shimmering silver wall. ‘It has beautiful fragile crystals so you can take photos and admire it, but it will become disfigured if you accidentally touch it.’ She watched them and saw with satisfaction how they all leaned the other way to protect the wall.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured. ‘Almost there.’ There were a few Hail Marys behind her and she stifled a laugh. The shy quiet man had turned out to be a Catholic comedian. You had to love him.
Finally, after another ten minutes of winding and uneven descent, she stepped into an opening with a sloping floor. It spread out into a wide cavern and she heard the sighs of relief to be able to spread out a little. The distance narrowed between roof and floor and she resisted the urge to duck her head. Enough of that soon enough.
‘If you shine your lights down towards your shoes you’ll see you’re standing on red sandy soil.’
All lights tilted downwards and there were some comments of, ‘All the way down here. Wow.’
‘So, we’re here. You’re standing on the bed of a river from thousands of years ago, stretching away in two directions.’
She let that statement sit in the silence as the others thought about that and shone their headlamps around. ‘As you can see with your lights…’ and that was all they could see with, as no other light could penetrate this far into the cave ‘…there’s a line of white rocks marking off a section of the cave. Also, in front of us, a circle of the same stones to protect an area of new stalactite formation.’
She crouched down and even now she could feel the excitement as her heart rate sped up with the wonder of all this subterranean world so far below the surface. ‘See this—’ She pointed out the new holes burrowing into the dirt in the centre of the circle.
‘Every drop is making the hole larger and eventually it will form a pencil of creation.’
She breathed out and those standing next to her murmured their own awe. This was why she loved these tours. When she felt the connection from others at the opportunity to see something so few people had.
‘If you look across from us—’ she angled her head and the light shone on the roof ‘—hanging from the low roof like eyelashes, those are thin tendrils of tree roots that are searching for the water that left eons ago, but the moisture remains and even though the roots don’t touch any water the filaments absorb moisture from the air.’
Someone said, ‘Amazing.’ She smiled in their direction.
‘There’s no natural light—the creatures who live here are small, without eyes, their bodies are see-through, almost like albino slaters.’ She crouched down and drew an example the size of a cat in the red dirt with her finger.
Her comedian said in the darkness, ‘That looks too big for comfort,’ and laughed nervously. Several other voices murmured.
Faith grinned. ‘Not drawn to scale.’ She pointed out a tiny white beetle-like creature on a tree root. ‘But if you see one of them in front of you when you’re crawling, please scoop up a handful of dirt and shift him aside.’
The young woman next to Faith who’d changed into jeans said in a small voice, ‘You say we are crawling?’
‘Yep, we’re sliding under that overhang on our stomachs, using our elbows, for about thirty metres, but it opens into a small cavern after that.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said in her lilting accent, ‘I can stay here and mind the bags?’
Faith looked at her and noted her pinched nostrils and darting eyes. ‘Perfectly fine. We’ll only be about ten minutes’ crawl away, though you mightn’t hear us because the riverbed bends a little. Then it opens into another cavern where we can sit up. We’ll be gone for about thirty minutes by the time we spend ten minutes there as well as crawling there and back. Will you be fine with that?’
She laughed nervously. ‘I find it very peaceful here.’
‘I’ll stay with her,’ one of the teenage boys offered with pretended resignation. It was so obviously what he wanted to do that everyone laughed.
Faith nodded. ‘The rest of us can drop all our extra stuff, like cameras and jumpers, here. Too hard to crawl on your belly dragging a drink bottle or camera.’
There was a small wave of tense laughter as people dropped surplus bits and crouched down. The black semi-circular opening above the red sandy floor looked about three feet high and maybe ten feet wide, based with the red sand of the ancient river. A little too much like a mouth that would eat them, Faith had thought the first time, and she guessed a few of the others now thought the same.
‘I’ll go belly down into the damp dirt first so you know I’m ahead, but I need a volunteer to go last. Someone needs to make sure we all keep going.’
‘I will go last.’ Raimondo spoke quietly, his thick accent rolling calmly around the tiny space. When the others expelled breaths of relief he said, ‘I have been on this tour before and have no concerns.’
Faith knew this last stretch tested the first timers’ resolve as they slithered forward in the dark, seeing the backside and feet of the person in front, the circle of light from the person behind washing over them, the roof closing in over their helmeted head. She’d had the occasional talk down of a panicked group member at this part but in the end they all agreed the challenge was worth it.
Faith knelt down until she was lying on the damp sand and glanced at Raimondo, looming above her. He nodded calmly and with a last flashing grin at the rest of the group she propelled herself forward along the riverbed, the circle of her headlamp piercing the darkness ahead with its warm glow.
She heard them behind her and the flicker of the others’ lights occasionally shone past until she’d crawled all the way to the cavern.
She sat up and waited, watching the circles of light approach one by one as each crawled out of the hole and into the circle of the cavern.
‘You can sit up now. There’s a good foot over your head.’
‘Gee, thanks,’ the first arrival, the other of the solid woman’s sons, muttered mock complainingly, and she grinned in his direction.
‘Just shimmy around so the next person can sit up and move next to you until we have a circle.’ It didn’t take long for all of them to arrive and she wasn’t sure how Raimondo ended up sitting next to her, but she doubted it was by accident.
Faith cleared her throat. She couldn’t change the next bit and he probably knew it. ‘We’re going to turn out all our lights and just sit here, in the belly of Mother Earth, in the dark, and soak in the wonder of what we are experiencing.’
The same smart alec said, ‘Why not?’ But everyone laughed. Except Raimondo.
There was a murmur of further surprise and then slowly, as they all began to feel the magic of the space, she could feel the agreement.
She pushed on. ‘And we’ll sit in silence for a minute or two just to soak it in—where we are, how long this cavern has been here, and how amazing you all are to do this and still be having fun.’
A few murmurs of pride.
‘After the silence I’ll share an Aboriginal legend I was told about a good spirit from the ocean and a bad spirit from the cave, and how these caves were formed.’
Like good children, one by one they turned out the lights until the darkness fell like a blindfold over them.
Faith closed her eyes. She always found this moment, this silence, incredibly peaceful. The air she breathed felt moist on her nose and throat as she inhaled and she dug her fingers into the damp earth and collected two handfuls of the sleeping riverbed and held them with her eyes shut tight—not that it made any difference, open or shut, in the total dark.
She always felt blessed to have been given this moment in time to embrace the idea of being a part of this river under the earth. Breathing in