AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Loosen up on your left hand. It’s just for balance. You’ve got this. Slow and steady, all the way down.”
She nodded and walked down the cliff a little at a time.
Grimm knew she’d be all right as long as she didn’t freeze. At that point, he’d have to set up another rope and rappel down to her. While Dezi worked her way down, Grimm kept an eye on her and one behind him. If someone wanted to hurt them, now would be a good time to do it—while they were dangling over the cliff’s edge.
Dezi madeit to the first stop and remembered to breathe as she waited for Grimm to join them. From there, Chad set up the next rope. “This is the point at which we’re passing through the Needle’s Eye. It’s a gap between rock formations caused by years of erosion. We’ll stop at the base of the formation.”
Chad went down first and belayed for Dezi as she followed. Yes, her heart was in her throat the entire way, but the second rappel was just a little easier than the first. She even tried a small bound near the bottom, landing beside Chad.
“Good job,” he said and unclipped her from the rope.
Grimm came down in a tenth of the time it took Dezi, making it in a couple of tight bounds.
By then, the sun was slowly setting in the west and about to sink below the peaks above.
Dezi turned to the east. On the opposite side of a narrow ravine filled with giant boulders was a band of three caves lined up across the face of a cliff. As the clue mentioned, the sun shone through the Needle’s Eye like a wide spotlight, illuminating only one of the three caves—the one on the right side.
“Can we get to the cave on the right?” Dezi asked.
Chad nodded as he gathered the rope and slung it over his shoulder. “Yes. There’s a trail that leads to the right and passes just above the ravine and around to the base of the caves. If we hurry, we can get there and back to the trail out of here before it gets dark.”
He led the way along a narrow trail barely wide enough for goats, much less humans.
Dezi tried not to look at the many drop-offs they passed along the way. She breathed a sigh when they arrived at the base of the cave, only to be appalled that the cave was twenty yards up a steep incline of what appeared to be loose gravel.
“You might have to scramble up on your hands and knees. I’ve done this climb several times,” Chad said. “It’s slippery, and you feel that for every step up, you take two back. But if you persist, you’ll get there. And it’s worth the trouble. There are cave drawings in each of these caves that have been around for centuries.”
“The clue was specific about the cave lit up by the sun in the west. This is that cave.” Dezi drew in a deep breath and let it out. “Let’s go.”
They spread out to keep from making it hard on each other with sliding gravel and started up at the same time.
Like Chad had said, for every step she took, she felt like she slid back two, making the going slow. The men, with their longer legs, reached the top sooner. When Dezi finally came close, Grimm reached down. She grabbed his hand, and he pulled her up to stand beside him.
“Thank you,” she said and took a moment to catch her breath. Dezi pulled her cell phone from her pocket and turned on the flashlight.
Grimm and Chad did the same.
Chad led the way into the cave. “The paintings are on the far wall of the inner cave.”
Most of the cave wasn’t very deep and tapered off into a narrower corridor that led into another, bigger cave about the size of a living room with a twenty-foot ceiling.
Chad shined his light on the back wall where pictographs of deer, buffalo and people danced across the stone.
“What was it he said?” Dezi whispered.
Grimm brought the photo up on his cell phone and read, “Art is in the eye of the beholder yesterday and today. In some cases, the medium hasn’t changed and bears witness to what was and what will be, if you’re paying attention.”
“This has to be the art that was.” Dezi moved further back in the cave. The cave art dwindled the further back she went. She came to a drawing of a pair of mountain peaks, one shaped like an M, the other like the profile of a Native American warrior.
Dezi’s eyes narrowed. “I know those peaks,”
“The peaks look authentically ancient,” Grimm pointed to the drawing below the peaks. “But this doesn’t look like something from way back when. That’s a building, not a Teepee, buffalo or stick figure.”
Dezi nodded. “You’re right.”
“I don’t remember seeing that before,” Chad said.
Grimm turned his cell phone on the image and snapped a photo. “Is there some significance to the position of the building to the peaks? Is there a building in roughly that shape at the convergence of those two mountains?”
