People of the Caverns

James Abraham Carter

Virgil Newton shone his helmet light against the darkness of the Cango Caves, watching dust motes drift through the beam like ancient spirits disturbed from their slumber. One month had passed since the earthquake—a tremor so violent that it had set seismographic equipment across the province shrieking in alarm—but the caverns remained sealed, waiting for men like Virgil to venture into their depths and determine whether the ancient limestone halls would welcome tourists once more.

His team of five cavers had spread through the eastern galleries, mapping fractures, assessing ceiling stability, and documenting the damage the tremor had inflicted upon this Underground Cathedral of the Klein Karoo. Virgil moved carefully, his climbing boots finding purchase on the uneven floor; his trained eyes assessed every crack, every fallen stalactite, and every shift in the ancient stone. This was his calling—to read the language of caves, to understand the hidden architecture beneath the earth.

He did not hear the floor giving way until it was too late.

The rotten pocket— weakened by millennia of water seeping through limestone and damaged further by the earthquake—collapsed beneath his weight with a sound like collapsing brickwork. Virgil fell, arms pinwheeling, his cry swallowed by the vast darkness as gravity dragged him into stygian depths. Down through empty air, down past walls covered in formations he had never seen, down into the unknowable depths of the cave system.

He struck something soft.

For a long moment, Virgil lay still, his breath driven from his lungs, his helmet light illuminating the strange substance he had landed on. He had fallen at least fifty feet—perhaps more—and yet he lived. Beneath him, a mound of spongy cylinders rose like a nest of pale mushrooms, each one thick as a man's thigh and glowing with a faint, emerald luminescence. The bioluminescent fungi had broken his fall, catching him like a living life net. Their glow was dim but sufficient to illuminate the cavern around him—a chamber of vast dimensions, its walls studded with crystals that caught the fungal light and scattered it like stars.

Virgil sat up slowly. He stared around in wonder and amazement at the fantastic sight. Who would have guessed that hidden beneath the earth, there existed this astonishing world - a subterranean ecosystem unknown to modern science? For a moment, he speculated that the enormous thallophytes might be the descendants of Prototaxites, the giant fungi of the late Devonian era. Although it was a fantastic discovery, he knew practical matters must first take precedence. Virgil began examining himself for injuries. Nothing was broken. Bruises, yes—his ribs would ache for days—but thankfully, that was the extent of the damage.

Virgil carefully climbed down one of the thick, ten foot tall fungal cylinders. Reaching solid earth, he saw that there was a sparse undergrowth of dark green plants that had adapted to the low light. He looked up at the hole through which he had fallen. It was a vertical shaft of darkness high above his head, the remnant of some collapsed pocket in the cave system. It was far too high to reach, and no handholds presented themselves to his careful scrutiny. He cupped his hands around his mouth.

"Hello! Can anyone hear me? I've fallen and I need help!"

His voice echoed and died. No answer came. His teammates were too far away to hear him.

Virgil knew then, with the cold certainty of a scientist faced with irrefutable data, that he would have to find his own way out. The knowledge was not unfamiliar—he had explored solo before, had planned for contingencies—but the reality of it settled into his bones as he turned to face the luminescent chamber and whatever unknown dangers it might conceal.

The cylindrical fungi dotted the floor in clusters, their soft glow painting the stone in shades of green. Virgil turned off his helmet light to conserve power, as there was enough light to see by, and commenced to explore this weird environment. As he moved toward the cavern’s eastern wall, following what might have been a pathway through the strange, subterranean mushroom forest, he became aware of sound—rhythmic, repetitive, coming from ahead. Footsteps. Voices.

He stopped, flattening himself against the pale trunk of a huge growth, and cautiously peered tensely around its girth.

