I am frozen in a moment. Seized by dread. I hold my breath. I will my very heartbeat to cease and relieve the deafening pounding in my head. I strain to hear, but terror prevents me from turning my gaze from the ceiling. It seems safer, somehow, to remain transfixed on the spot on the ceiling illuminated by the glow of the LED lantern. If I look at it long enough, perhaps I’ll convince myself the noise was in my head, the echo of a dream.
I almost succeed.
Then the sound returns.
A sound that should not be here. For we are, after all, over a mile inside an ancient tunnel, accessible only by a small doorway in the wall of a thousand-foot-deep sinkhole on one of the most remote mountains on earth. It is the epitome of isolation.
Yet the noise is unmistakable. Footsteps. In the dark. And one thing becomes clear: we are not alone.
The Labyrinth,
Sarisariñama Tepui,
Venezuela
It was our sixth day exploring the Labyrinth of Sarisariñama. Everything had already become routine, habitual. It’s incredible how even the most extraordinary of situations – an archaeological expedition to mysterious ruins on one of Venezuela’s jungle-choked table mountains – can become as ordinary as any 9 to 5 job in such a short time.
Shortly before dawn each day, my phone’s alarm clock joins a chorus of others echoing out from the canvas city, home to 47 scientists, support workers and military escorts. The Age of Smartphones has decimated the traditional brrriiiing of alarm clocks. Instead, the collective cacophony I hear each morning is a mismatch of musical tastes, everything from Justin Bieber to Elvis Presley to Tchaikovsky. There is even a cheeky pre-programmed Nokia jingle, which is just plain lazy for someone not to have bothered changing! I can only imagine what the legendary Evil Spirit the local Ye’kuana people believe lives on the mountain thinks.
I roll over and kiss Sid on the forehead to bring her around, although I have no idea how she sleeps through the noise. Then we perform what has become a ritualistic dance, struggling to dress within the confines of our small tent. We eventually emerge from it just in time to see the sun climbing into the eastern sky.
We stagger over the Mess Tent, pulling light jackets tighter to protect ourselves from the morning chill. Blistering heat will soon replace whatever coolness our altitude gifts us. The cloud cover that dumps its load on the rainforest every day has so far remained below Sarisariñama’s summit, saving us from any rain. The trade-off is a lack of protection from the sun. Even hiding in the shade cast by the trees that choke the perimeter of basecamp, the heat is sometimes unbearable.
We gorge ourselves on the breakfast spread put on by the so-called ‘comfort team’ each morning, chat with colleagues on neighbouring tables, usually about how crap our sleep was, and then head to the equipment tent to gear up. With hard hats, hi-vis vests, radios, ropes, flare guns, torches and LED lanterns, we head down a now well-trodden path through a patch of skyforest to the Sima Humboldt.
The sima is almost as wide as it is deep, a yawning chasm cutting into the heart of the mountain. Its near-vertical sides are choked by vines and thick, lush vegetation, swallowed by an otherworldly mist drifting lazily in its depths. I marvelled at the sight for the first few mornings as we waited for the hoist lift to complete several journeys. Now I barely notice it.
Eventually, it is our turn. Nadia, our friend and teammate, and I gently guide Sid onto the lift platform. We try to engage her in conversation the whole way down, a distraction from the sheer drop beneath us that never succeeds in dampening her fear. The worst part of the ride is the point, a couple of hundred feet down, when the shaft widens, leaving the platform to dangle away from the perceived safety of the sinkhole’s walls.
My hand, squeezed numb, is always relieved when we reach the ancient doorway and head inside the Labyrinth. We don our safety gear, with Sid and Nadia both complaining about my lack of a hi-vis vest. I repeat my daily explanation that they stop me from accessing the numerous pockets on the leather waistcoat my dad gave me years ago, which I have worn on every dig since. Then we turn on our lights and head down the tunnels, using the Geoarchmap app on our tablets to retrace our steps from the previous day.
We spend the next five to six hours in the dark. We dot geotags and use a laser measure to record the dimensions of the passageway every ten metres. We photograph our surroundings and search for any archaeological points of interest (of which we’ve thus far found none). We stop for a lunch break around midday and then continue the survey and recording late into the afternoon.
Then we head back to the doorway and repeat the hand-numbing journey on the hoist platform topside. We stow our equipment, join a queue for the solar showers and then crash out for a late afternoon / early evening nap. Before heading to the Mess Tent, we usually update the daily expedition log. Hopefully, one day, we’ll get to add something to the finds database.
