Episode 7

They sat in one place for a long time. The professor visibly rested, though given his condition, it was for the best. She, however, was bothered by this helplessness, this confinement. She wasn’t used to needing others’ help—after all, she was the one who usually rescued others, not the other way around. When she finished her sandwich, she stood up and stretched. Her head no longer hurt, and she wasn’t cold… She shone her lamp around the chamber, looking at the thick, reddish-brown stained stalagmites and stalactites. She liked the cave. Behind them, a few meters from the rock Ágoston was leaning against, she saw the gap leading to the lowest chamber. It seemed slightly wider than the one she had squeezed through to get here.
She thought about climbing down to check out the lowest chamber, though she didn’t believe they could get out through it from nearly fifty meters deep.

“Go ahead! Take a look!” - the professor called after her. She crawled through the irregularly shaped opening into a narrow passage that widened after about a meter and a half. Leaning her back against the rock and bracing herself with her boots, she descended. This was the largest chamber in the cave. Sitting on a higher rock, she admired the bacon-like and curtain-like, wavy, hanging stalactites and the thick columns under the light of her lamp. The area below her was about three men deep. The professor had explained while eating that they suspected there were even lower chambers, but they hadn’t found the entrance yet. Every semester, he started by offering an automatic A to anyone who discovered a new passage during this fieldwork. The students tried, but so far, no one had earned that gift grade. In the far corner of the chamber, a small pool of water shimmered, but as she climbed down and approached its edge, she saw it was more of a puddle.

How strange—there was no standing water in the upper chambers, only here. It had rained the previous day, and if there were indeed more cracks and passages here, the water should have drained away, unless the bottom of the puddle was covered by a clay layer preventing the water from seeping further, or unless the water was being replenished from somewhere. The surface of the water rippled, as if a small inflow was feeding it. She shone her light on the opposite wall, where she saw reddish, rust-like streaks on the limestone, and about a meter up, a fairly wide cavity. She stepped into the puddle—her boots were waterproof—and climbed into the cavity. Upward, a narrow, muddy, clay-covered passage led into darkness.