Bruce felt an offsetting sensation, alone in the rainforest. As far as he knew, the only person in the vicinity, the coordinates of the cave site were less than a hundred kilometers from the Myanmar and Laos borders. Under the dense tree canopy of one of Asia's biggest forests, Bruce passed colonies of megabats, distinct from the microbats he expected in the cave.
What was Kirk hiding? This question was separate altogether to where Kirk was hiding.
There was no telling Kirk's intention until he got a hold of him and asked the man. From Bruce's vantage, Kirk's risk-taking in his research was riding close to precipitating the outcomes Kirk sought to prevent. How could Kirk not see this? Were it deliberate, it would make sense. More distressing was Bruce had financed the whole palaver. The furthering of science working against its aims, as though it couldn't see the forest from the trees.
It led Bruce to wonder what else of his philanthropic efforts had affected opposite intentions. He'd entrusted the disbursal of grants from his foundation to administrators and committees whom he trusted. In the instance of Langstrom's approved grants from his foundation, the proposed outcomes were of benefit to people and the planet. Did Kirk's misanthropy extend to desires to wipe out his own species to an extent where he'd harness a pathogen hosted in the bat population?
At the 22nd parallel, now within the tropics, Bruce met the coordinates of the cave, mossy boulders, and thick lianas either side of its mouth. The opening led into a narrow horizontal gallery, the sunlight penetrating only several meters into the passage.
Bruce cast his mind to the bust of Carl Jung within his home. When Bruce pushed its head back, it opened a secret door found in the bookcase of his study, leading down to the cave within his manor. What would the famous psychoanalyst say about caves, and their link to the subconscious? What would be the symbolism? Jung might've said a cave was a descent into the depths of oneself, the strata of the unconscious, offering insight to self-discovery.
The subconscious held what it wanted to forget or repress. He couldn't know what lurked in his unconscious, rearing its conscious head within the cave depths.
Turning on his headlamp, he retrieved a printed copy of a survey of the cave, named Kanbei'er by speleologists.
At the point along the first gallery where natural light went no further, the survey showed a descending step. Following this was a vertical pit, dropping off. Herein reliant on his headlamp, according to the survey, the chimney was 40 feet deep, and five feet wide. He leapt across with a short run-up, after which the gradient increased downward at a precipitous rate.
Bruce noticed the sharp drop in elevation and began to hear flowing water. The survey showed a waterfall, a few meters high, up ahead, cascading into a small lake.
Bruce tried to scale down the adjacent wall. It was a calcite flowstone formation, resembling a waterfall of rock, caused by carbonate minerals and the water's flow. Because of its proximity to the spray of the waterfall, the wall was slippery. He lost his footing a couple meters from the surface, water breaking the fall.
Paddling to the edge of the water on the other side, he felt a breezy air draft, unable to identify where it was emanating. He realized he hadn't done his due diligence to check the weather conditions beforehand to ensure there was no risk of flooding.
Vertical stalagmites and stalactites covered the ceiling and floor of the hall enclosing the lake. He went ahead down a gallery leading off from the hall, curious limestone deposits protruding at odd angles of deposit from the wall. Covered in white, creamy cave milk made from crystallized limestone, it gave the formations a quality of being alive.
He felt the presence of hypogeal life at ground level, above his head on the cave ceiling, on the walls, and in the water. A smattering of microbats had been flying around, though little more than a couple dozen until now.
