Our guide led us to Grand Avenue, the largest room in the cave, where Tom and Becky were lost in darkness after a bat doused Becky’s candle. This story was, of course, a natural segue into the climax of the tour (of all cave tours, for that matter) when our guide turned out the lights with the exhortation, “Put your hand up to your face and see if you can see it.”

We couldn’t, of course. “Dark as sin,” McKale would have said. Actually she never would have come in the cave; she was crazily claustrophobic. Amusingly, someone said “ouch” after hitting himself in the nose.

Our guide turned the lights back on then said, “Let me share with you an interesting fact. The human eye needs light to survive. If you got lost in this cave, you would be permanently blind in six to eight weeks.”

“Imagine that,” the woman next to me said. “That would be horrible.”

“If you got lost in this cave, you’d be dead long before you went blind,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that.” Peculiarly, the woman smiled, as if this were a comforting thought.

Our guide continued. “At one time this cave was owned by a Hannibal doctor named Joseph Nash McDowell, who bought the cave to do ‘scientific’ experiments with mummification. When his daughter died, he brought her in and embalmed her. He did his experiments in that crevice about fifty yards back.”

“Wait,” I said. “He did experiments with his daughter’s corpse?”

“Yes, sir,” the guide said.

I shook my head. Just when you think people couldn’t get any more bizarre, a Joseph Nash McDowell turns up.

At the completion of the tour I retrieved my pack, then started back to historic Hannibal. That wasn’t my original plan. I had stopped at the cave on my way to highway 79, a scenic route that followed the Mississippi River south along the Missouri–Illinois border. But as I verified my route with a clerk at the cave’s gift shop, I learned that the river had recently washed out the road and the highway was closed. I reasoned that I could always walk around construction crews, but the clerk wasn’t sure that was possible. Considering that a closed route might mean backtracking for days, I decided not to take the chance.

My only other option was to take U.S. Route 61 southeast to St. Louis. It would be a considerably busier route but I really had no other choice.

Over the next three days, I passed through New London, Frankford, Bowling Green, Eolia, and Troy. I woke in Troy feeling dizzy and nauseous again, but forced it aside, vowing to rest properly once I reached St. Louis.