Then, around 6.30 pm, we join the daily briefing. Our increasingly frustrated expedition leader, Juliet McKinney, informs us that the bio team are getting on well. On the other hand, the arch teams have so far discovered nada from inside the tunnels, the sinkhole floor or the rainforest below.
As if we need reminding.
After that, we eat and chat for a while. There’s usually a bit of time to pursue personal interests. Some of the guys like using the expedition’s dedicated Sharpelink satellite coverage to update social media or contact friends or family at home (not that I have any). Generally, I just chill before turning in and starting the whole thing over again the next day.
Eat your heart out Bill Murray.
You’ll see then why Sid, Nadia and I jumped at the chance to break the routine by spending the night in the tunnels. We didn’t do so for any daredevil reason or even just for giggles. We did it in an almost Vulcan pursuit of logic. Namely, the further we explore the tunnels, the longer we have to trek each day to pick up where we left off and even longer each evening to return to the doorway.
The other three teams currently working in the tunnels have been literally running rings around each other. Their routes have looped around in large arcs and circles, often crisscrossing one another’s paths and getting nowhere. By sheer dumb luck, however, Sid, Nadia and I seem to have stumbled onto a single straight passageway running deep into the mountain. Sure, we’ve wandered down a few branches from it and been confronted by deadends, but the main route keeps going and going.
Right now, it is the only route that feels like it is leading anywhere. Yet, each day, once we trek to the previous day’s endpoint, we have less and less time to push on further before heading back.
The solution is obvious: don’t head back. Push on as far as we can on Day 1, camp overnight in the tunnels, push on further on the morning of Day 2, and then make the long return journey to the doorway in the afternoon.
There was nothing to worry about. I mean, sure, a couple of the teams have mentioned a ‘feeling of being watched’ or sounds of movement. Karen swears she heard raspy breathing a couple of days ago.
But, all such fanciful ghost stories are nothing but imaginations hurtling into overdrive after spending days on end in tunnels with nothing but torchlight to reveal our surroundings.
Or so I thought.
As I lay there, paralysed by fear, I realised how wrong I was.
I knew that only Sid, Nadia and I were in the Labyrinth. Even if one of the other teams had ventured down our branch of the tunnels, my inner clock told me it was around midnight. Even in the constant darkness, I knew I could rely on my internal timekeeping. There was no way another team would dare to descend the hoist lift at that time of night – nor was there any reason to do so.
No. As I forced through my sleepiness, I knew there had to be another explanation. A more reasonable one. A more obvious one.
The footsteps must have been Sid or Nadia creeping off to the bathroom. Of course, the bathroom down here is nothing more than peeing into a bottle – with a she-wee adapter for the ladies – which we take out when we leave. Even so, we always seek some modicum of privacy, heading around a curve in the passageway or down a branching corridor.
Yes, that was it. My fear was triggered by nothing more than a midnight piss (which, annoyingly, I realised I now needed to mimic).
Buoyed by this realisation, I turned my head.
Sid lay tucked up tightly in her orange sleeping bag, using her daysack as a pillow. She snored softly, and, once again, I was amazed by her ability to sleep anywhere and through anything. Then I craned my neck to look behind me. The blue-white glow of our LED lantern illuminated a little bubble around our impromptu camp – little more than our three sleeping bags, daysacks and discarded MRE [meal ready eat] packets.
When the ghostly light caught the Russian woman’s face, an icy hand gripped my heart. She, too, was nestled in her sleeping bag, but her wide blue eyes stared intently past me. Her face was, I imagine, a mirror of mine – the blurriness of sleep blasted apart by a sense of horror.
Nadia had heard the noise too.
Like a pinch of salt vanishing into a saucepan of water, my equally small pinch of courage evaporated. Nadia is not a woman prone to flights of fancy. She is not a woman who allows her imagination to get the better of her. She is not a woman who easily succumbs to fear.
But I could see in her face, in her eyes, that she was as terrified as I.
There wasn’t a shadow of doubt in my mind.
Someone, or something, was down there with us, and there was nothing anyone, even the Rambo-esque del Vega, could do to help us.
I saw Nadia slowly reach behind her into her daypack, which she also used as a pillow. I have no doubt it was immaculately organised and that such organisation paid off – within seconds, she extracted whatever she was looking for. It took a few more seconds for me to realise that it was her flare gun.
Better than nothing, I guess.