They emerged from between the towering fungi like figures from an outlandish fever dream—warriors, naked but for loincloths woven from the fibrous trunks of the giant thallophytes, their pale skin tinted green by the fungal light. Their features were approximately African. But their noses were not as broad, nor their lips as full, as those of the Bantu people. Their skin was as fair as a Northern European’s, and their hair—tightly curled and woolly—had faded, like their complexions, to a shade of cream from generations of living beneath the earth. Their eyes held the flat stare of ruthless killers, and each man carried a truncheon of carved keratin, which was made from the heartwood equivalent of the giant mushrooms.

Behind them came others—slaves, clearly marked by rope collars, their backs welted with recent beatings. They carried baskets filled with cuttings from the edible portions of the bioluminescent fungi; their harvesting of the strange crops that grew in this underground world was now complete.

Virgil’s breath caught in his throat. These were people—human beings—living in the depths of the caves that spelunkers had explored for years without ever suspecting their existence. Virgil was eager for human contact, for someone to guide him through the maze of caverns. But the sight of the abused slaves gave him pause for thought. If the warriors were cruel to their own people, then what would they do to him, a complete stranger? He stepped back, prudently seeking better concealment, but as he did so, his foot crunched on a stone.

One of the warriors, alerted by the sound, jerked his head around and spotted Virgil in an instant. The fellow’s eyes widened, then narrowed. He barked something in a language Virgil did not understand, and the party surged forward with all the fervor of a wolf pack hunting prey.

Virgil tried to run, but the warriors were faster. They surrounded him, keratin truncheons rising and falling. His helmet was knocked off, and the last thing he remembered was a blow to the base of his skull that sent him spinning into darkness.

**********

He woke bound.

His hands were lashed behind his back with ropes woven from fungal fiber, rough against his wrists. He was hauled to his feet and forced to stumble through passages carved from living rock, some created by nature and others by generations of human hands. He passed through chambers where more of the pale people worked at strange tasks. He saw, in one cavern, workers digging at the walls with tools made from human bone, extracting garnets - deep crimson crystals embedded in the limestone, which would be knapped into other implements. In another chamber, women wove cloth from fibers he could not identify; their fingers moved in complex patterns.

The warriors spoke among themselves in their unknown tongue. Virgil, being South African, was familiar with many of the indigenous languages, but this didn’t resemble any of them. He tried to understand, to find meaning in their words, but it was hopeless. He was a prisoner of an unknown people who had never seen the surface world; their entire existence was bounded by claustrophobic stone and darkness.

They came at last to a cavern that stole Virgil's breath. Fantastic flowerstones - sheet-like deposits of calcium carbonate that formed huge draperies of stone across the walls. Natural rimstone dams were also present where calcite-rich water had pooled and overflowed, and had gradually built up dam-like structures. Then there were stalactites and stalagmites in all their wondrous forms. But it was not the amazing sight of these marvellous speleothems that made him gasp.

A city rose from the cavern floor—a metropolis of pale limestone blocks, carved into cube-shaped buildings; each structure was windowless and roofless. All the buildings were arranged in perfect concentric squares around a central plaza. The cubic architecture made sense, Virgil realized—the absence of rain meant no need for pitched roofs to shed water, and the consistent temperature freed builders from the concerns of climate adaptation. The pale stone caught the glow of embedded fungi and reflected it outward, giving the city an ethereal quality, like a dreamscape fashioned from moonlight.

But something was wrong. Cracks ran through many buildings. Whole structures had collapsed into piles of rubble. Here and there, groups of workers labored to clear debris and to rebuild what the recent earthquake had destroyed. Virgil was forced toward a huge cube-shaped building at one end of the central plaza. His captors herded him through its trapezoid doorway.

They entered a spacious room. Memmis, chief of the cavern world, sat upon his dais at the far end of the chamber in the largest building at the city’s heart. He was the absolute ruler of his people—the Quru, children of the hidden places, whose ancestors had retreated from the surface world in ancient times to escape enemies whose names were long forgotten.

