The Underdwelling

8

When they touched bottom, Boyd was glad to see the lights from the lanterns. They lit up the gloom enough so that he could see right away that this was going to be no quick excursion. For there was a tunnel down there leading off into the earth.

“Limestone cave,” Jurgens said. “Just like I thought.”

That meant trouble for future mining operations and he didn’t like it. McNair, on the other hand, was clearly excited.

“You boys ready for a hike?” he said, snapping a few photographs with a flash.

Jurgens and McNair led from the front and the others followed behind down a long, low-ceilinged passage that seemed to wind all over the place, the roof sloping so low at times they had to duck down. The gas detectors told them the air was fine, but they kept their masks handy. You just never knew. Their lights bobbed and threw illumination onto cold, black rock that had known nothing but darkness for God only knew how long. It was chilly and damp down there and they splashed through puddles, feeling less like miners and more like cave explorers. Now and again, McNair and Jurgens would pause and study the strata.

“We’re still in that Permian seam,” McNair said.

Jurgens looked at him. “Way down here?”

“Oh yes.”

Boyd was bothered by that and he wasn’t sure why.

So, these are Permian rocks… what of it? he told himself. You tripped over ’em on the surface you wouldn’t have known if they were Permian or Triassic or Devonian for that matter. Rocks are fucking rocks.

And that sounded good, sounded reasonable, but it wasn’t buying beans. Because he was getting that feeling low in his belly again like something had curled up and gone to sleep, and now it was waking up.

His knowledge of geology was mainly from a high school class where they had grown crystals and collected fossil seashells. That was the extent of it. Yet, the idea of the Permian rocks was eating away at him. Maybe it was the atmosphere of the place… the age, the silence broken only by dripping water, that smell of entombed things only now bursting free. It made no sense. Regardless, he felt claustrophobic again, almost manically so. Like he had been buried alive.

Breed and Maki weren’t saying much.

No bickering, no whining from Maki, and no insults from Breed. Boyd figured that was a pretty good barometer. It told him that they were feeling the forbidding atmosphere of this place same as him.

McNair and Jurgens led them into what looked like a stope that had been chiseled from the limestone, but Jurgens said it was probably hollowed by subterranean waters long, long ago. Just how long he did not even begin to speculate. And you could plainly hear the disappointment in his voice. A network of underground caves was bad news. It meant maybe abandoning the series of drifts above and channeling in a different direction. Things the company would not like because that meant time and money. Things Jurgens was supposed to be saving them whenever possible.

The stope went on for maybe another fifty or sixty feet, the floor littered with debris and collapsed shelves of rock that had fallen in long ago. Some were so big they had to climb right over the top of them. But they pushed on, the lanterns creating jumping shadows that crept along the crumbling walls.

Then it opened up into a massive cavern.

Boyd just whistled at the sight of it.

“Holy shit,” Maki said.

It was incredible. They stood there in awe, feeling like the first men to set eyes on the Carlsbad Caverns. Before them was an immense grotto. Even with the long-barreled flashlights, they could barely see the roof above. It had to have been well over a hundred feet straight up. There were huge stalactites and stalagmites, great shelves of rock that had been sculpted and polished by eons of dripping water into great columns and blobby, candleflow heaps of stone. Minerals sparkled in the walls. Crystal formations rose like pillars of salt. Great boulders the size of two-story houses had been perfectly rounded by ancient waters. There was a briny stink in the air.

“Gentlemen,” McNair said, “we are about to step into the history books.”

Maki just stood there with his mouth hanging open as the flashlights scanned about, their beams thick with suspended dust and droplets of moisture. He swallowed, licking his lips. “Did somebody dig this out?” he said.

“No, no, this is a natural cavern,” McNair was quick to point out before imaginations started running wild. “All of what we’ve seen so far has been channeled out of the limestone by ancient floodwaters. This cavern, too. It’s really incredible.”

“But that shaft I almost fell down… it was so smooth and round.”

“That could have been volcanic rock laid down by a lava flow,” Jurgens pointed out. “Lava can form shapes that look man-made if it rapidly cools.”

McNair nodded. “Exactly. It’ll take years and years of study, gentlemen, to answer all this. For now, just enjoy.”

Thing was, all this might have gotten a paleobiologist excited, but Boyd and the others had mixed emotions. Something this big and this old, well, it inspired a certain superstitious dread that made their mouths go dry. They were almost afraid of it and, at the same time, desperately curious.

“What’re you thinking?” Boyd said to Breed.

The dazed look in his eyes finally faded. He laughed. “I was thinking of those comic books I read when I was a kid. Those guys in there were always finding places like this and they were always full of dinosaurs and shit.”

It was McNair’s turn to laugh. “I don’t think we’ll find any dinosaurs.”

“Good,” Breed said. “Because I left my rifle in the truck.”

They all got a little chuckle out of that.

The floor of the cavern was about twenty feet down from the opening of the stope. But it was a gradual incline littered with rocks and boulders and there was no trouble climbing down. Jurgens and McNair went first. Boyd and Breed followed. But Maki just waited above.

They put their lights on him.

“C’mon, peaches,” Breed said. “I’ll hold your hand.”

