When you start to rappel into a mouth of the cave, you can only see down to a ledge thirty feet below. You find soon enough, though, that below that thin entryway next to the ledge is a chasm whose bottom rests another 135 feet down. Aware now of the magnitude of your situation, you want to believe that the wall you're brushing against will somehow catch you if your anchor comes loose.
Still, you know better. This becomes all the more true as you descend past the wall and find yourself suspended in mid-air with nothing but your rope as support. You know intellectually that holding the rope will prevent you from going very far, but that doesn't stop your emotions from informing you that you just might die here in this artificially lit cave.
Once you reach bottom and rebuke your emotions for being so presumptuous, you listen interestedly to a guide, who not only discusses cave formations (and even points out the likeness of formations to movie characters), but turns off the lights to show what it was like for miners whose only source of light-- candles-- went out. Waving your hand inches from your face doesn't seem to help you see any better.
Your guide then leads you deeper into the cave through a passage that requires you to slide feet first with a ceiling mere inches from your face. You no longer wonder why there is a gaping hole in the seat of the tour-provided coveralls, and you even contribute to ripping it still larger as you slide.
After exploring one or two tight-lipped dead ends on your own (meaning it takes some effort to fit your body through the passages), your guide leads you on through still more tight spaces, and still deeper. The only light comes from your own headlamp, and those of the others. At times, you need consoling, so you resort to singing Coldplay under your breath. The temperature is markedly cooler down here. Small limestone formations dip like water from the ceiling.
Your progression includes climbing through a passage whose height requires you to maneuver over "belly flop rock," and you begin to make comparisons. So this is what a worm feels like, you think, slithering down these passages. You start to wonder how so many before you have done this, and especially how the first miners could come here not knowing whether the way forward was a safe one. As you work your way through this labrynth, however, you begin to feel a camaraderie with the other spelunkers, even the ones who speak only Russian.
After you emerge from nearly the same place you entered, you climb a spiraling and seemingly rusting metal staircase next to the gaping space down which you rappelled, and rebuke yourself mildly for feeling more fear of the heights you see here than that which you experienced on the way down. It is only after you climb most of this that you learn it was built in the 1920s. You're glad you were told that later, rather than sooner.
Still, you know better. This becomes all the more true as you descend past the wall and find yourself suspended in mid-air with nothing but your rope as support. You know intellectually that holding the rope will prevent you from going very far, but that doesn't stop your emotions from informing you that you just might die here in this artificially lit cave.
Once you reach bottom and rebuke your emotions for being so presumptuous, you listen interestedly to a guide, who not only discusses cave formations (and even points out the likeness of formations to movie characters), but turns off the lights to show what it was like for miners whose only source of light-- candles-- went out. Waving your hand inches from your face doesn't seem to help you see any better.
Your guide then leads you deeper into the cave through a passage that requires you to slide feet first with a ceiling mere inches from your face. You no longer wonder why there is a gaping hole in the seat of the tour-provided coveralls, and you even contribute to ripping it still larger as you slide.
After exploring one or two tight-lipped dead ends on your own (meaning it takes some effort to fit your body through the passages), your guide leads you on through still more tight spaces, and still deeper. The only light comes from your own headlamp, and those of the others. At times, you need consoling, so you resort to singing Coldplay under your breath. The temperature is markedly cooler down here. Small limestone formations dip like water from the ceiling.
Your progression includes climbing through a passage whose height requires you to maneuver over "belly flop rock," and you begin to make comparisons. So this is what a worm feels like, you think, slithering down these passages. You start to wonder how so many before you have done this, and especially how the first miners could come here not knowing whether the way forward was a safe one. As you work your way through this labrynth, however, you begin to feel a camaraderie with the other spelunkers, even the ones who speak only Russian.
After you emerge from nearly the same place you entered, you climb a spiraling and seemingly rusting metal staircase next to the gaping space down which you rappelled, and rebuke yourself mildly for feeling more fear of the heights you see here than that which you experienced on the way down. It is only after you climb most of this that you learn it was built in the 1920s. You're glad you were told that later, rather than sooner.
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