cave - Team Geriatric
Dave Fox
Team Geriatric crawled up the hillside half a mile
behind the fast moving dust cloud that showed where team youth was burning
up the miles. At the cave entrance, when they eventually got there, the
pensioners were heard to be talking about family responsibilities,
arthritis and other ploys for not going underground (one of them even had to
be lent a descender, having conveniently forgotten his own).
Marshalled
between members of the Youth Team, the ancients were carefully fed down the
entrance of the cave. A curious transformation came over them, a glazed
expression in their old eyes as though recalling distant memories of when
they too had discovered new glories. Down the first pitch, then the second,
and the third, then along the traverse ; so far so good, their aged limbs
had stood up well to the strain. Now at the head of the next pitch they were
sat down and told of hitherto undescended holes ahead of them. Then Team
Youth vanished into the darkness to push into discoveries elsewhere.
Left alone at last, the crones shook off their disguise of weariness.
Swiftly they fixed a rope down the thirty foot pitch to a large floor of
unstable boulders. One of them carried on to the bottom of the boulder choke
while another was fixing a bolt at the top of the rift. Soon Rod was going
down the rift till he ran out of rope at about 70'. He called for another
rope, tied it onto the end of the previous one and carried on down to the
end of that one too. He ascended to a safe spot (The Sentry Box) and called
the others down. Dave, the last man down, took another 200' of rope with him
to the bottom of the second rope. Here he placed another bolt, belayed the
rope, and vanished off into a vast, dark hole. At one stage he was abseiling
down between the wall and a huge pinnacle, 30' high. The rope just reached
the floor. Here a stream appeared. He followed it down a descending rift
until, after about 50' of descent, he came to a small pitch with possibly
another one beyond that.
Dave prusiked back to where Rod and Vic had been waiting in the Sentry
Box sharing both ends of a bar of Kendal Mint Cake at the same time since it
was too hard to break. From here the operation of getting out was a smooth
well-rehearsed exercise that they had done many times before. It took only
just over the hour to get out onto the plateau where they were in time to
enjoy the last few hours of sunshine.
And Team Youth ? They came eventually, weary, dirty and dishevelled as
usual. They had missed the sunshine. It was dark by the time they got
down. Team Geriatric had wined and dined and already gone to the pub.
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