And now Virgil stood before him, a stranger from the world above, brought low by the cruel vagaries of uncaring Fate.

The warriors forced him to his knees at the foot of the dais. Kavor, their leader—a broad-shouldered man with ritual tattoos crossing his chest—spoke to the chief in rapid tones, detailing the capture of this strange creature who had been lurking in the fungal gardens, planning who knew what mischief.

Memmis was an intimidating man; his authority was evident in the way his people deferred to him, the way even Kavor lowered his eyes when addressing him. His gaze on Virgil held no warmth, only suspicion—the cold assessment of a ruler whose position depended on control of information and power. Virgil represented the unknown, and the unknown was dangerous. Memmis turned to an elderly man standing at the foot of the dais.

"Zarna," the chief said, his voice echoing through the chamber, "use your powers to give him understanding so I can find out who he is and where he is from."

Zarna, the sorcerer, was ancient; his skin was a network of wrinkles; his eyes were clouded with cataracts but still piercing in their intensity. He wore a crystal pendant on a cord around his neck, and when he approached Virgil, the pendant began to glow with inner light.

"Torel kavira," the old man murmured, pressing the crystal to Virgil's brow. "Torel kavira enash."

The world dissolved into chaos.

Words crashed through Virgil's mind like waves—concepts, vocabulary, grammar, all of it flooding his consciousness in a torrent too rapid to process. He felt his sanity straining under the assault; felt himself drowning in a tidal wave of knowledge. And then, slowly, the chaos resolved. The sounds became words, the words became meaning, and Virgil understood.

"What are you?" Memmis demanded, his voice harsh with suspicion. "Where do you come from? How did you enter our sacred caverns?"

Virgil managed to overcome his astonishment and pull his wits together. "I am Virgil Newton," he heard himself say, and the words came out in the Quru tongue, flawless and fluent as if he had spoken them all his life. "I am a scientist—a seeker of knowledge. I came from above—from the world your ancestors left. The caves were damaged by a great shaking of the earth, and I, along with others, came to see if they could be made safe again."

A murmur ran through the assembled courtiers. Above? The World Above? It was myth, legend, the stories told to children of a realm that could not be real—a realm of light and warmth and openness that their ancestors had fled in terror so many generations ago that the memory of it had become a fairy tale.

Zarna's eyes blazed with excitement. "The ancient stories speak of this! The World Above, which our forebears fled when the Enemy came! It is real—it is real after all!"

But Memmis's face had darkened. "You lie," he said slowly. "There is no World Above. There is only the caverns, the only world that exists. You are a demon made flesh by the Shadow Spirits, come to trick us with your false words."

"I speak only truth," Virgil earnestly said. "Above the earth is endless…” His speech faltered for a moment because there were no words in the Quru language for blue sky, golden sun, and vast oceans. “Your ancestors came from there, long ago.” he continued. “They must have sealed the passage behind them and told their children that the World Above was a myth, but it isn’t. It is real, and your enemies—the ones who drove your ancestors underground—are long dead. There is nothing to fear."

He spoke with the passion of a man who believed what he said, who had seen the sun and felt the wind and knew the truth of the World Above. But Memmis's eyes held only fear—fear not of the surface world itself, but of what the knowledge of it would do to his power.

He was the chief because the Quru believed there was no other life, no other world. Their world was the caves, their destiny was the darkness, and his authority came from controlling that conviction. If his people believed that there was a surface world—a better world, a world of light and freedom—then his power would crumble like limestone under the blows of the stonemason’s garnet hammers.

"You will not speak of this,” Memmis said to all in the chamber; his voice low and dangerous, his eyes glaring as they swept the room. "None of you will speak of this. This stranger has come out of the shadows. He is the unclean spawn of the Shadow Spirits, sent by them to lead us astray. The Rock Spirits are angry—the great shaking proved it—and they demand a sacrifice. He will be offered to them, and his blood will appease their wrath."