But Maki was not moving.

“You don’t have to come with us, Maki,” Jurgens said. “All of this, it’s above and beyond. I can’t even say how safe it is.”

“I’ll stay with you if you want,” Boyd told him.

That got Maki down. He was looking pale and his lower lip kept jumping with a tic. He was scared and nobody made fun of that, not even Breed. Maybe they were all feeling what Boyd had been feeling all night: the sense of impending doom. Like a can of something crawly had been opened up in their guts.

The floor was irregular, sometimes smooth and flat, other times hilly with mounds of rocks and jutting spokes of limestone. There were pools of water and lots of cracks that led down far below. Jurgens and McNair were having themselves a good old time, theorizing about the age of the cavern and the waters that must have cut it out, chipping off rock specimens and prodding at fossils… of which, there were many. Outcroppings of them everywhere: corals and brachiopods and crinoids.

“This is definitely late Permian,” McNair said as he took photographs of the fossiliferous rock. “The index fossils are fairly conclusive. My God, look at these specimens. Trilobites and mollusks and ammonites. Enough to fill a dozen specimen cases.”

“Sure, great scientific stuff,” Jurgens said. “But my bosses won’t be thrilled. I can tell you that much. If we have to divert those drifts, it’ll cost thousands, hundreds of thousands.”

“They’ll live,” Boyd said to him. “Besides, I bet museums will pay plenty for the stuff down here. Christ, people’ll want to tour this. This will be a cash cow for Hobart. They’ll rake it in.”

“Yeah, he’s right,” Breed said.

Jurgens and McNair kept taking samples, discussing matters geological and paleontological, taking pictures. Boyd and the others wanted to explore, to see what was ahead. But it was hard to get them to move on. They wanted to study what they were finding. Finally, Breed and Maki moved off. Boyd went with them.

“Hey, we got bones over here,” Breed called.

That got them moving.

Jurgens and McNair came right over, holding their lanterns out. There were bones. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Some were protruding from the floor and others thrusting out from shelves of rock. All of them were fossilized, of course.

“Amazing,” McNair said, photographing them. “Absolutely amazing.” He held his lantern over the fossil imprint of a fish that was sinuous and eel-like. “Ancanthodian. Last remaining forms died out in the Permian Extinction event.” He looked around at the fossiliferous deposits. “Permian fishes… reptiles… amphibians. All heaped together like this. It’s unusual. I suppose the waters must have brought them together.”

“What’s unusual about it?” Boyd asked.

“Well, some of these are land forms and others are marine animals. It’s hard to imagine what could have scattered them all into the same basin. I suppose it could have been a streambed. Animals have a habit of dying around streams and in the shallows. The water might have washed them here.”

Boyd just looked at all those knobs of bone and things like the slats of ribcages, jaws, and skulls, and you name it. The bones of animals from land and from the sea all tossed into this basin like McNair said. No, it didn’t make sense. Not even to a guy like him. If there were a pile of bones like this in the modern world, he would have thought somebody collected them up and put them there. Or dumped them there.

Sure, he thought, like the litter pile of bones outside the cave of a beast. When it was done eating, it just tossed them in a litter pile.

But he didn’t say that. It was probably unscientific as all hell. McNair, no doubt, would have a better explanation and who was he to argue with the man? How it looked to him and how it probably was were two different things. Boyd figured that was probably true.

“Lookit this one,” Maki said. “A freaking crocodile, eh?”

McNair and Jurgens came over, looking at what appeared to be the near-complete fossil skeleton of a reptile maybe twenty feet in length.

“Good God,” McNair said, down on his hands and knees next to it. “This is a therapsid. And a big one, too.”

“What’s that?” Maki said.

“Therapsids were reptiles that mammals eventually developed from. Some were vegetarians and some were carnivores.” He examined the skull, the teeth jutting from it. “Look at these canines and incisors, this one was a carnivore.”

There were more bones scattered about. Lots of them. McNair identified some belonging to fish and others from therapsids, some quite large and others from smaller rodent-like forms. He went on and on in dusty detail about life in the late Permian and the massive extinction that wiped most of it out.

“This area must be part of some ancient headland,” he said. “Where the sea met the land. Incredible. We’re probably standing on a beach from the Upper Permian.”

Breed got bored and wandered off by himself. He disappeared over a rise and they could see his light bobbing about.

“Hey!” he called out. “There’s pillars over here.”

That got everyone scrambling to take a look.

They all arrived about the same time and saw an uneven expanse of ground stretching away as far as their lights would reach. It was set with low mounds and sloping hills. And everywhere… pillars. Not just two or three, but hundreds stretching away in all directions. Some were narrow like pipes and others had very wide bases that gradually tapered as they moved up and up, many right into the living rock far above. They were set in stands, crowded together so tightly you would have had to turn sideways to get between them, while others occupied low hillocks above.

McNair started moving around them, touching them and muttering under his breath.

Boyd moved with him, puzzled by what he was seeing. When Breed said “pillars” he was thinking of something out of classical architecture, Doric columns and the like. But these were nothing like that. Their surfaces were rough and set with overlapping scales and sometimes little thorns. It all reminded him of the skin of pineapples.

