his back.
    When the crawl opened suddenly into a chamber the size of a small theater, he stood and walked across as quickly as a man going to work, crossed the lobby of his office building, mounted a shelf of rock which fell away into another slide, longer but not as steep as the first. It was possible to go down standing, using the light and choosing his footing carefully. There was pleasure in planning each step, calculating distance and angle of rock and using his weight either to fetch up or to carry him onto the next step. It was not hard work but when he reached the stream at the bottom he was sweating. There was a curving beach of gravel. As he played the light into the clear shallow water, it was easy to imagine that it was a tidal rivulet. There were minnows. Perhaps they were blind. But when he shone the light up, it showed a glittering lopsided vault, one side sloping steeply to join a cliff across the stream. The glitter, he saw, came from needles of stone, each holding a drop of water.
    Beyond a promontory crouched the three nuns, humpy becowled stalagmites. When the cave was open to tourists, there was a blue floodlight behind the nuns. Lewis said that what people liked was not nature but likenesses in nature. Rather than see stalagmites, they would rather see stalagmites that looked a little like nuns. There were also formations called the Old Man of the Mountain, and Honest Abe, and Marse Robert.
    It took another hour to find the chimney. It began, he remembered, as a sort of flue above a tilted slab of a boulder. But there were many such slabs. Twice he passed the entrance to the lair where Lewis had found the tiger, but did not bother to enter. It was the chimney he was looking for. When he found it, the opening was higher than he remembered. Before he went up, he made sure to leave footprints of heavy wet clay in plain view on the rock. It took both hands to jump straight up into the dark and catch hold and double over onto a shelf of rock. The chimney was directly above, a rough skewed cylinder a yard or so wide. With each step up he had to wedge himself like a chimney sweep to free one hand and use the light to plan the next step. Could this have been another Confederate beaver hole to escape the blue tide? No, because at its top it opened not up and to the outside but to one side and into a small curiously shaped chamber elongated in one dimension but rounded top and bottom like a pod. Tiger bones had been found