chapter thirty-one

The Cavern

Oscar Kørner clattered his instrument case onto the stone floor inside the kitchen door and sloughed his massive overcoat, depositing a dense cloud of ice particles upon the same surface. Mother and son turned their attentions from their respective activities; Sylvia to be gathered into a huge embrace and Frank to be summoned to the congress in front of the stove.

“I have made a discovery; an important discovery, I think,” announced Kørner, kissing his wife generously and ruffling his son’s already thinning hair. He plucked the ladle from Sylvia’s hand, dipped into the pot and sucked up a rich mouthful of herring broth, steam and oxygen. “I will expound further over this splendid meal. Come, Frank, prepare the table for us.” Frank, excited by the promised revelations, quickly gathered his sketch book and the mathematical devices he had been using to construct a chart of the heavens. He laid three hide mats and the antique silver and mother-of-pearl cutlery whilst his father opened a bottle of Paulliac and poured it into two heavy crystal goblets with which he had been presented in the days when he still enjoyed the esteem of the Royal Norwegian Academy of Science.

Frank watched his reflection disappear in the concave soup-spoon as it reached the distance of its focal length from his eyes, the age-spotted silver then fogging with condensation before cutting into the oleaginous orange liquid. Oscar, noticing his son’s downcast gaze, lifted the eight year old chin in his warm hand. “Here, you should not be deprived of this glorious French sunshine,” Paulliac swirled into Frank’s simple tumbler of water. “We share this wine, and we share this great discovery. I have chanced upon a cavern; possibly a system of vast caverns, not far to the South-West. Following a necessarily brief inspection of the exposed strata and the very many fossils, I believe it to be extraordinarily old, and uniquely unaffected by millions of years of changing terrestrial conditions.” He stood and poked one of his hand drawn maps of the island with a dripping shard of unleavened bread “Here is our Garden of Eden, and tomorrow, at first light, we go to examine God’s earliest handiwork!”

Frank was puzzled: his father was a vociferous atheist; this talk of God astonished him. Oscar divined his son’s confusion and nudged the pagan Sylvia, who ignored most of the Norwegian spoken in the house as a matter of course. “I jest, of course; God, his garden and his shaming of women are all nonsense. Tomorrow we will begin to use scientific instruments and method to reveal the reality of our Genesis.” He laughed loudly at his joke and Frank picked up a kerchief to stifle his nasal response. The wine had compromised both the taste and temperature of his water. He soon retired and made highly detailed drawings of imagined prehistoric creatures by candlelight as his parents finished the wine and then vigorously copulated before snoring and silence stilled the cabin.

It was not even first light when Frank found himself woken, fed with porridge and strong coffee and smothered with a malodorous hide robe. Oscar pulled a light sled into the confusing darkness, allowing Frank to ride on it when his eyes, unable to discern a reliable path, caused him to stumble and twist his ankle. Reluctant dawn revealed a vast incline, jagged with the snow carrying the same grey iridescence as the antique nacre of last night’s cutlery. As Oscar dragged the sled towards the rise the sun defined his long shadow, pointing towards a dark heart in the land that refused to surrender to the day. This turned out to be the entrance to the cavern.

The dynamite that had opened the cavern had thrown large, piano shaped chunks of rock into the inner space, and these formed convenient irregular steps that led them into the profound, almost eternal waiting within. Frank’s father set torches around the chamber, revealing in jagged excerpts the enormous dimensions of the place, and the clear strata which articulated the walls and the mineral millennia there recorded. While Oscar used his hard metal tubes and hammer to extract samples of rock, Frank wandered with his own hand-held torch to an area where the roof swept down, almost, but not quite, fusing with the floor. He got down on his hands and knees and felt a cool breath in the narrow aperture. He pushed the torch through and then, wriggling on his stomach, ripping the robe and a fair portion of his back and buttocks, followed it into the mysterious ancient lung.

His torch revealed a sandy ledge, a thin crescent that he was unable to reliably attribute to instantaneous light or lugubrious geology. Before and slightly below him was a motionless body of liquid. He held the torch over it and perceived no depth, merely his and the light’s reflections in an implacable black mirror. He remembered his eight years, all of those he retained being in the cabin. Now he sensed the future, and it was interesting, and it was long, and this black fluid space was his true home; a home to which he would return for more than a century.