The first part starts, as most school trips do, with a speech from the teacher. It also starts, as many lives do, with a grey sky. The wind races flat against the rock and into our watering eyes as we stand, backpacks fastened to our shoulders, in front of the gaping chasm. The teacher speaks about tectonic plates. About rock formations. About the salted rainwater that seeps through the permeable earth and slowly, slowly, slowly moulds it into stalactites and stalagmites and subterranean rivers. About the differences between a chasm and a cave – caves start horizontal, you see, while chasms begin with a vertical drop. I stare at the deep black hole that will soon swallow me up.
“Cool,” I say.
Lesson number one: most of the information you learn in school isn’t really useful. But it can still be interesting.
The harness pricks against my thighs as final checks are made. The speleologist tugs on the wire. It vibrates down into the darkness. He does it again. I gulp.
“All good,” he says. Glancing at him, I find he has a little smirk. Mischief, maybe – or benevolence. He’s witnessing another little girl performing the same journey he does daily. “Go on, jump. And remember: don’t look up.”
Don’t look up. Down was fine, apparently. I look down, hang on to the wire, squeeze my eyes shut, and I jump.
There’s nothing there. My feet kick uselessly. This is how I die – a splat and a broken body on a chasm floor. But then the wire tenses with a thwang, and suddenly I’m a dangling body pinned to a chasm wall. Much better, I think. My toes collide against the stone, and I tug – this is the signal. The powers above loosen my wire, and I start the descent. Underneath, I can hear the cheering of my classmates, those who have already slid down before me. My eyes are still shut, and the phrase Don’t look up, don’t look up, don’t look up vibrates in my head like a mantra.
Naturally, at the very last second before my feet hit the ground, I look up. And a single salted droplet falls into my right eye. It stings awfully.
Lesson number two: maybe some of the information you learn in school is useful. But not in the way you think.
At the bottom, there’s a wide room where students mill about, waiting for the others to come down. It’s almost a waiting hall; the kind you’d see in a hotel, with high ceilings and an ornate crystal chandelier, with the ticking of a grandfather clock to remind yourself that time still exists. Except here, the chandelier is the cloudy piece of sky that peeks through the giant hole above us. Stray rays of light bounce against the walls as our headlamps swivel with our foreheads. And the grandfather clock is replaced by the drip-dropping of unseen rainwater.
Lesson number three: most of your life will be spent waiting crammed between chatty children and sweaty armpits. And most of your life will probably not be worth all that waiting.
The final student’s feet touch the ground – a collective cheer from the class. The speleologist turns his lamp towards a small opening in the wall, and starts instructing us on the proper position to crawl through a narrow tunnel.
“We’re supposed to fit through there?” whines Kenny with a scrunch of her upper lip.
I watch the speleologist wriggle his limbs, and soon he’s sucked into the hole. I think of the boa constrictor I read about in a kids’ biology magazine – how it can swallow monkeys whole by dislocating its jaw. How there’s a moment where all you can see are the monkey’s wriggling legs disappearing into its mouth. I peek my head into the tunnel, and the teacher gently pushes my legs behind me.
The reality is this: smelly shoes hitting my hands as I crawl up the slope. My own feet hitting Kenny’s hands behind me. The occasional drop of salty water landing on my skin, making my hair rise up. The sound of my breath absorbed by the tunnel. A dull pain as my helmet bumps against the low ceiling. The light of my headlamp bouncing up and down. The grunts of students.
“Move!”
“I am moving!”
“Stop kicking!”
Lesson number four: sometimes your brain massively overplays the panic. Sometimes a tunnel isn’t a boa’s guts – sometimes it’s only a wet, dark tube you can’t wait to get out of.
God, this is taking forever.
Until it doesn’t, and the passage suddenly opens up into a small platform. As the group trickles onto the ledge, I stare past the adults into the giant gorge in front of us. It’s at least three times bigger than the entrance of the chasm. Looking down, the feeling is the same as what I experienced before. Except when my eyes slide up, the grey clouds are gone, replaced by an unnatural darkness so unlike the night sky. It’s a black ceiling, and a black floor, that none of us can reach – not even our feeble lamps. The cool breeze is replaced with a glacial draft that comes from underneath my feet. There’s a background noise – a vibration that gently settles under my skin and between my gritted teeth. It’s from the subterranean rivers, informs my teacher. We won’t be seeing those on our trip. The noise will remain inside our brains, feeding our imaginations.
One by one, we attach our harnesses to the small metallic loops on the façade. We will have to grip onto those while we scale horizontally across the chasm. Crawling through the tiny tunnel has made me calmer – the dull anxiety that gripped me before plunging into the entrance has gone, replaced with an eagerness for a new experience. Nevertheless, through a combination of circumstances that involve getting repeatedly elbowed in the ribs and almost slipping on a puddle, I am one of the last children to set off against the wall. The stone is cold and a little slimy, and I wrinkle my nose like everyone has done before me. I curl my fingers around a jutting stone, place my left foot on the tiny wooden plank, and start clambering along the façade.
The first part is uneventful. The draft coming from below me tickles my bare legs. I hear the distant giggles of my classmates, the teacher’s reprobation, and behind this, the constant buzzing sounds of the underwater river echoing around the chasm. Above all, I hear my own steady breathing and the th-thump, th-thump, th-thump of my heartbeat. This is too easy, I think. And then I look up – and the blackness feels so much closer now that I’m suspended on a vertical wall.
