The Courtesy of Death (10 page)

My guess as to what had happened is no more good now than it was then. I had been concentrating my attention on the walls of the cave and the accidents under foot, never turning a beam on the
flow of the water. Somewhere we had reached a third tributary and followed it down.

No explanation. Nothing. It was far worse than to be lost among the involutions of some vast rock chamber when one could at least keep one’s head and systematically explore the openings
till they were identified. But in that sump of waters we had nothingness. Instinct, intelligence, the senses—they were all put out of action.

The worst of it was that I had been navigating by water, not by compass. I sat down and cursed—frenzied, filthy swearing. Fosworthy’s reaction was astonishing.

‘My dear man, the fear of dissolution is so absurd,’ he said. ‘It is nothing but a moment’s suffering.’

His tone was in no way unctuous, but simple, sure and comforting. However, I was in no mood for it. I remarked that when it was a question of his Cynthia he didn’t seem to enjoy more than
anyone else the thought of being bloody well dissolved.

‘That is different,’ he replied. ‘I am exercised by the conditions of survival, not the fact.’

We rested, shivered and drank. We tried again. I cannot clearly remember much of it. My watch said that we spent five hours stumbling about aimlessly and getting physically weaker. It could have
been seventeen hours, but the paraffin in the lantern would not have lasted that long. It went out, of course, at last, and we had nothing left but Aviston-Tresco’s excellent electric
torch.

Again we heard the fall and worked towards it. We had long since given up following the courses of streams. The fall was something we knew, somewhere to die. One’s strong instinct—if
I make myself plain—is not to die nowhere. The mere rediscovery comforted us a little. Fosworthy said:

‘Suppose this is the bottom of the sluice which we first saw from the top.’

I replied that it didn’t matter if it was; we could not climb it.

‘Let us assume it is,’ he insisted. ‘We are travelling in a three-dimensional world which soon we will be unable to see. We must always go uphill and, when we can, always in
the direction of the fall, watching the compass as long as we have light.’

It was better than giving up. The problem, of course, was how far to continue away from the fall in the hope of finding a way back towards it. The amazing thing is that we never disputed over
this. I must have caught some of his gentleness.

At last we heard the gurgle of water again and knew that this time we must be well above the level of the bottom of the fall. But there was no going on. The flashlight showed a clear drop below
us. At the limit of the beam was the sluice. We were looking out from a window high up in the cave which contained the original stream, unmistakably plunging downwards, the terrace we had followed,
the entries to the steep pot-hole and presumably a bend of the tributary which had misled me.

Fosworthy was determined to attempt the descent. Myself, I would have gone on wandering rather than tackle that drop; but to him it was a short cut with Undine somewhere at the ultimate end of
it. He hurled his coat over the edge and climbed down the first twenty feet. Then he had to let go, and fall or glissade until he fetched up against a lumpy, mushroomy growth of stalagmite. He hit
it and called up that he was all in one piece.

‘I may by misadventure have broken a toe,’ he said, ‘but I shall be able to catch you.’

I threw the torch down to him, muffled in my coat. As soon as he found it and lit up the darkness, I followed. He did not exactly break my fall. He saved my life by catching a foot as I missed
the stalagmites and was shooting past him.

The rest of the descent was not difficult. We then set out along the once familiar terrace, hurrying and tripping since the torch was now dying. The lantern we had left behind was, of course,
out, and we searched for it desperately until one of us fell over it. We were in bad shape, Fosworthy limping and I streaming blood from a jagged wound in the neck—the result of my head
swinging round in a half circle after Fosworthy grabbed me. The loose skin of the throat must have caught on a pointed stalagmite. The check possibly prevented a fracture of the skull, for, as it
was, my jaw had thumped against rock hard enough to knock out a tooth.

We went through the same incompetent search for the end of the flex, which we were too dizzy with hunger and fatigue to find. At last we had it. In half an hour we were back in the lit passage.
We were still alive. We shivered a little less in fresh, dry coats. That was all. There was no sign that anyone had opened the hatch.

