What of Adam? What of his perfect form? She imagined them living in Paris; she saw him sitting outdoors at a café with her, people slowing down to look, wondering if such handsomeness were a matter of misperception. Who would not lust for his beauty? Yet these were the thoughts of a fool, she knew. Her artist’s eye had betrayed her into foolishness.
Here was the stream, and she would take care to keep her feet dry, would cross on that line of rocks arranged as though stepping-stones. A bird like an Egyptian ibis rose up from near the water. Progressing uphill would be harder and slower, but she was in splendid condition. I flew, I flew. Nonetheless, mounting the incline was much slower work, and she disliked getting hot and beginning to sweat. She unbuttoned the top button of her orange shirt as she tried to run uphill.
At the farmhouse a hunched old woman was in the yard, watering cornflowers with a large green plastic watering can. “Why, what’s the matter, my dear?”
“I need help.”
They spoke in rapid French.
Once inside, Arielle stood panting. Her explanation was quick, and the woman used an ancient dial telephone to call for help—the phone functioned—and then woke her husband from his nap.
They would all take café au lait at the table while they waited, the old man insisted. While they sipped the hot drink, cats emerged from hiding, more and more cats, as though there were dozens, maybe hundreds of all stripes and colors, brindled and spotted. One, the obvious favorite, with six toes, was bold enough to leap into the old woman’s lap and purr like a contented motor. Arielle was surprised that this antique Frenchwoman called him “Calcifer,” the name of a Japanese cartoon character.
Across from Arielle the old couple sat side by side on a bench, their brown faces like twin maps with wrinkles for roads and rivers. They communed. Sometimes they spoke. Yes, they, too, had seen the paintings and drawings, the incised animals hidden in the slope across the valley, the spotted horses wreathed by human handprints. No, they had never told. Well, a few cousins, close neighbors who could be trusted.
Arielle’s vision of a helicopter proved prescient, for soon it hovered in a cloud of noise near the low stone barn.
Insisting that she ride back with the police, Arielle instructed them to look for the legs of her pants, which she had unzipped and discarded near the exit of the cave, but her explanation was unnecessary. From high in the air Arielle saw them coming down the mountain—her father and Lucy, hand in hand, her father carrying the codex in the black case. But where was Adam?
When Pierre and Lucy saw the copter and Arielle’s smiling wave through its glass bubble (but not the tears that had filled her eyes), they reversed their direction and began to climb back toward the cave.
ADAM’S HEEL
WITH CONSTANT PRESSURE from the pad of folded undershirt, the bleeding stopped. In the beam of his flashlight Adam saw the heel bone was shattered, the tendon torn. The pain was excruciating, and consciousness reeled and staggered.
Hunched over his leg, with infinite patience he gradually loosened, then removed the tourniquet made of shirtsleeves. All the while, he kept a steady pressure against the wound. With one hand, he folded a sleeve and placed it as a larger bandage over the bloody pad; the other sleeve he used to bind both pads against his heel. Now he could uncurl his spine and lie back.
When his skin first touched the cold stone, Adam recoiled, but he hoped the heat of his flesh would gradually warm the place where he lay. He turned off the flashlight again to conserve its battery. After he rested, he would begin the clinking of stone on stone as a signal he hoped would carry through the corridors. He would use the SOS code.
For now he would sleep in the bowels of the earth as though in the bosom of Abraham.
What woke him was his own shivering. Immediately he switched on the flashlight and checked his foot. The blood soaked into the fabric was brown and stiff; there was no bright blood. But it was dangerous to be this cold. Except for the wrapping around his foot, he wore nothing at all. He feared that he might go into shock, and he was grateful to his shivering and to his body for trying to warm itself. Slowly he rose and stood on one