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He ran into the hall in a rage and wanted to do something terrible to the hermit, but the doctor stepped forward quickly and diverted his attention to himself.
“What happened, Jean-Pierre?” Dr Capri said loudly.
“Where is the exit? I’m asking you, Aborigine!” Jean-Pierre kept shouting behind the doctor’s back.
“What are you talking about?” David asked incomprehensibly.
Jean-Pierre turned away from all the people and exhaled. He pressed his lips together and inhaled through his nose with such an effort that his chest almost doubled in size.
“I want to ask our new and caring friend where the exit from the cave is.”
“It…,” David wanted to answer, but Jean-Pierre’s own answer overtook him.
“It was near the pile of firewood, but it’s not there now. Not!” repeated Jean-Pierre louder and extended his hand toward the other room, inviting everyone to check his observations.
Everyone moved into the other room. Only Jean-Pierre, Bhrigu, and Debby remained in their places, motionless.
Debby lowered her eyes to the floor, standing next to Bhrigu. And he just stared at Jean-Pierre’s emotions, which were very simple – resentment.
“What have you done to us?” Jean-Pierre asked quietly and angrily in French.
Tulu-Manchi, Yulia, and David entered the hall in quick strides and looked alarmed.
“Bhrigu!” Dr Capri began to speak in a loud and anxious voice. “Bhrigu,” he switched to Nepali. “Please tell us what is happening. We cannot find the exit from the cave.”
The hermit hesitated and said:
“Interesting. Very interesting,” Bhrigu replied in English. “Place this is not usual. Sacred place. To understand its motion very difficult. But I can help to understand you. Seems to me, you are connected and have to find important something.”
“Where… is… the… exit?” Jean-Pierre repeated, pausing between words.
“Exit?” the hermit thought again. “You need exit?”
“Yes,” the Frenchman answered, looking at him sternly.
“I show you the exit. It is on the other side,” and Bhrigu pointed to the dark part of the hall on the other side of the lake.
“What?” blurted out Jean-Pierre and all the others.
“But that’s impossible,” David concluded.
“Yes?” answered Bhrigu with a smile.
Jean-Pierre turned to Debby and said to himself:
“How do we get there?” he shook his head. “What am I talking about? The gateway is gone. We went in there yesterday. How is that possible?”
“Wait, Jean-Pierre. Stop,” Dr Capri said, closing his eyes and shaking his head. “Bhrigu, how is it possible? Is it you? Do you know anything about the signals from Voyager?”
Bhrigu raised his eyebrows in surprise as a sign that he did not know what the doctor was talking about. He thought for a moment and turned in the direction he had just pointed to the travelers.
“Boat is there,” Bhrigu said, pointing to the right.
Jean-Pierre went in the direction indicated.
“Yes, here it is!” he called out from the darkness.
“I don’t understand,” Yulia said to Dr Capri.
“I can’t understand it either,” David added. “I woke up near the entrance, and I could feel the cold air coming in from outside.”
“That’s right,” Dr Capri said without taking his eyes off the hermit.
“Bhrigu,” Debby said, unable to endure, into the hermit’s back. “Did you make this happen?”
“No, Debby,” answered Bhrigu quietly, “sometimes goddess of fortune come, but we think it’s bad.”
“You gave us something to drink yesterday. I remember!” Yulia cried out anxiously.
The doctor nodded and turned to Debby:
“I even gave you a few sips.”
“No,” David shook his head. “I didn’t drink. I saw everyone else was drinking, but I didn’t have the energy.”
“Tea,” Bhrigu nodded, “strong, maybe, but just tea.”
Jean-Pierre walked along the bank, pulling the boat up by the rope. He stepped closer to the hermit:
“You’re coming with us,” Jean-Pierre said in French. “And if there’s nothing there, you’d better be able to swim well.”
“Do you want to go there?” Dr Capri asked.
“Yes,” answered Jean-Pierre. “It’s not a hallucination. All of this. I’m sure of myself, and I’m sure of what I see. Believe me, he didn’t poison us. It’s all crazy, but that’s not what’s important.”
“So what is?” the doctor was surprised.
“If your military friends are still alive, they will have to search for us. Either they will choose the direction that seems most logical to them, or…” Jean-Pierre paused, “and I hope so, they will start searching every possible hiding place in a spiral. Starting from the crash area. But if there’s no way out, how will they find us?”
Jean-Pierre pointed to Bhrigu with a glance to get into the boat.
“We don’t have much time. We walked about 20 or 30 minutes yesterday. So we’re about one or two kilometers away from the crash point. We were going mostly toward the setting sun, so westward. And you and the pilots came from the north. How long did you walk from the helicopter before you saw me and Debby?”
“We ran, about fifteen minutes,” answered the doctor to Jean-Pierre.
“So,” Jean-Pierre wanted to make another assumption, but when he saw Bhrigu he froze. “Although now it is important that the exit is really on the other side of the lake.”
David ran to get his backpack and Yulia’s bag in the other room. He tapped the place where the passage had been yesterday and whispered, “How is that possible, isn’t a rock?” He threw the backpack into the boat and helped Yulia and Debby get in, then seated himself.
“Jean-Pierre,” Dr Capri said quietly. “I think Bhrigu is telling the truth. He had nothing to do with it. All this…”
“I don’t care,” Jean-Pierre replied. “Maybe Debby is better, but we still have to get out of here as quickly as possible.”
David, who was already inside the boat, caught the doctor and the Frenchman’s gaze:
“The boat is flimsy. Do you think we can all get across at once?”