"You cannot—" Virgil began, but Kavor's keratin truncheon crashed against his skull, and the world went black.

As he was carried from the room, a shadowed figure lurking in a doorway watched him go. The figure, who had been listening intently to everything that had been said, also silently departed.

**********

He woke in gloom.

A cell, he realized—there was a doorway, currently blocked by a slab of stone, and the room, unlike the other buildings, had a roof peppered with small holes for ventilation. There were no windows. Instead, the cell was illuminated by bioluminescent fungi growing in niches in the walls. His hands were still bound behind his back, and his head throbbed with the dull ache of a mild concussion.

Virgil rose unsteadily to his feet and sat on a stone bench against the wall, trying to think, trying to plan. If they expected him to sit passively while they prepared some ritual sacrifice, they did not know his nature. He had escaped from worse situations—had extricated himself from collapsed tunnels in Mexico, had wriggled free from flooded passages in China, had found his way out of caves that locals swore were entrance to hell itself. He would find a way out of this one, too.

The stone door groaned, rising upward like a portcullis. Virgil lifted his gaze from the floor.

A young woman stood in the doorway—slender, pale-skinned like her people, but with a finer bone structure. She was clad in a brief loincloth. He large breasts were bare, and her hair was a mass of tight curls that framed her face. As the door grated shut behind the girl, her eyes moved over Virgil with an expression he could not quite read. She appeared to be about twenty, ten years younger than he was.

"Hello," she said quietly. "I am Nenru."

Virgil's heart hammered against his ribs with rising hope. "How did you—"

"My father is Chief Memmis. I heard everything—what you told him about the World Above." She moved to stand in front of him, her voice dropping to a whisper. "Is it true? Is there really a world up there, a world of light and beauty and spaciousness?"

"I've seen it," Virgil said. "I've lived in it all my life. I swear to you by everything I hold sacred—it is real, and it is beautiful."

Nenru's eyes glistened with tears. "Then my father has lied to us. All our lives, he has told us that the World Above was a myth, or if real, the abode of demons to be shunned. But it's not, is it?"

"No. It's real, and your people could go there if they wanted to. Your ancestors sealed the passage, but there must be another way—"

"My father is cruel," Nenru said, and her voice cracked. "He beats me when I displease him. He beats all of us—his power is built on fear, on lies. I want to see the World Above, Virgil. I want to know what it’s like to experience it." She turned around, revealing her back—a landscape of welts raised in angry red lines across her spine from a recent beating. "This is what he does to me. This is what he does to everyone who questions him."

Virgil's stomach turned. "I believe you. I'll help you escape—I swear it. But first, we need to—"

"I have a knife," Nenru said. "Hidden in my body where the guards dare not look. I can cut your bonds, and then we can escape. But there are guards outside, and—"

"I'll fight," Virgil said decisively. "I'm not helpless. Once I'm free, we'll get out of here together. I've done this before."

Nenru met his eyes, and something passed between them—recognition, perhaps, of two people united by circumstance and mutual need. She reached under her loincloth and withdrew a blade wrapped in cloth—a knife of garnet, its edge honed to a glistening sharpness.

She sat next to him on the bench and cut his bonds. The fungal fiber parted like wet paper, and Virgil's hands came free.

"Two guards are outside," Nenru said. "When I call them, they'll raise the door. We'll rush them—surprise and speed are our only hope. Preparations for your sacrifice are under way."

Virgil nodded, flexing his fingers, feeling blood return to his hands. "Ready."

Nenru wrapped the knife and concealed it inside her slit. She then rose and called out in the Quru tongue. The door began to rise. Virgil, standing at the side of the portal and out of sight, tensed.

The guards were young and strong, but they hadn’t expected Nenru to free the prisoner and attack them. They had just enough time to look surprised before Nenru’s fist quickly thudded solidly against one man’s jaw and Virgil’s blow swiftly struck the other. Both fell senseless, and the escapees were sprinting through the doorway toward freedom.