Lacking Nadia’s organisation, however, I had no idea where my own flare gun was (probably right at the bottom of my bag, in all likelihood). Instead, my fingers reached for my waistcoat, discarded next to me; I found my Leatherman and quietly opened the multitool’s knife. What I planned to do with it was anyone’s guess. Jump up, grapple the intruder and plunge it into their neck with a savage war cry? Hardly my scene. But at least I felt somehow protected, even if the hand gripping the multitool’s handle shook as though moments from going into hypothermic shock.
Sid snorted softly. Still asleep. I thought about waking her but feared doing so might alert our uninvited guest, or spook it, or . . . something. Regardless, I could tell from Nadia’s expression that there wasn’t time. Whatever she was going to do, it was about to happen.
Then, ashamedly slipping into the overused trope, everything happened at once.
Nadia sprang from her sleeping bag, wrenching out a palm torch in one hand and aiming her flare gun with the other. Minus the Russian’s grace, I also fumbled to my feet, half-tripping on my sleeping bag as it shimmied down to my ankles. Sid jolted awake with a gasp of freight. Nadia’s torch beam speared past me, shooting down the tunnel. Then, in a heart-stopping moment that felt like a physical blow to my abdomen, driving the air from my lungs, I saw it.
A pair of eyes.
It was only for a moment, then they were gone. Gone in a swirl of motion and the padding of bare feet on the stone floor, accompanied by an animalistic yowl which echoed through the tunnels.
After the initial panic, riding on a wave of expletives, died down, I sank down next to Sid. I put my arm around her, but it trembled as much as her own body and probably offered zero reassurance. Nadia remained standing, flare gun and torch still aiming into the dark. Despite whatever fear I had earlier noticed on her face, I was amazed at the stability of her torch beam – steady, unwavering.
I’m not sure which of us eventually voiced it – perhaps it was all of us. But, ultimately, one of us said, ‘maybe we shouldn’t be down here.’
Nobody argued.
We hastily packed up our mini camp. Nadia radioed the incident into basecamp, where one of del Vega’s soldiers picked it up and arranged for someone to meet us at the hoist lift when we arrived. Then, keeping a wary eye out behind us, flare guns in hand, we beat a hasty retreat, rushing back through the tunnels as fast as our legs could carry us.
It was just before dawn when we made it topside without further incident. McKinney greeted us (or as close to ‘greeted’ the Glaswegian ever gets), and del Vega joined us in her ‘command tent’ a few minutes later.
McKinney was initially sceptical of our tale, suggesting that we had fallen prey to our imaginations. However, upon our insistence (unexpectedly buoyed by del Vega’s support), she agreed to suspend Labyrinth-based activity for the day.
The camp awoke to the buzz of excitement, forcing us to recount the tale dozens of times while wolfing down a well-earned breakfast. Meanwhile, del Vega took all but two of his men into the tunnels, bristling with weapons. Exhausted, Sid, Nadia and I tried to grab some sleep. But, with the other three tunnel teams temporarily reassigned to tidying the equipment tent (I’m sure that’s made us popular), the camp was too noisy.
By mid-afternoon, McKinney announced that del Vega had checked in. They had arrived at the point where we had camped, marked by a geotag, then pushed on deeper. Without stopping to record, measure and photograph the tunnels, they covered a lot of ground, eventually coming up against a collapsed section of tunnel. The tunnel opens into a cave above it, leading to the mountain summit. In that cave and, indeed, along the tunnels approaching it, the soldiers found evidence of what they believe to be a jaguar.
Yes, a jaguar.
The third largest cat in the world. One of the greatest predators to stalk the earth. A creature so resourceful it can hunt as easily on land, in the water or through the trees; in daylight or darkness, on open plans or inside caves. A creature that is so central to the belief systems of all human cultures that dare to make its lands their home. A god. A predator. A protector. A guide. It is all these things and more.
And one was scant metres from me.
I don’t know if I’m luckier to be alive or luckier to have been in the presence of such an animal.
But now, as the rest of the camp sleeps behind me and I sit in my favourite spot, legs dangling over the edge of the cliff, updating this blog instead of battling to sleep, I cannot shake the image of the beast’s eyes from my mind.
Would it have killed us? Would it have attacked us? If so, why didn’t it?
I know it’s just in my head, but I feel as though those eyes are watching me still, gazing at me from the shadows of trees. And I cannot help but feel that they hold no anger or savagery but a warning.
This is the jaguar’s world, not ours.
And we should not be here.