By: John J. Pint
According to our friend Don Rafael, he recently struck up a conversation with a traveller from the little town of Barreras, Jalisco, who told him of an intriguing cave in the area. "It's a straight tunnel, high enough to walk upright in and it's so long..." Well, the man claimed people had walked in it for two days -- sleeping there overnight -- without ever coming to the end of the cave.
Now, I've never met a Mexican treasure hunter whose light (and they never seem to carry more than one) has lasted over an hour, so I'm a bit doubtful of anyone who claims to have spent four days in a cave. However, Barreras is right smack in the middle of some of the finest karst in western Mexico, so we had to go take a look.
After bouncing along dirt roads for a bit over an hour, we came to a flat valley near the Naranjo river. While the streets of many pueblos have more ruts and potholes than the roads leading to them, Barreras had wide, neat cobblestone streets, generally straight as an arrow. It almost looked as if someone had planned to put a town there.
Chris Lloyd and I sat in the truck while Susy and Nani scouted up informants -- somehow people are always ready to divulge important cave info to the ladies, but can be suspicious of "men bearing helmets." Soon (as usual) we were sitting in someone's living room, sipping agua de limon and waiting for Noel, a young man who half the town said had actually been inside a cave.
While we awaited Noel (by the way, not even his parents knew that Noel means Christmas in French), the family slowly began to drag out fascinating artifacts of all sorts, figuring this was the sort of thing we looked for in caves. Among other things, they had several kinds of ancient beads, jade and bone carvings, the fat foot and thigh of some plump god or goddess and a beautiful necklace made of little pierced sea shells and rectangular "slices" of bone. Then they came out with a small jar, completely intact, with black hatching. "Keep it," they told Susy, "it's not worth anything."
About then, Noel walked in, just as friendly as the rest of the family and soon we were winding our way up to the top of the Cerro del Caballito (Horsey Hill) which is so covered with rocks (all beautiful karst) that we were surprised to find crops up there.
Noel took out his machete and off we went into the hilly woods beyond the fields. "It took me nine attempts to find this cave," said Noel and we could see why. His machete was kept busy every step of the way and not a path did we ever see. This was really a wild and wooly place, so wild that Susy suddenly decided to demonstrate her acrobatic techniques by doing a spectacular somersault that ended in a dramatic belly flop. But she was up and valiantly limping along in an instant.
The entrance to the cave was a small hole a foot and a half high, hidden in a jumble of rocks which blended right in with thousands of similar jumbles. How Noel ever found it at all is beyond me. And how anyone could describe this obscure hole as a "big, walk-in entrance" to a long tunnel was a mystery.
We crawled through and climbed down into a narrow little room. A black, spindly-legged creature -- maybe four inches long -- with huge claws, scurried past us. "It's a tindarapo," said Noel, but we noticed it was clearly different from any tindarapo that we had ever seen before, first because of its jet-black color and second, because it had a tail sticking straight up like a car antenna or like...
"Ah ha!" I cried. I do believe we've finally found the "whip-tail scorpion" which tindarapo is supposed to translate.
Nani, who is a medical doctor, then proceeded to push and prod the critter with a stick "in the interests of science," that is, to find out if it was going to bite or sting us. It turned out the "fierce beastie" was not aggressive at all, so we moved over to a hole at the end of the little room and peered down into a deep hole. It looked like a ten meter drop, straight down, but the walls of this apparently natural fissure were less than a meter apart and chimneyable. Noel, who had already strapped a hunter's lantern to his head, rose several notches in my estimation. "You've climbed down there, eh?"
He nodded and I unpacked the cable ladder. The climbers in our group wouldn't need it, but I'm always thinking about the Arrival of the Unexpected: that falling rock, that batwing in the face, that wayward African bee. In caving, an ounce of prevention pays off handsomely.
The bottom of the crevasse wasn't a bottom at all, but a carefully constructed shelf with a hole at one end. Scattered here and there were lots of bones, human enough to be easily identified by Doctor Nani. "Last time I was here," said Noel, "a friend found four small fish made of jade, right in this room." He disappeared down the hole and we followed. Below was another floor that wasn't really a floor. This long, narrow space had a low "room" off to one side, into which Chris rolled in order to experience the peaceful rest of a corpse. Of course, the tomb-robbers hadn't left a trace of the original body.
It was eerie climbing from one story to the next, seeing each floor become a ceiling, then looking up at those neatly arranged rocks and wondering what would happen if just one of them slipped out of position. Would the fact that they had been stable for hundreds or thousands of years increase or decrease the chance that they might give way today?
It turned out that Noel -- who was now on a borrowed flashlight -- had never reached the bottom of these curious, pre-Columbian catacombs, but at Chris and Nani's urgings, what appeared to be the last floor was reached at around 60 meters below the surface. Just enough formations could be seen on the two narrow walls of this deep slot to bolster the claim that this could be called a cave, but you would be reading a far more informative article if we had had an archeologist along with us. Who knows how much more there is to this story? Hopefully we'll find a volunteer to accompany us on a return expedition.
That night, we were treated to the sight of Dr. Nani's grimaces as Chris cremated a fat tick whose head was buried in my neck (and apparently still is).
Next morning, after a sweltering, sleepless night in the dead air of Chris's favorite camping spot, we stopped at a small pit along the roadside, planning to have a quick look at its bottom. "That tree on the other side is the one we should tie onto," someone said. Fortunately, before we decided who was going to do the honors, Susy shouted, "Stop! That's an hincha-huevos tree!" Sure enough, up on the mountain top, I had asked Noel 150 times to please warn us if he spotted this detestable tree, and now we were practically dancing in the branches of one. The hincha-huevos (Swollen Balls Tree) inflicts upon you even more than what its name implies. If a gringo type like me touches any part of its bark, the result is a multitude of oozing, spreading sores that make poison ivy look as friendly as honeysuckle. Local people claim all you have to do is walk past the leeward side of it to get infected.
"We'll send Luis Rojas (who wasn't present) down this one," we said, and headed for home, wondering what had ever happened to that two-day-long horizontal dream cave we had been looking for in the first place.