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wheelchair bound over half his life. His greatest fear was that his house would catch fire. If he couldn't get to his wheelchair, he would burn to death.
      During the trip this man was unable to carry canoes or gear on the many rough portages. But he chose not to be a burden to the others. He discovered an untapped talent. Clad in protective clothes, he crawled and inched and slithered, dragging his legs over fallen logs, across rocky beaches, and through weed-choked ravines.
      By the end of his sojourn in the wilderness, his fear of burning to death in his own home was gone. "I can crawl out," he said. "I never thought of it. Shoot, I could crawl the six miles to the fire station if I had to." He'd regained some of his lost mobility.
      The guy would have made a heck of a caver.
      They'd been traveling ninety minutes, had gone less than three quarters of a mile, and had ventured into the earth four hundred feet, when they came to the North Rift.
      The rift was a great crack running northwest to southeast, splitting the known world of the cave as a cleaver might halve a melon. Pointing with his light, Oscar picked out a hand line, threaded his rack, and descended. At the T-shaped junction where passage met rift, the cut was only fifteen feet deep. Moments later he was climbing up the far side. A cringing, spine-scraping crawl later they emerged next to a huge fissure. The Rift gone mad.
      "Jesus," Anna breathed as she cleared the last tumble of rock. Iverson was seated on a square block of breakdown the size of a refrigerator. The stone was sheared as neatly as if a gargantuan mason had done it with a chisel. Pieces, varying in size, clung to the edge of the precipice. She scratched her way up to sit gingerly beside Oscar, her hands hooked on the back of their limestone couch lest the pull of the deeps should suck her down. "Shouldn't there be a sign here that reads 'Beyond This Point Be Monsters'?"
      "Left goes up to the North Rift," Iverson said. "Right is the main route to the rest of the cave. We go right."
      The word "impassable" came to mind. Above, stone vanished into the gloom. Blocks the size of rooms jutted from the walls. Where she and Iverson sat, it was about thirty feet wide, the far side smooth, vertical, offering nothing in the way of an inducement to cross.
      "Right?" Anna said.
      "Right."
      "How?"
      Iverson smiled. "There." He painted a curved surface of rock above her with his light. The wall of the rift bulged slightly and bent around in a southwesterly direction. On closer examination, Anna could see where a rope had been strung. The trail-using the term loosely-was suspended along the wall eight or ten feet above where they sat. Pitons, bolts were frowned upon in wild caves. Driving these man-made anchors into living stone left scars. The rope above them made use of a motley assortment of natural anchors: BFRs, Big Fucking Rocks; jug handles, natural holes in the rock; and stalagmites.
      Below, the rift fell away in a rugged canyon. Light served only to beckon forth the shadows and veil secrets. It struck her as odd that all of it-this tremendous gorge, the seeps and falls and spires-could continue to exist in the total absence of light and life. Like the philosophical tree falling in the theoretical forest, with no one to hear, not so much as a gnat or a dung beetle to take note, did it really exist? Apparently it did. "How deep?" she asked.
      "Here? Maybe one hundred twenty-five feet or so. It varies, of course. Nobody's ever really done much exploring down there."
      As far as Anna was concerned, that left it wide open as a habitat for impossible creatures from the underworld. It was no mystery why the ancients peopled caves with evil spirits and placed their hells deep within the earth.
      "Definitely a No Falling Zone," Iverson said mildly.
      Anna turned her light on his face. He was smiling with what looked to her like genuine delight. "You really are a creepy person,