Tumacácori Gold

Leery that something abnormal would still occur, which could at any time manifest itself with catastrophic consequences, Logan slowly raised his head from the dark floor of the pit and opened one eye to take a quick peek. But when his eye settled on the serenity of the dark and silent hole in the center of the pit, he realized that there was nothing to fear; the pit remained calm and stable.

Logan was on safe ground and he knew it. The pit was safe and all his fears of a cave-in vanished from his thoughts as he gradually rose to his feet, took in a deep breath, and then calmly walked over to the hole in the center of the pit and shined the narrow beam of the flashlight down into the opening of the hole.

What he saw when he first looked inside the dark, musty hole didn’t quite register in his fatigued mind at first, but after he peered again into the dark crater below and focused his eyes on the object in the beam of the narrow spotlight, his dusty chin dropped, his mouth opened wide and his sky blue eyes blinked with absolute disbelief. He stumbled and nearly fell over backward with breathtaking astonishment.

Juny, sensing something very strange about Logan’s unusual behavior, rose to his feet with alarm. “Are you all right? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

“Maybe I did. Or, perhaps I’m just hallucinating. You had better pinch me anyway just to make sure that I’m not dreaming.”

“What are you talking about?”

Logan walked back to the hole in the center of the pit and again shined the beam of the flashlight into the dark cavity as he shook his head with astonishment and disbelief. “Come see for your self.”

Juny, still terribly apprehensive that a sudden cave-in might still occur, looked with skepticism toward the black hole in the center of the pit. Then, a burning curiosity that surged rapidly through his veins suddenly took over, compelling him to move closer to the center of the pit. Ever so slowly, he inched his way along the dusty floor and then carefully stretched himself out to a prone position next to Logan and stared with bewilderment into the dark hole below.

The thin, narrow beam of Logan’s flashlight was much too inadequate of a light source to sufficiently illuminate the distant bottom of the vast and immeasurable cavern that lay hundreds of feet below. It would be like trying to illuminate the Arizona Cardinal’s immense football stadium in the dark by lighting a single match.

Logan felt as though he were on top of the universe looking down through an open window at some strange and distant world that lay far beyond the horizon of the imagination. It reminded him of the time back in 1975 when he had just received his State Miner Certificate as a Drift and Cross-cut Miner, where he began his short-lived mining career as an underground journeyman miner on the three thousand-foot level of the Copper Nugget Mining Corporation, an Australian owned copper mine located near Mammoth, Arizona. Being the new guy in the company, and holding the lowest level of company seniority, Logan was tasked with the most detested and unpleasant job of constructing a subterranean train station by drilling and blasting an enormously huge underground chamber, and then transfer thousands of cubic-yards of loose earth and rock, referred to as muck, out of the crater and up to the surface using nothing more than a obsolete, antiquated cable operated slush bucket.

 Logan and Juny couldn’t believe their eyes as they both stared quietly, for what seemed an eternity, into the dark expanse of the pitch-black, breathtaking universe below. Approximately five hundred feet deep, at least eight hundred feet wide and over a thousand feet in total length, the colossal cavern was an awe-inspiring, out of this world sight that neither Logan nor Juny had ever chanced to come upon in all their many years of rummaging through the fallen ruins of unknown and uncharted ghost towns in search of buried relics and undocumented history forgotten by time.

“What in the hell is this place,” asked Juny with wonder as he rubbed his dirt filled eyes.

Logan thought for a moment, and then let out a long sigh of frustration. “A big hole -- a very, very big hole.”

“How do you suppose it got here -- aliens?”

Logan chuckled with amusement as he scanned the distant floor of the chamber below with the narrow beam of the flashlight when he froze in speechless silence as his razor sharp eyes immediately locked onto a faint glimmer of light reflecting off some peculiar object in the seemingly bottomless expanse below. “I have a hunch the missing piece to our puzzle is lying down there on the bottom of this chamber, and guess who’s going down after it.”

Juny carefully inspected the crude harness one last time then gave Logan an encouraging pat on the back. “Don’t get careless and fall into some whirlpool, I’m in no mood for a swim.”

Logan looked his life-long friend in the eyes and sighed. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. It’ll be dawn soon and I’m ready for some hash browns and gravy, so keep an eye on the winch and be ready to bring up the mail on my signal.”

“You talk as though you know something you’re not telling us about,” shouted back Guzman from the surface above the pit.

Logan smiled. “I can’t think of a logical explanation for a man-made cavern of such astronomical dimension as this one, and to exist in such a remote area as Tumacácori, Arizona.