"Stop!” A voice bellowed from ahead. "Stop them!"

Memmis.

The chief stood at the end of the corridor they had just run into, flanked by a dozen warriors, his face a mask of fury. "Traitor!" he spat at Nenru. "You would betray your own father? Your own blood?"

"You are not my father," Nenru said, her voice steady. "You are my jailer. You would have all of us be prisoners to our terrors - frightened of demons, frightened of the World Above. That is how you seek to control us. Virgil is not evil. He speaks the truth, yet you would kill him to protect your power, just as you have beaten or killed others who have challenged your authority. I want to see the World Above, Father. I want to feel its warmth. I want to live in a world that isn't bound by stone, darkness, and fear."

"I came to collect the sacrifice. Now both of you will die,” Memmis said, his voice harsh and merciless, and unaffected by her words. Then, to his warriors, “Seize the two of them!” "

The warriors charged.

Virgil fought—a desperate, flailing battle against opponents whose fighting skills were better than his own. Nenru battled beside him, her small but powerful fists thudding into flesh and felling men. But there were too many warriors, and even as they disabled two, three more took their place. A truncheon caught Virgil across the shoulders, and he fell. Another warrior struck Nenru, and she crumpled.

They were bound hand and foot, and carried through the tunnels to a huge cavern where the population had gathered to witness the bloody ritual. A shallow pit had been dug at the base of a ramp, and behind it was a limestone idol representing the Rock Spirits. At the top of the incline lay a massive stone cylinder, its weight sufficient to crush anything beneath it.

"Prepare to roll the cylinder,” Memmis ordered the warriors who had accompanied him. Then, turning toward the expectant throng, "Let the Rock Spirits feast on the blood of the faithless. Let them see what happens to those who betray their chief."

Virgil and Nenru were pitched into the pit. The chanting began—a low, resonant drone that rose from the crowd in an eerie, primordial song, a paean to the earth itself. A drum began to beat, a deep thunder that vibrated through the stone and echoed from the cavern walls.

"The knife," Nenru whispered, her face pale but composed. "It's still inside me. I can feel it—but I can't reach it. You'll have to."

This was no time for modesty or prudishness. Virgil twisted, struggling to reach her; his fingers slipped beneath her loincloth. And then—yes—his hand found the hilt protruding from her slit. He drew the blade and began to awkwardly saw through the ropes that bound her wrists. No one saw him. Lying flat in the pit, they were below the line of sight of the throng.

The chanting grew louder. The stone wedges holding the cylinder were jerked away with ropes.

Nenru's bonds around her wrists parted. She grabbed the knife and frantically sawed at the ropes constraining her ankles. A rumbling sound made her look up. Her eyes went wide with fear. The massive cylinder, freed of its wedges, was rolling down the incline, gathering frightful speed as it rushed toward them.

The final rope fell away. The hurtling cylinder was almost upon them. There was no time to free Virgil. Nenru grabbed him beneath the armpits and heaved him from the pit, leaping out after him and pulling him clear as the massive stone rolled down the ramp with the inevitability of an avalanche. It thundered past them so close that Virgil felt the wind of its passage. It crashed into the pit where they had been lying a heartbeat before.

Nenru took the knife from between her teeth and swiftly freed Virgil from the ropes that bound him. Memmis looked down from the head of the ramp, shocked by the unexpected turn of events. But before he or his men could react, the ground shook so violently that they were hurled to the earth.

A tremendous crash drew Virgil’s gaze. A pile of rocks at the cavern’s far end had collapsed, revealing a hidden tunnel through which dim light streamed. But it was not the green bioluminescence of the giant fungi; it was the light from the World Above. The ancient pathway had been opened by the tremor.

"An earthquake," someone screamed. "The Rock Spirits are angry!"

"The tunnel," Virgil gasped. "Through the wall—there!"

