The Kingdom

8

CHOBAR GORGE, NEPAL

As a ladder, the vertical alignment of the spikes would make Sam’s ascent awkward-if, in fact, he was able to reach the first rung. To that end, he uncoiled his rope, tied a slipknot in one end, and spent two minutes trying to lasso the second spike. Once done, he used a bit of parachute chord to secure a stirrup-like prusik knot to the rope to climb-and-slide his way up the wall.

With one foot perched on the lowermost rung and his left hand wrapped around the second rung, he untied the slipknot and clipped it to his harness. He then reached up, slid out the third spike, and started upward. After five minutes of this he reached the top.

“Not that I’d care to try it,” Sam called down, “but there are just enough handholds to make the ascent without the spikes.”

“It would have taken some skill to set them, then.”

“And strength.”

“What do you see?” Remi called.

Sam craned his neck around until his beam shone over the rock shelf. “Crawl space. Not much wider than my shoulders. Hang on, I’ll drop you a line.”

He withdrew the second-to-last rail spike and replaced it with a SLCD (spring-loaded camming device), which locked itself into the hole. To this he attached first a carabiner, then the rope. He dropped the coil down to Remi.

“Got it,” she said.

“Wait there. I’m going to scout ahead. There’s no sense in both of us being up here if it’s a dead end.”

“Two minutes, then I’m coming after you.”

“Or if you hear a scream and a thud, whichever comes first.”

“No screaming or thudding allowed,” Remi warned.

“Be back in a flash.”

Sam adjusted his position until both his feet were perched on the uppermost spike and his arms were braced against the rock ledge. He took a breath, coiled his legs, and pushed off while levering with his arms, launching his torso onto the ledge. He inchwormed forward until his legs were no longer dangling in air.

Ahead, Sam’s headlamp penetrated only ten to twelve feet. Beyond that, blackness. He licked his index finger and held it upright. The air was perfectly still, not a welcome sign. Getting into caves was usually the easy part, getting out often harder, which was why any spelunker worth his salt was always on the lookout for secondary exits. This was especially true of unmapped systems like this one.

Sam brought his watch to his face and started the chronometer. Remi had given him two minutes, and knowing his wife as he did, at two minutes and one second she’d be on her way up the rope.

He started crawling forward. His gear clanked and rasped over the rock floor, sounding impossibly loud in the cramped space. “Tons.” The word appeared, unbidden, in his mind. There were countless tons of rock hanging over his body at this very moment. He forced the thought from his mind and kept going, this time more slowly, the primal part of his brain telling him: Tread carefully, lest the world collapse around you.

He passed the twenty-foot mark and stopped to check his watch. One minute gone. He kept crawling. The tunnel curved left, then right, then began angling upward, gently at first, then more steadily, until he had to use a modified chimney crawl to keep moving. Thirty feet gone. Another time check. Thirty seconds to go. He crossed over a hump in the floor and found himself in a wider, flat area. Ahead, his headlamp swept over an opening almost twice as wide as the crawl space.

He craned his neck and called over his shoulder, “Remi, are you there?”

“I’m here!” came the faint reply.

“I think I’ve got something!”

“On my way.”

He heard her crawling up behind him as her headlamp washed over the walls and ceiling. She gripped his calf and gave it an affectionate squeeze. “How’re you doing?”

While Sam wasn’t clinically claustrophobic, there were moments in particularly tight spaces when he had to exert strict control over his mind. This was such a time. It was, Remi had told him, the downside of having a fertile imagination. Possibilities became probabilities, and an otherwise stable cave became a death trap ready to collapse into the bowels of the earth at the slightest bump.

“Sam, are you there?” Remi asked.

“Yep. I was mentally practicing Wilson Pickett’s ‘In the Midnight Hour.’”

Sam was a fair hand at the piano, and Remi at the violin. Occasionally, when time permitted, they practiced duets. While composer Pickett’s music didn’t readily lend itself to classical instruments, as lovers of vintage American soul, they enjoyed the challenge.

“What’ve you found?” Remi asked.

“That it’s going to take a lot more practice. And my blues voice needs more-”

“I mean, ahead?”

“Oh. An opening.”

“Lead on. This crawl space is too tight for my liking.”

Unseen by Remi, Sam smiled. His wife was being kind. While Sam’s male ego wasn’t a fragile thing, Remi also knew that offering a little face-saving was a woman’s prerogative.

“Here we go,” Sam replied, and started crawling forward.

It took only thirty seconds to reach the opening. Sam inched forward until his head was through. He looked around, then said over his shoulder, “A circular pit about ten feet across. I can’t see the bottom, but I can hear water gurgling-probably a subterranean offshoot of the Bagmati. Directly across from us is another opening, but about twelve feet higher.”

“Oh, joy. How are the walls?”

“Diagonal stalagmites, the biggest about as thick as a baseball bat, the rest about half that.”

“No conveniently placed spike ladders?”

Sam took another look, panning his headlamp along the pit’s walls. “No,” he called back, his voice echoing, “but dangling directly over my head is a spear.”

“Pardon me? Did you say-”

“Yes. It’s affixed to the wall by what looks like a leather cord. There’s a piece of cord hanging below the spear with a shard of wood attached.”

“Trip wire,” Remi commented.

“My guess as well.”

They’d seen similar traps-designed to foil intruders-in tombs, fortresses, and primitive bunkers. However old this spear trap was, it had likely been contrived to plunge into the neck of an unsuspecting interloper. The question, Sam and Remi knew, was what had the booby trap been intended to protect?

“Describe the spear,” Remi said.