Turning off the light to save the batteries, we tried to sleep. I suppose we did, for I remember feeling suddenly stiff, sore and immovable. When I groaned, Fosworthy groped his way to the light
switch, audibly limping. I think he had long been lying quite still and awake. My watch read half past seven, but I was no longer certain whether we had been underground for thirty hours or
forty-two.

‘I have been considering your future after you have dissolved,’ he said placidly. ‘Come with me! It will help you.’

The pools of dim, white light in the passage were as depressing as darkness. That crude illumination of silent rock emphasised the pitiless inhumanity of the place. As Fosworthy led me on
towards the blocked entrance I reminded myself severely that we had not been long enough without food to be exhausted, and that if I had been in the outer world I should have recognised my physical
distress as due to nothing but frantic activity. Consequently I began to feel that dissolution was a lot less imminent.

We came to the horizontal cleft on the right of the path, outside which was the last of the lights. Fosworthy stooped, entered and felt for a switch. Two soft floodlights at ground level and one
powerful reflector overhead lit up the wearisome, eternal limestone. I could not imagine why so much trouble had been taken in a cave which was not at all remarkable except for an overhang of
smooth rock like the initial curve of a dome and another irregular slope at an angle of about sixty degrees to the floor.

Then I made out the mammoth, vividly drawn in a rust-red pigment, and I swear that my first impression was not of the physical form of the animal, but of its bearing, its mood. In spite of the
spears stuck in flanks and belly, it was unaggressive. It was melancholy in the moment of death, almost trusting. It received. One could well imagine that it forgave.

At first I paid no attention to the animated black lines around it and turned to the floodlit overhang covered with beasts, sometimes in groups deliberately composed, sometimes overlying each
other where bosses of rock had tempted the artist into bas-relief. There were deer, bison and horses and some strange sitting creature with short, beseeching forepaws which could have been—if
the painter preserved his scale—a very large squirrel or some kind of sloth. The short ears proved that it was not rabbit or hare.

The paintings were covered by the thin glaze of the limestone walls which had preserved them like the glass over a picture. A better geologist than I, who knew how long it took to form a
millimetre of the deposit, could probably date the paintings within a thousand years. They belonged to the same tradition as the art of Altamira, Lascaux and the Pyrenean caves, yet were livelier
and perhaps less delicate. Movement and expression were what the artist was after, just as in the prehistoric picture galleries of the Spanish caves. But, unlike his southern contemporaries, this
animal lover—was he hunter, priest or gourmet?—did not leave out human beings though he drew them conventionally, with no attempt at the tender realism of the animals. A lively little
black figure with angular lines for arms and legs was good enough for a man.

‘Now you understand,’ Fosworthy said. ‘They believed that in my distress I had told you, and that you had lent me money so that I could go into hiding and keep
quiet.’

I did understand. Buy your hotel, buy up any land available for the hot-dog stands, the motor-coach parks and the souvenir shops, and when all is safely in the bag, send a postcard to the
British Museum! No wonder Aviston-Tresco was confident that I would give nothing away to the police until I had completed my plans! The cave system—that and that alone—had puzzled me as
a motive for so much desperation, since it was on Jedder’s land and he could control access as he liked. But this was a possession for the whole world. It would and ought to become a place of
pilgrimage.

All the same, I could only stare at Fosworthy’s agitation. People were certainly going to make a lot of undeserved money when the secret was out. But what about it?

‘It is not the paintings themselves,’ he said. ‘It is their profound religious significance.’

This was what Dunton had got hold of. He knew the beliefs from one or more patients; he knew, as many other local inhabitants must have, of meetings; he knew of the Apology for giving death, of
the fellowship with animals and the seemingly inconsistent obsession with hunting. But he had not the faintest suspicion that the small sect preserved an objective secret.

‘So this is what started you off?’

‘No, no!’ Fosworthy exclaimed as if I had doubted his power to think independently. ‘Our group had been in existence for some years. Many of us were impressed by the Quakers
who are influential in this part of the county. Excellent people, but too easily content!’

