Rabbitbrush guards the entrance. There is ice on the wind, and yet my shirt is soaked through in front. The blinding cold sun does not enter the cleft but I do, pushing through a wall of scratching stems. Burrs coat my clothes and I am through.
The path is black, basalt sand sloping softly down into the fissure. The walls are three feet apart, thirty high. Then fifty. Then eighty. The walls at length seem to close over my head.
It is cold here under the earth.
I once walked down into the earth, chamber beneath deep chamber, until the path I was following disappeared beneath a cold, black pool. There was no light, no way of knowing how deep beneath the water the path continued, and almost certainly no air at the end of it. I felt reluctant to turn back nonetheless, momentarily ashamed at how easily I gave up.
It is cold here under the earth, and the fissure’s sloping floor surprisingly devoid of life. No animal sign, few plants. Seventy feet above me spiders have built desultory webs across the opening, silk strong as bridge cables, and one of the webs has caught a clump of feathers: a quail, perhaps, or a grouse caught by a hawk, and striped feathers tumble across the desert before the wind in the aftermath.
The walls are smooth, embedded fist-sized clumps of basalt, improbable granites. I round a twist: before me the way is blocked, twenty feet of sheer boulder to climb were I to continue. A side path dwindles to a four-inch cleft, less than a hand’s breadth wide running fifty feet to the surface. I consider making myself small enough to pass, or — even better — wedging myself in tight, embedded in the earth for good. The feeling passes.
On the surface I jump across a narrow ditch, 18 inches at its widest, and turn back, suddenly curious. The ditch has no bottom. I find a small rock, toss it in. It makes no noise.