“I’ll do you one better.” Sam rolled over on his back, braced his feet against the ceiling, and wriggled forward until his upper torso was jutting through the opening.

“Careful . . .” Remi warned.

“. . . is my middle name,” Sam finished. “Well, this is interesting. There’s only one spear but two more attachment points. Either the other two spears fell away or they found victims.”

He reached up, grasped the spear’s shaft above the point, and pulled. Despite its half-rotted appearance, the leather was surprisingly strong. Only after Sam wriggled the shaft back and forth did the cordage give way. He maneuvered the spear around, twirling it like a baton, then slid it back along his body toward Remi.

“Got it,” she said. A few seconds later: “This doesn’t look familiar. I’m no weapons expert, mind you, but I’ve never seen a design like this before. It’s very old-at least six hundred years, I imagine. I’ll get some pictures in case we can’t come back for it.”

Remi retrieved her camera from her pack and took a dozen shots. While she was doing this, Sam took a closer look around the pit. “I don’t see any more booby traps. I’m trying to imagine what it must have looked like by torchlight.”

“‘Terrifying,’ is the word,” Remi replied. “Think of it. At least one of your friends had just taken a spear to the back of the neck and plummeted into a seemingly bottomless pit, and all you’ve got is a flickering torch to see by.”

“Enough to turn away even the bravest of explorers,” Sam agreed.

“But not us,” Remi replied with a smile Sam could hear in her voice. “What’s the plan?”

“Everything depends on those stalagmites. Did you bring up the rope we left behind?”

“Here.”

Sam reached back until he felt Remi’s outstretched hand, grabbed the carabiner, and pulled the coil up to him. He tied first a slipknot into the loose end, followed by a stopper knot; to this, for weight, he clipped the carabiner. He maneuvered his body until his arms were free of the opening, then tossed the line across the pit, aiming for one of the larger stalagmites a few feet below the opposite tunnel opening. He missed, retrieved the rope, tried again, this time laying the slipknot over the tip of the protrusion. He jiggled the line until the knot slid down to the base of the stalagmite, then cinched the knot tight.

“Care to help me with a stress test?” Sam asked Remi. “On three, pull with everything you’ve got. One . . . two . . . three!”

Together, they heaved on the rope, doing their best to rip the stalagmite from the wall. It held steady. “I think we’re okay,” Sam said. “Can you find a crack in the wall and-”

“I’m looking . . . Found one.”

Remi slid a spring-loaded cam into the crack and fed the rope through it, then through a ratchet carabiner. “Take up the slack.”

Sam did so, heaving on the rope as Remi slid the carabiner up to the cam until the line was as taut. Sam gave it a test pluck. “Looks good.”

Remi said, “I suppose it goes unsaid-”

“What, be careful?”

“Yes.”

“It does. But it’s nice to hear anyway.”

“Luck.”

Sam wrapped both hands around the rope and shimmied forward, slowly transferring his weight onto the line. “How’s the cam look?” he asked.

“Steady.”

Sam took a steadying breath, then pulled his lower legs free of the crawl space. He dangled in the air, not daring to move, gauging the sag in the rope and listening for the sound of cracking rock, until ten seconds had passed. He then pulled his legs up, hooked his ankles over the line, and began inching across the pit.

“Holding steady on this end,” Remi called when Sam reached the halfway point.

Sam reached the opposite wall, transferred first one hand, then the other, to the stalagmite, then swung his legs up and braced his right heel against another protrusion. Testing his weight as he went, he contorted his body until he was sitting perched atop the stalagmite. He took a moment to catch his breath, then slowly stood up until he was level with the opening. A quick boost with his hands and a shove off the stalagmite, and he was inside the crawl space.

“Be right back,” he called to Remi, then scrabbled inside. He was back thirty seconds later. “Looks good. It widens out farther on.”

“On my way,” Remi answered.

In two minutes she was across, and Sam was pulling her into the opening. They lay still together for a few moments, enjoying the feeling of solid rock beneath them.

“This reminds me a lot of our third date,” Remi said.

“Fourth,” Sam corrected her. “The third date was horseback riding. The fourth was the rock climbing.”

Remi smiled, kissed him on the cheek. “And they say guys don’t remember those things.”

“Who’s they?”

“They who haven’t met you.” Remi shone her headlamp around. “Any sign of booby traps?”

“Not yet. We’ll keep a sharp eye, but if your estimate on the age of that spear is accurate, I doubt any trip mechanisms would still be working.”

“Famous last words.”

“You have my permission to put it on my tombstone. Come on.”

Sam started crawling, with Remi right behind him. As Sam had promised, a few seconds later the crawl space opened into a kidney-shaped alcove roughly twenty feet wide and five feet tall. In the opposite wall were three vertical clefts, each no wider than eighteen inches.

They stood up and stoop-walked to the first cleft. Sam shone his headlamp inside. “Dead end,” he said. Remi checked the next: another dead end. The third cleft, while deeper than its neighbors, also petered out a half dozen paces inside.

“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Sam said.

“Maybe not,” Remi murmured, then started toward the right-hand wall, her headlamp pointing at what looked like a horizontal slash of darker rock where the wall met the ceiling. As they drew closer, the slash seemed to grow taller, rising into the ceiling, until they realized they were looking at a slot-like tunnel.

Standing side by side, Sam and Remi peered into the opening, which rose away from them at a forty-five-degree angle for twenty feet before rounding over a jagged bump in the floor.

“Sam, do you see what-”

“I think I do.”

Jutting over the ridge in the floor was what appeared to be the sole of a boot.