He meant, I suppose, the same criticism as when he described Dunton as limited. Nobody could be more sane and healthy than Quakers; but I can well see that the mystics and eccentrics still
inseparable for the Isle of Glass might find the admirable influence of the Friends too simple for them.

I gathered that Fosworthy, the Bank Manager and a handful of others had formed a mild vegetarian circle which used to contemplate the Unity of Life. That was the start. I wish I had listened
more patiently; but when his eyes began to shine and his gestures to be too emphatic, I could only see the abnormality.

‘Who found the cave?’ I asked.

‘Miss Filk. Her wretched Dobermans put up a fox which went to ground under a rock. Jedder, who is a keen rider to hounds, visited the place a week later to stop the earth, as I believe it
is called, and made his way inside. He kept quiet about it. He saw it as a mere curiosity which he would not allow to disturb his life. Another man would have thought only of the admission fees.
But Alan Jedder looks inward.’

I was about to say that he wouldn’t much like what he saw. But he probably did. No doubt he congratulated himself, like the rest of us, on being an individual of wonderful
potentialities.

‘Then one day, exploring alone, he found the paintings. He invited Aviston-Tresco and myself to see them. We all realised very soon that here was the synthesis we sought.’

The earnestness of the synthesis went on and on and I tried to take it in—since Aviston-Tresco’s opinions were responsible for my almost certain death—while mind and eyes were
day-dreaming among the lovely simplicities of human life twenty-five thousand years ago. I could see how the dying mammoth might stir the imagination of our crowded world in which an animal is a
pet or a potential carcass. The recognition between hunter and hunted of the divinity in each is lost to us.

Then the lights went out. I could not think for fear. After a few seconds they came on again. I thanked God, and tried to reconstruct causes, all unlikely, of a breakdown in so elementary a
system. They went out again, and stayed out.

‘I told you he would look for me,’ Fosworthy said.

I hoped he was right and that someone had come down through the hatch and switched off the lights to immobilise us, if either of us were alive. Assuming that a fuse had gone, we had no hope of
ever finding our way back along the passage. In theory it could be done by feeling for the wires, but I doubted if that would be possible in practice; there were too many openings and obstacles
where the line was overhead and out of reach. In darkness the passage was merely a random route, undiscoverable except by chance. Turn round twice and that was the end.

‘Where will he look?’ I asked.

‘If I am not near the entrance, he will look here, where of course I should choose to wait.’

‘And what then?’

‘I presume he will help me to dissolve peacefully. He seemed certain that I should be alone.’

I had forgotten the puncture from the van seat. Naturally! By now I was equally sore all over. However, I felt quite capable of waiting for a far sorer Aviston-Tresco along the track. What good
it would do was more doubtful. According to Fosworthy, nobody committed himself to that labyrinth unless a companion was left at the top of the hatch.

Pulling Fosworthy by the hand, I felt my way out of the painted cave. It was the only time when he seemed reluctant to live. Perhaps the haunting influence of that calm mammoth overcame his
desire for Undine. We followed the wires some little way and then turned into a confused tumble of ledges and pinnacles just off the track. I had passed it three times and knew it would give cover
from any searching beam and from the passage lights. As for getting out again, one had simply to scramble downhill in any direction and follow the cave wall.

First of all we heard Aviston-Tresco’s voice.

‘Barnabas! My poor Barnabas! Where are you?’

It boomed and trilled and echoed and died away, once returning seconds later with a faint, uncanny ‘Barnabas!’

They passed the recess where we were. Jedder had a miner’s lamp on his forehead and carried a twelve-bore gun. Aviston-Tresco had one arm in a sling and a lantern in his free hand. They
were careless and confident, showing that Fosworthy was right and that they did not expect to have to deal with me.

They went on into the painted cave. If we had had any light, then was our chance to reach the entrance before they could. As it was, we were helpless. I was sure only of finding my way back to
the wired passage, and that might well have taken ten minutes of patient concentration.