In a Cave

There is the feel of an ocean. Whipping banners and blue flags. The shops and vendors in the avenue. A small fountain. Driving along a boulevard of palms. Maybe it was for the Spanish I was speaking. The craggy buildings. Green hills to the side. The horizon dropping off below. I drove without thinking and rolled down the window—as people often do when nearing the ocean—for the smell of salt and the breeze. There was the buzz of motos and honking horns, the people baking in the sun, the smell of wood smoke and crushed vegetables and manure, and I was aware that I was not driving to the beach. There was not an ocean for thousands of kilometers. The avenue narrowed and turned to dirt, and then dropped between the houses like anthills, below the long green hills, a range of mountains I had not seen. 

Driving the car—a stick shift that wasn’t mine—down so many rocky, potfilled, roads, and getting lost within them, and reversing back down them, and performing three-point turns across them, from one muddy ditch to the other, had lent me a deep ache by the time we arrived at the caves, and I envied the workers we had passed, and the locals we had asked for directions, who traveled by donkey or horse or foot.

There were six cars in the parking lot at the caves. The yellow lettering on the treated wood signs reminded me of signs outside U.S. National Parks. A wooden fence with three triangular beams led to a small hut with a metal turnstile. A woman sat inside. Entering the caves would cost foreigners $15. Hondurans paid the equivalent of $2. I gave them the money and walked up a well-maintained trail along the river to the entrance to the cave. A small man with a smooth and round face like an olive walked out of the cave followed by a nondescript couple and their child, all of whom paused and looked at me and my companion. The couple continued down the trail along the gushing river to the parking lot and the guide introduced himself and asked if we had flashlights. We said no and he asked if we wanted a guide and we said yes and followed him onto the metal walkway and into the cool unscented darkness of a cave named Talgua.

Talgua is located in a cave complex outside the city of Catacamas, Honduras, in the Department of Olancho. It has human remains from 1500 B.C. And there is some mystery to them. The skeletons are all located in odd, somewhat unceremonious, places—several of which seemingly would require technical climbing gear to reach. And there are no paintings or writings in the cave. No drawings, no signs of life—as the saying goes—but the bones. One thousand five hundred years before Christ they were. That's a long time. That is same as the distance between now and the barbarians sacking Rome plus 2000 more years. 

We were not yet out of the light when the guide, who had a very nice and easy smile, motioned to a tunnel behind the handrail. It was of the wall behind us, and from it's direction it seemed it would lead directly where we'd come from. But scientists who had entered were forced to turn back after traveling for 8 hours without finding the end.

But there is a famous cave in France—now more-famous because it was the subject of Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011)—that scientists are able to study without entering thanks to sonar-mapping technology. Out of fear of contaminating the remains and more importantly the beautiful, museum-worthy paintings within, only the Scientists go in. They can see paintings that have disintegrated and see what layer of paint was put applied at what time, digitally scanning the layers of the rock. Archaeologists regard it as a church. Something holy. It was. The paintings are good: running horses painted by torchlight 30,000 years ago (for there is no light). And next to them, painted 10,000 years later, a vast lion hunt. Then we found it. 20,000 years later. The fathoms of time. This is the point of the film. And it is a good film. Most haunting though, of this cave’s oddities, are a set of footprints, deep within the cave, where there is no light: the footprint of a boy situated neatly next that of a wolf. 5,000 years later (still over 10,000 years ago) a man walked around making red handprints. Some are on the rock floor, some on the walls. Scientists confirm the handprints were made by the same man. He had a broken pinky.

The guide told us that the bones glowed, and referenced the beautiful, sparkly, curtain-shaped, stalagmites behind us. Sales y minerales. They glow because of the minerals in the water. Then there was a set of stairs welded to floor. With a less-than defensive, but erect, and braced posture, the guide explained that due to the sensitivity of the atmosphere around the remains only certain people were allowed to see them. He apologized, and pulled the orb of the flashlight back onto the floor.

And this is when I noticed the scratches on the walls. Someone had written mierda, which translates to shit. If I had thought of it at the time, and I hadn’t been distracted by a strange color sitting on the rocks, I would have asked the guide if it was really better to wall anything off, like in France, or to set to work scratching things like mierda on the walls. But that is when I saw this strange color sitting on the rocks. Algae growing on the walls. I hadn't noticed it when we came in. The light increased. We were nearing the entrance. The tour was over. The guide began a brief, farewell-hope-you-enjoyed-yourself-and-come-again speech he’d probably said a hundred, hundred times, and we said thank you, and we stepped outside and someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was raining. How long inside? I was squinting, my pupils so wide it hurt.