Fatalis Read Online Free PDF Page B

someone who once called petrified wood a pillow, the desk hadn't been half-bad. When the alarm went off in the bedroom five hours later he was alert and ready to focus on the job at hand. He had no classes to teach until the following afternoon and, for the time being, the only ghosts he had to deal with were those of the ancients.
    Grand was dressed in warm, light blue, waterproof microfleece pants and a yellow wool jacket The jacket was cut long to keep his backside and upper legs warm, though he had removed the large, zip-away peaked hood. Grand had always preferred to go bareheaded when he was exploring a cave. If something came loose from above he wanted to hear it; small stones often fell before larger ones. And if one of those bobcats or bears came along, or if he went someplace where there were rattlesnakes, he wanted to be able to hear them too. Right now, all he heard was the hollow but delicate trickle of water spilling in from the swallow hole and dripping down the sides of the ledge.
    Grand finished checking the pulley rig. It was attached to the rock at the very edge of the cave ledge, held there by a widely set series of short pitons. Grand had designed the array himself to cause as little damage as possible to a site. Slipping the lightweight harness from his duffel bag, he fastened the thick waist-wrap tightly above his slender hipbones and slid his legs through the two, two-inch-wide nylon bands. He adjusted the slider buckles, leaving the leg loops relatively loose. This would give him extra mobility and also help to avoid "rug bum." Once the harness was on,
    Grand attached two slender climbing ropes to the belay loop. The other ends of the two-hundred-foot nylon lines were coiled through the pulley system. He would hold one rope in each hand, using the one on the left to lower himself and the one on the right to pull himself up.
    After making sure that the lines were secure and untangled, Grand lay them on the ledge and reached back into the bag. He slipped on his night-vision goggles. The four-inch-long cylindrical eyepieces amplified existing light from the visible through the infrared spectra and presented them in different intensities of green, shades to which the human eye was most sensitive. Then he hooked a compact 8-mm video-cassette recorder to his belt There was a lightweight headset and microphone built into the goggles and a small, silver tube attached to the right side of the frame. The tube contained a fiber-optic night-vision video camera, which was jacked into the tape machine. Everything Grand saw and described would be recorded. The tape was not only a useful study tool, it was a valuable precaution. Chumash cave art had been painted with brushes made of animal tails that had been dipped into bowls of powdered minerals such as hematite, diatomaceous earth, and manganese mixed for red, white, and black-the primary Chumash colors. Held together with a binder of animal fat, these pigments could be extremely volatile when exposed to air or light. Significant details, if not entire murals, could be lost within days of a cave being opened. In a geologically active zone, rock slides and earthquakes could also compromise or destroy the art. If anything like that happened here, at least there would be a record of the work.
    Grand touched a button on the videocassette recorder. The machine began to hum.
    "This is Jim Grand," be whispered. He was speaking softly so his voice wouldn't echo and cause dangerous vibrations. "I'm in a cave that's about fifty feet from the summit of La Cumbre Peak and about twenty-four-hundred feet above sea level. The opening of the cave is roughly a one-hundred-foot climb from East Camino Cielo Road. I came here after finding what seemed to be a reference to the mountain in the Chumash map painted in a cave on Figueroa Mountain. I found the entrance yesterday, on September thirteen, after it was exposed by a rockslide. There's a slide-path directly from the cave opening