“They look kind of like trees,” he finally said.

“They are trees,” McNair said, nearly breathless with it all. “Permian trees. Good God in heaven, a forest of trees, still rooted, still in their upright living positions after 250 million years.”

Breed and Maki just looked at each other.

“Doc,” Breed said, knocking on one of them. “They’re made of stone.”

“They’re petrified,” Boyd said. “Just like those bones. They’re fossils.”

“Exactly,” McNair said.

All of them got the significance of it now: a forest of prehistoric trees.

And there had to be hundreds of them.

As they explored around, they found some that were no taller than a man and others that must have been eighty feet when they were alive, and still others that were probably hundreds of feet that disappeared right into the rock overhead. Some were just trunks, others had been snapped off thirty feet up, petrified logs and branches and deadfalls lying about. But many were nearly intact, their limbs still extant. Not only had the trees themselves been fossilized, but the loam around them. Heaps of fallen leaves were as petrified as the trees they fell from.

Boyd found it hard to take it all in, that immense, maze-like run of trees like the masts of ships.

Maki just didn’t get it, though. “How does a tree turn to rock?”

Breed said, “It’s like out in Arizona, the Petrified Forest. I been there. Ain’t you ever heard of that, Maki?”

“Oh yeah, sure.”

McNair told them that the trees in the Petrified Forest in Arizona were from the Triassic, but what they had here was much older. Much, much older. In Arizona, some of the trees were still rooted as these, but many had been washed by prehistoric seasonal floods into sandy river channels where they were buried in gravel and sand rich in volcanic ash.

“The process is called permineralization,” McNair explained. “I imagine this entire area was in some sort of lowland swamp or valley during the Permian. A flash flood probably turned that valley into a bog or a muddy lake. Hence, oxygen which causes oxidation and rot, was kept away. These trees were buried in water and sediment. What happens next is that the trees either disintegrate or are compressed into coal over a period of millions of years, or, in this case, they permineralize. Minerals gradually replace the woody tissues and you have petrified trees.”

Breed said, “Yeah, but this is better than the Petrified Forest. A lot better.”

“Yes. Yes, it is. This entire forest must have been locked in that bog and the entire thing, through the passage of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years must have dried up, but the sediment that enclosed it turned to stone, capturing our forest as we now see it. Nearly intact.”

McNair said that much later, whatever geologic upheaval swallowed up the Permian strata and sank it deep into Precambrian rock, brought the forest here as well. Through the ages, waters must have eroded the rocks away and exposed what they were seeing now.

Maki was interested. “There’s nothing like this anywhere? Not even Arizona?”

McNair shook his head. “A few years ago, a nice stand of petrified Permian trees were discovered near the Beardmore Glacier in Antarctica. But nothing like this.”

Some of them rose up out of the rock on spidery tangles of fossilized roots and others had trunks so huge that three men could not have circled them with their arms. McNair said there were both conifers and deciduous trees in this forest. They were looking at cycads and gymnosperms and seed ferns, an amazing variety. He pointed out short trees with fern-like fronds that were called Archaeopteris, the progenitors of modern pines. Something called a Dicroidium that looked more like a large houseplant than a tree. There were primitive Ginkgoes with broad, fanlike leaves, cycads that looked much like palm trees, and Glossopteris, another seed fern, but very treelike in appearance. This species had a massive trunk that tapered gradually upward maybe fifty or sixty feet where a cluster of whipping branches sprouted. The huge, broad leaves in the rock were Glossopteris leaves, McNair said.

He squatted next to a wide stump, examining the rings within which were bright and sparkling with mineral deposits of many colors. “Look here,” he said. “If I had a mass spectrometer, I could identify these minerals, but I’m prepared to make a guess. Much of this is quartz, but the various trace elements give the petrified wood its color. Copper and chrome oxide create greens and blues, iron oxide gives us reds and browns and yellows, aluminum silicates produce whites, etc. etc.”

Boyd, for one, was ignoring the lecture.

It was interesting stuff and any other time he might have listened intently, but not down here. Not in the bowels of the earth in the enshrouding darkness with nothing but the sound of dripping water and echoing voices to break that heavy, almost humming silence. This place was like some graveyard and he honestly did not like it. It was meant to stay buried and he wished to God it had. He panned his light around, all those fossilized tree trunks leaning and canting this way and that, clustered together, crowded like the spokes of bike tires. The flashlight beam created sliding, distorted shadows and made the trees look like they were in motion. More than once, he was certain that something had moved out there in that cemetery of pillars and monuments.

It was imagination. It just had to be.

Yet, that feeling in his guts was expanding, filling him with an oily blackness, drowning him in his own mounting claustrophobia and paranoia. This place had not known light or air in eons and the idea of that disturbed him in ways he could not adequately catalog. Like maybe this hermetically sealed graveyard might start waking up at any moment, unleashing all its terrible secrets after 250 million years.

That was crazy, of course.

But as he wiped sweaty dew from his brow, he could not dismiss it entirely. Because ever since they’d reached the petrified forest he’d had the feeling that they were being watched.