“Easy-peasy; I think not!” he snorted out loud to himself, with some sarcasm.
He slowly lowered himself, handhold by cautious foothold, over the slope’s cliff edge and then carefully reached out, when he was level with the dead rat on top of the pinnacle of rock.
He took a deep breath and then made the small but scary jump across the short distance, onto the rat’s back, not daring to think about the height or all of the possible “what-ifs” he had built up in his mind: What if I slip and fall, what if another quake comes, what if the Rat isn’t dead after all, what if, what if…?
Just as planned though, he pulled himself onto the furry back of the Giant Rat and then sitting there like a noble Knight, astride his mighty battle charger, looked for the best route down the twisting, column of rock to the Cavern floor below.
Well, if anyone from school could see me now, he thought, they wouldn’t believe it!
He tried his best to avoid looking at the thin spike of rock sticking up in front of him, through the rat’s back, its blood, still slowly oozing from its horrible wound and looking like a dark crimson stain under his torch’s weakly flickering beam. The rat blood though, became just another gruesome black puddle when he turned the torch away, attempting to peer down into the hidden depths of the smoky cavern.
“Oh, I really don’t like heights… but at least I can’t see down through all of this smoke.” he muttered grimly to himself.
He lowered himself down the rat’s furry flank and quickly found its bony rat-ribs very useful indeed, although distasteful, as handholds and footholds. He was now, at long last, standing on and descending the large, upside-down and corkscrew-like stalagmite itself.
“Now all I have to do is get through all this filthy smoke without suffocating while blindly landing on the floor of a cavern full of spikes!” he wheezed with grim sarcasm.
He tightened his spotted hanky-facemask and coughed and spluttered as he descended the spiral of rock, into the swirling fog billowing all about him, but he instinctively kept going, stepping lower and lower, around the stalagmite. Hugging tightly to its rough rocky surface and not daring to look down.
Almost like having your own spiral staircase, this is, he thought smugly to himself.
It was then, of course, that the ancient curse of 'Hubris’* struck!
(*Hubris - I suggest you look it up in a dictionary!)
CHAPTER 12:
SIR ROGER TO THE RESCUE!
The Giant Rat suddenly shifted position. It was still dead, but it hadn’t been as firmly and as stably balanced on the pinnacle of rock as Roger had thought. The top of the stalagmite was slowly cracking and breaking off under the Rat’s weight and in doing so, the body of the vile beast, had swung around and one of its legs gave Roger a sudden hard shove in the back.
He fell, toppling from the rocky staircase, into the boiling grey mass of smoke below.
But as he fell, the rat’s long and sinewy tail came whipping through the air towards him. Roger grabbed it without thinking, in an automatic and mindless response to the dire peril he was in. It was either ‘make like an ape’ or fall to a dark and deadly fate, far below.
He fell, swinging and cutting through the smoke in a wide arc, desperately clinging on to the end of the rat’s tail for dear life. It flashed through his mind that at one time he’d looked like a masked Cowboy, and now here he was, swinging through the boiling, cavernous smog, looking like some prehistoric Tarzan!
He hardly had time to scream. The rat and of course its tail were both still precariously perched atop of the stalagmite, but for how long? Who knew? He really didn’t have time to worry about such things. The rat’s tail was now drooping downwards and slowly coming to a stand-still from its sweeping, pendulum-like motion, and with Roger, of course, still clinging to it as tightly as he possibly could.
One very lucky thing had occurred, however. The rat’s tail had swept downwards and had passed quickly and through the cloud of smoke. It now hung limply downwards, penetrating the cloud’s underside, with Roger hanging over the cavern floor from its tip.
Roger could see that the rock-strewn floor of the cavern was just a few feet below him and all he had to do was slide the last few feet down the rest of the tail. And then jump.
But he felt momentarily paralyzed. “Oh, Muddled up Maxwell!” he cried out. But then he quickly swallowed his panic. All he had to do was… let go. And then he’d be home free. Well, at least Cavern free, if not quite Home yet! he wryly thought to himself, as he slid down the rat’s tail and did just that.
And not a second too soon.
As his feet landed firmly on the cavern’s floor, the pinnacle of the stalagmite holding the Giant Rat at last cracked and sheared fully away from the rest of the rocky column of rock. The Giant Rat along with a noisy cascade of crumbling rock and debris, hurtled downward, all ready to bludgeon and squash any non-rocky life-form that might be below, to a pulp! This, unfortunately, included Roger.
He dived away just in the nick of time, hiding behind some large, sheltering rocks nearby. There, he watched in horror, as the giant dead rat hit the floor with an almighty thud and a horrible squelch; blood spluttering against the nearby rocks. Roger waited, hardly daring to breathe as it lay there sprawled amidst the rain of rocky debris and dust.
A great cloud of powdery dust momentarily filled the air around where the rat had landed, and once more Roger was coughing and spluttering, his eyes again temporarily blinded, now stinging and streaming with tears. He felt like he really could cry anyway, so in a weird way, he felt guiltily thankful for the smoke.
His throat felt rubbed red-raw with all the gasping and coughing that racked his bruised and weary soot-stained frame. He was feeling extremely on edge and battle-weary now.
He took a moment to get himself together, wiping his face and clearing his eyes free of soot. He could now see that nearly all the smoke swirling about and above him meant there was several feet of relatively clear and breathable space down here at ground level after all.
He had been right! “Oh, of course,” he muttered to himself, now realizing what physical properties were at work in this smoky cavern. “I see now! Hot air, or even smoke, as it is in this case, always rises!”
He then peered and gave a puzzled look, gazing up at the whirling cloud. “But where’s it all coming from? Just where’s the fire making all this smoke?” he wondered out loud.
Then his thoughts turned to the vital need at hand.
“I’m here Mary! Where are you? I can’t see very well in this smoke,” he called out.
“I’m over here, Roger. I’m in the middle of the cavern, just follow my voice,” she replied. “But be careful, it’s a bit of a maze and the ground’s very rocky and dangerous, O.K.?”
Roger got a bead on the direction her voice had come from and started out towards her.
“Huh! Dangerous, she says!” he snorted derisively to himself. “Well, I don’t think there’s much else that beats ‘dangerous’ than being attacked by a Giant Rat!”
He could see the floor was strewn with many other stalagmites growing up from the floor, all of various sizes. But all much like the one he’d climbed down, that had so effectively skewered the Giant Rat, Rattus Magnus. And above him lay the bubbling sheet of dirty grey smoke, hanging like a permanent low-lying canopy of cloud.
He realized that his next task, after finding where Mary was in this gloomy old cavern, would be the seemingly impossible one of somehow… getting out of the place.