There will be a point when your brain will finally process that it’s really just a mouse. That the walls around you were present millennia before your species was born. That you’re not even part of the salty raindrops that slide down and form stalactites and stalagmites and underwater rivers. That in the grand making of caves and chasms, you have no impact. It’s the reverse of stepping inside a cathedral – or maybe it’s the same. Being plunged in a feeling that’s deeper than anything your child mind has ever wondered about. Sometimes it makes you pray. And sometimes it makes you freeze up, your breath hitch and every single muscle in your body clench up. Sometimes it makes you feel nauseous. And sometimes, it makes you want to let go of the ramp and fall into the giant black hole underneath your tiny feet.
And then someone’s fingers firmly wrap around you shoulder, jolting you back to the present. You nod, shaking, and continue walking, and you think you’ll either continue feeling this way your whole life or you’ll never feel it again. And you’re not sure which is worse.
The teacher looks back towards me with a worried frown. I’m not the only student who panicked during the climb, but I’m the only one who froze when I looked up instead of down. My left foot lands on the opposite platform, and just like that I’ve crossed the chasm. I still cannot breathe.
“You’re sure you’re up to continue?” She asks. I nod, not so much because I want to carry on than because I’ll have to brave the chasm again if I back down. And surely I’ve gone through the worst already. This made me stronger, I tell myself as I struggle to catch my breath. As I cradle the cut I made on my palm by gripping the stone too harshly. As the sound of the underground river still pounds in my skull. The class has moved on, but the black ceiling still lurks behind my eyelids whenever I blink.
The next few steps bring us towards a wide corridor, and we finally catch a glimpse of the famous stalactites. This is what a cave should look like. They swirl down from the ceiling (the wet, dark grey, present ceiling) in elegant patterns. Water drips along them, splashing down on to the stalagmites, foreshadowing their eventual collision in a few thousand years. I remember when the art teacher showed us a close-up of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam – Adam and God’s indexes straining to reach each other, always close but never touching. Maybe nature’s copying them. Or maybe in a few thousand years Adam and God’s hands will finally meet, forming a pillar from the Earth to the sky. I blink. It’s not every day a fourteen-year-old experiences a philosophical thought.
The path swerves down again, and the limestone beneath us becomes smooth and slippery. I hear the flutter of wings – it’s spring, bat season. Somehow, this wide, open passageway feels more oppressive than the tunnel we had to crawl through. For once, we aren’t in a line, one after the other. Our many steps echo down the slope. I can feel the draft again, the one that caressed my thighs against the chasm wall. We’re all packed up, moving at the same pace, and still it feels like I’m at the end of the queue. What is it that the others have and I don’t? Why am I still shaking, when the danger is gone – was never there in the first place?
But I carry on, and laugh emptily when Kenny makes a joke. Fake it till you make it.
At the bottom of the slope, the corridor opens up into a space the size of a ballroom. Here, too, the darkness surrounds us, blurring the edges of our light beams. But it feels more like it’s hugging us than trapping us.
The expert makes sure we’re all accounted for, then turns around with a dramatic swish.
“Turn off your headlamps, everyone,” he says, spreading his arms.
A silence. “That’s it, he’s gone mad,” I hear someone mutter in the back.
One by one, our lights go out. Faces flicker out of view, until all that’s left is the speleologist’s own grin, illuminated by the only torch.
“What you’re about to experience is true, complete darkness. And if you all hold your breaths at the same time, you’ll hear true silence as well. Good luck!”
And with that he clicks the light off, and the darkness I saw in the chasm ceiling has come down to find me.
The thing is, emptiness is the same, physically or emotionally. I can’t really tell if my eyes are open or not. Someone shifts their feet behind me, and it sounds like I’m underwater. Then sound stops existing altogether – even the rumble of the river has dulled into nothing. My body, which had shivered from the humid cold in the tunnel, which had hurt when I scraped it against the walls, is enveloped in a numb cocoon. For a while, I’m not even inside it anymore. It’s just there, maybe blinking, maybe not, and I’m drifting. For a few precious, terrifying moments, I’m not there anymore. Maybe I did let go of the ramp – maybe I fell in the subterranean river, and I’m only realising it now. Maybe this is the state of the real world.
The teacher’s gentle voice breaks the silence. Lights come on again. I blink. The room looks much wider than before – the pillars project high, threatening shadows. What I saw, or rather didn’t see, was their natural condition, undisturbed, unseen, unused. I shiver, feeling the hair on my skin rise up again – thrown back into the reality it knows well, my body has resumed its functions.
“Cool,” someone murmurs next to me. I nod.
The last part ends, as most school trips do, with the bus ride home. It started raining three minutes after we all spilled out of the cave, covered in cuts and mud and smelling like mushrooms. The speleologist had led us through a different path than on our way in, through a separate tunnel that avoided another bout with the giant pit. And as I climbed out, as my left foot landed on the grass, as I closed my eyes and felt the strong wind rustle my sweaty hair, I burst into tears.
Some of my classmates still send quizzical glances in my direction as I stare past the droplets that slide down the bus windows. Chatter surrounds my ears. My jaw mindlessly works through a piece of gum, and the fresh taste fills my mouth up my nostrils. My arm brushes with Kenny’s. It stopped trembling a few hours ago.
“That was fun!” She laughs. I nod. It was. It was fun and informative and life-changing. And all I can think of was that numbness – how good it felt to feel nothing, to live inside a void for two minutes.
How can you still laugh and cry and live when somewhere underneath there’s a black floor and a black ceiling and a dangling student that froze instead of walked? This made me stronger, I told myself as I struggled to catch my breath. This child is still inside me. If I went back through this hole in the ground now, I would have the same reaction. I would still look up. I would still cower like a mouse, half-praying to be rescued, half-dreaming of letting go of the ramp and falling, falling, falling until I saw the underground river that made my whole body shake with anticipation.
I’m sorry, but you’ll have to find your own lesson number five. It isn’t mine to give.
- Estelle Wallis, February 2022
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