Memmis was shouting, but his words were lost in the chaos—as the earth continued to shake, as dust rained from the cavern’s ceiling, and as fissures opened in the stone. Virgil and Nenru ran toward the opening in the wall, fighting for balance on the heaving ground. They reached the tunnel, forcing their bodies through the narrow gap. Behind them, Memmis still screamed for his warriors to pursue, to kill, to stop the faithless traitors.

The escapees raced up the passage—and here was light, real light, light from the World Above, beckoning them onward. The tunnel angled upward—always upward—and they ran, stumbling, crawling, and climbing toward the surface and freedom.

The tunnel mouth opened onto the night, and the heaving of the earth subsided.

Virgil staggered out onto a hillside, the cool air of the African night washing over his face, the stars blazing overhead in configurations he had looked at all his life but had never truly seen until now. Behind him, Nenru stumbled to a halt, and he heard her gasp.

"The World Above," she breathed. "Those many lights up above. What are they?" she asked in wonderment.

"They are stars, and that is the moon," Virgil said, pointing. "The full moon. Its light led us to freedom."

Nenru stared at it, her face transfigured by wonder. "It's so bright. So... beautiful."

Shouts echoed from the tunnel. Memmis and his warriors had followed them partway—but they had stopped at the entrance, recoiling from the night sky as if it were fire and from the full moon, which seemed to stare at them like a demon’s eye. They stood at the threshold, trembling; their faces were pale masks of terror.

"It's... it's real," one of them whispered. "The World Above."

"The spirits will kill us," another said. "The great light in the sky must be the eye of one of them—we'll die—"

"Return to the darkness," Memmis ordered, his voice thick with fear. "Leave the demon-world to its demons. We will go back below, and we will seal the passage again, and we will tell no one—"

But his voice was already losing authority. His people were looking at Nenru standing beneath the stars and the full moon that hung like a lantern in the heavens. They were seeing, for the first time in generations, the world their ancestors had fled, and one of their own, the chief’s daughter, stood upon its soil alive, unharmed, and unafraid.

Memmis, overcome by agoraphobia, turned and fled back into the darkness. His warriors followed, some eagerly, others reluctantly. And then they were alone—Virgil and Nenru, two fugitives from the underground world, standing beneath the endless starry sky.

In the distance, a fire burned—the campfire of Virgil's team, the colleagues who had been searching for him these past hours, days, he didn't know how long. They had never given up on him.

"Over here!" he shouted, waving his arms. "I'm here! I found a way out!"

The figures at the campfire began to run toward him. And as they approached, as the light of their lanterns filled the night, Virgil took Nenru's hand in his.

"You're free now," he said. "You can see the sun tomorrow—feel it on your skin. We can find somewhere safe for you to live, somewhere you can learn about the World Above, become part of it. I will stay with you and help you."

"And my people?" Nenru asked, looking back at the dark mouth of the tunnel, her face troubled. "Will they remain in darkness forever?"

Virgil thought about Memmis's fear, about the control that came from misinformation, about the power that rested on lies. And then he thought about the faces of those warriors at the tunnel's mouth—the wonder, the terror, the longing.

"Some of them will want to stay in the dark," he said slowly. "But some of them won't. They'll remember this night, and they'll come back. They'll want to see the stars, and the sun, and the open sky. Your people will have a choice, Nenru—the same choice you've made. And some of them will choose the light."

Nenru smiled—a real smile, the first true smile Virgil had seen on her face. "Then let us give them that choice. Let us show them that there's more to life than stone and darkness. Later, when we are better organized, we can go back and help them overcome the fear and tyranny that rule their lives."

They walked together toward the campfire, toward friends eagerly racing to greet them, toward the future that stretched before them like the endless plains of the African savanna. The moon shone down on them, and somewhere in the darkness below, news of the World Above was spreading, and with it the dawn of a new era had begun.

THE END