“Thirty minutes in a cave or a tunnel won’t hurt us,” I said. “Compared to crossing Mount Peirasmos, it’ll be easy.” I tried to sound confident. I didn’t mention my claustrophobia or my stomach’s flip-flops at the thought of being trapped in a tunnel. The prospect of being stuck on an elevator, something I’d thought about every time I traveled to and from the twenty-fifth floor at work, seemed mild in comparison.

We walked up close to the mouth of the cave. I heard faint drumbeats and chanting in the wind, as if primitives had stood here and voices from the past were inviting us in.

Or were they warning us to stay out?

We bent low and walked cautiously into the mouth of the cave, about five feet high. It was dark and dank, cool and clammy. Something flew by my ear and squeaked. I couldn’t see anything. I took a deep breath and walked into the darkness, bracing myself.

18

IT TOOK A LONG TIME for my eyes to adjust. Three feet inside its mouth the cave opened into a huge chamber, dwarfing the cave I’d been in my first night in Thuros. It appeared to be limestone with large sections of marble. The rock ceiling, covered with stone daggers pointing down, must have been a hundred feet high, and it glowed slightly. Whether it was luminescent rock or caked phosphorous, I couldn’t tell.

Huge mounds of rocks and spires jutted up from the cave floor, some of them thirty feet high. Icicle-shaped pieces of dripstone hung from the ceiling, sometimes in pairs, looking like giant open scissors. In a few places the dripstones met spires below to form a continuous column, as if sky had reached down to touch ground. It was stunning. The longer I looked the more I realized the cavern was much larger than I’d thought, at least a football field deep and almost that wide. Fantastic shapes were everywhere, including baconlike draperies hanging from the ceiling.

From the icicle rocks above, water dripped onto the cave floor, much of it accumulating in a large oval-shaped pool perhaps fifty feet across. I knelt down and touched the green and white water, mildly acidic, filled with dissolved limestone and tiny calcium particles.

Instinctively, we all stood still, listening to the awesome sound of water dripping into the great pool. There was an implicitly agreed-upon minute of silence as we united in our attention to the wonders before us.

Near the edge of the pool, I reached down and picked up some small spheres that looked like pearls.

“They’re made from the water splashing from the pool,” Malaiki said. “It forms coatings around grains of sand, and they get bigger and bigger.”

I looked at her with surprise. “You sound like a girl who’s spent some time in caves,” I said.

She looked at me defensively, and I was sorry I’d said anything.