“Fine, we can squeeze,” Jean-Pierre answered. “Only together.”
He went to the wall and picked up the torch which was attached to it. He gave it to Debby, who sat down next to Bhrigu. Yulia and David sat opposite.
The doctor and Jean-Pierre both pushed the boat away from the shore. The boat was very small and barely fit four people. There was one narrow thwart at the end of the boat and another thwart in the middle. Between the two pairs of people was David’s backpack.
“David, jump out,” Jean-Pierre said after looking around the inside of the boat. “We will swim behind the boat.”
David shoved his backpack under the thwart and jumped into the water. Dr Capri sat in his place and took up an oar. Yulia took the other oar. Jean-Pierre pushed the boat and asked David to take hold of it with his hands, while he swam behind.
The boat moved along the calm surface of the underground lake. The bottom immediately disappeared from under their feet and the light slapping of the oars against the water began to fill the vaults with even sounds
“Bhrigu,” Dr Capri asked in English, “and still, could you explain what is happening? How is it possible that the exit from the cave has disappeared?”
“Tulu-Manchi,” the hermit began quietly, “need you to understand question. How it happen? Or why it happen?”
“Both,” said David, pulling himself closer to the boat on his hands.
“Hmm,” Bhrigu smiled. “Good answer. I don’t know how it happen. It matters not much. But clear you have to go out a different way than you came.”
“Just to get out,” said Jean-Pierre, overtaking the boat. “How much longer?”
“Little,” answered Bhrigu. “Little further,” said Bhrigu. “Exit is close.”
“Debby, pull the torch forward,” Jean-Pierre asked.
Debby turned to the bow of the boat and held the torch forward over the water. The stalactites and stalagmites appeared out of the darkness. They were lumpy and yellowish and looked like huge dead snakes. Some protruded from the water in a frozen desire to reach the ceiling, others dangled from above.
“There,” Bhrigu pointed to the two o’clock.
The doctor took a second oar and turned the boat’s bow in the right direction.
In a few seconds, the cave’s arch appeared out of the blackness, and the light began to reflect off the wall directly in front of them. The boat sailed up to the solid stone barrier.
“Where now?” Jean-Pierre asked, taking hold of the boat.
“That way,” answered Bhrigu.
In the distance there was a sound like a waterfall, it was somewhere beyond the walls. The boat was moving slowly, parallel to the wall.
“Here is the exit to the bank,” said Jean-Pierre, feeling the bottom.
The boat came to a small bank, like two peas in a pod, similar to the one from which they had sailed. David and Jean-Pierre pulled the boat up.
“This is the same shore, isn’t it,” said David.
“No,” Jean-Pierre said uncertainly. “Debby, give me the torch.”
Debby handed over the torch, and Jean-Pierre walked forward with it. After a few seconds, he lit the torches mounted on the wall.
“No, David, there’s another passage, there’s no stretcher and the torches haven’t been lit for a long time,” Jean-Pierre shouted. “Get out of the boat.”
The doctor and David helped everyone onto dry land, and together they moved toward Jean-Pierre.
“What’s next?” Yulia asked.
“There is a passageway,” Jean-Pierre pointed forward.
Everyone went inside and found themselves in a large hall, almost perfectly round in shape. There were four passages in the hall: one from which they had just come and three at the opposite end of the hall. Faint sunlight streamed in from one. It was bright and dry in here.
“Old man didn’t lie,” said Jean-Pierre. “Let’s get out of here.”
Relief spread through the hall. For a moment everyone forgot the strange circumstances of the journey and the inexplicable, almost magical, but frightening mysteries left on the other side of the lake.
“Stay here I,” Bhrigu began.
“Oh, no. Don’t even think about it,” Jean-Pierre interrupted him grudgingly. “I didn’t let you go. Not until I’m sure we’re safe.”
“Belongs to this place I,” the hermit continued calmly.
“Jean-Pierre,” Debby said pleadingly. “That’s enough. There’s light in there. We’ll get outside.”
“But he…” said Jean-Pierre with incomprehension.
“No,” the hermit interrupted him himself. “Find the way forward is easy now.”
Jean-Pierre looked around at everyone, pondering. He stopped at Debby, who was begging him for mercy with her eyes. She was uncomfortable with the way Jean-Pierre was treating the old man. And though she felt a deep misunderstanding too, she believed that the hermit was not the cause of all of this.
The doctor and Yulia knew for sure that everything going on right now was somehow connected, but they couldn’t get their heads around how this hermit, who barely speaks English, the Voyager Gold Record signal they detected, yesterday’s unexpected storm, and, most importantly, the disappearing exit, could be connected.
David alone was simply amazed and happy at the adventures that were happening around him. He felt a kind of languor in his chest from everything that was going on and could not believe that he had decided to go here at this particular time by himself. He liked the hermit who had been so caring to them in a moment of need. He liked having the doctor and Yulia by his side, who seemed to him to be the only people who understood what was going on.
Everyone thought there was someone or something that was the cause of everything that was going on. How could it all be explained. David thought it was the doctor and Yulia, Debby thought it was her bad luck. Yulia thought it was aliens, and Dr Capri, though he was hiding it, thought it was some kind of Chinese experiment.
But in that very second, Jean-Pierre suddenly felt that there was no reason and that no one here now understood what was going on.
He began to nod, thinking that Bhrigu really didn’t look much like a terrorist or an evil genius in the service of some government.
“Okay,” Jean-Pierre agreed with Debby, “we have to go.”
Everyone turned at the same time to the hermit, who was looking directly at Jean-Pierre. He nodded.
