skit #41: Cueva Cuaya

The Paraguayan government hopes your attention to Cueva Cauya will increase our nation's tourism revenue, so they have promised Guaza-Cua a new secondary school in exchange for our cooperation. They reluctantly divulged the findings of your research thus far, as they regard our villagers as unlearned bumpkins (hence the school). While our village has a sparse and motley assortment of education (we being a demolitions expert from the Civil War, a first-year student at Asunción, an Australian expatriate, and an indigenous Guaraní), we've managed to collaboratively review your paper.

Your repertoire of tests deduces only speleogenetic attributes; the people of Guaza-Cua will tell you of the facets of Cueva Cauya.

The lagoon-filled crater at the foot of the opening shaft is not a result of sustained erosion. An affluent man, Don Arsello, lived here in Guaza-Cua centuries ago. His ranch did not survive one particularly odious February. His herds and sons fell to disease, his wife left him for her lover, and his lover took another man as his husband. He sought a place "as deep as his sorrows". Thinking he could fall forever, he plunged into the wailing maw bored in the earth. Only for one instant did he realize how shallow one man's woes are.

The rich phosphorous nitrate present in the lagoon water, as you have identified, is due to guano. Few animals are oriented inversely to the earth's pull and to man's conventions: the sloths in idleness, the opossums in deceit, and the bats in darkness. Bats are the doves of the afterlife, knowing secrets between life and death. What upright men condemn, upside-down men idolize. A tribe of bat-worshipers run the tunnels, hands beneath feet, subsisting on centipedes and fungi -- their noisome stool further enriching the lagoon foul elements. Where there are no stalagmites for use as ladder rungs, the troglodytes gouge fingerholds in the walls, scarring the cave's complexion with acne-pocks.

Triunfo de la Panocha is surely the most beautiful chamber in Cueva Cuaya. Your report notes its unique texture, its confounding composition, its indeterminate age. Late at night, the American Wyatt Yerlman wakes. He lurches from his farmhouse, past his turnstiles, past his ticket booth, and enters his cavegrounds. There he meets his brother-in-law, another American named Gilbert Dunt, a chemical engineer at the regional water treatment facility. On these nights, two-stroke engines belch and corrosives fume deep in Cueva Cuaya's bowels. Triunfo de la Panocha is a manmade cathedral, not natural phenomenon; and the grander the cathedral the deeper the collection plate.

You and we have discovered nothing of Cueva Cuaya. You and we both have invented stories to support what we find evident.