An odd intimacy develops among strangers in the dark. I could not always see the other people but I could smell them. For three hours, I stared at the back of his head as we walked in single file, the bulbs of our helmets casting thin beams of gray light. Nobody talked much, as if the sound of human voices that far under would jar something loose. The high-school girls bravely broke up the silence at frequent intervals, pausing under archways, near pockets of cave pearls, smiling confidently for their friends back home.
Time is hard to tell down there.
And after we had been walking for some time, we followed Viv into a hallway of sorts that grew thinner and thinner until we were suddenly crouched in a low-ceilinged room. Viv told us to sit. She called for lights out. We switched off our headlamps and sat there, seven strangers and two guides, in absolute blackness. I could hear Viv's voice a few feet away on my right as she began to tell some sort of story about early explorers who had died or had seen a ghost or something.