"and that's the place where the bandido ___ (just fill in the blank with the name of your favorite bandido) buried ALL HIS GOLD!"

GOLDEN IDOLS

Those few caves not found by illustrious bandits are inevitably filled with even more ancient treasure: fabulous idols, priceless for their antiquity as well as their precious contents. Such marvels are usually guarded by tangles of poisonous snakes and poisonous vapors. Mysterious drafts in the cave "blow out both candles and flashlights" and the little entrance hole always seems to vanish magically just when the local people decide to step over to the cave and haul away the loot. After 25 years of underground exploration (and not a pinhead of gold to my name), I've become somewhat skeptical about finding treasures in caves - that is, up until I met Matilda.

MATILDA'S LEGS

It was a late October afternoon and time for us to be heading back to Guadalajara. But there we were, an hour east of Tecoman, Colima at the five-house pueblito of Galaje and there was Don Apolinar Juárez describing a deep pit atop a hill on his own property, a pit which the local people had entered by raising and lowering a man on a rope, a pit with "bad air" at the bottom and in which they had found...

Ho-hum. The treasure they had found didn't interest me at all, but the pit did. "Let's go have a quick look," I offered, and several friends of Manuel Gallegos who had been crawling around in caves with us all day long, raised their eyes to the heavens and groaned.

A half-hour tramp up the jungly hillside brought us to an outcrop of "prickly rock," some of the most beautiful karst I had ever seen in my life.

We peered down into Don Apolinar's pit. "Hmm. Twenty-five meters at the most. Too bad we didn't bring up our rope." That's when we began to look around the pit entrance. Pottery shards. Broken metate legs and grinding stones. And── Matilda... a goddess without a doubt, an otherworld Venus De Galaje, if she only had legs. "Well, well, if this is what those treasure-hunters threw away, I wonder what it is they kept."

We decided we'd have to return, enter the pit and search for Matilda's legs and maybe her head as well.

INTO THE PIT

A month later Susy and I were back with Claudio Chilomer and Juan Blake. Don Apolinar led us to a fabulous campsite on the sandy banks of the broad Coahuayana River which separates the states of Colima and Michoacán. Our own private beach and swimming hole!

The following morning found us on the hilltop, rappeling into the dark entrails of the limestone hill. Susy, Claudio, Juan and I would go down while Don Apolinar's son Polo and Manuel, who had just joined us, would guard the rope. This would be Claudio's first experience exploring a pit.

At the bottom of what turned out to be a 17.5 meter (58 foot) drop, we broke out the collapsible shovels, shifting dirt and rocks with wild abandon. But all we found was more dirt and more rocks. Not a glimmer of gold nor any sign of a charming goddess's lost legs. In fact, the pickings were better on the surface!

But hold on. Off to one side was a little passage leading to a small room, in which we discovered a narrow tube heading straight down, just wide enough for a body to fit...

FLICK YOUR BIC OR DIE

Now we were surely at the treasure trove's door. We rigged a cable ladder and Juan prepared to continue the descent.

First, I handed him my Bic lighter, the inexpensive oxygen meter I always carry around ever since I nearly bought the farm at the bottom of Bottomless Pit (See Subterráneo Number 7). Juan climbed into the hole and flicked the Bic. It lit. He descended seven meters and began to emit an assortment of gasping and choking sounds. "The lighter!" shouted Claudio and I from the room above. Juan flicked. No light. Huffing and puffing, he climbed back up, madly flicking without result... until he reached a point about five inches below where the lighter had lit the first time around. Here the Bic produced a flame separated from and hovering two inches above the lighter. Now we knew exactly where the carbon dioxide started. So much for our treasure hunt. We generously decided to leave the gold and jewels to the archaeologists, thus avoiding any temptation to break the "take nothing but photos" rule.

TREASURE TROVE

Back on the surface, I went for a stroll, figuring Claudio would be struggling for some time with his prusik-knot-Croll ascending system. Actually, he made it up a lot faster than Susy, who had to use a homemade substitute for her (lost) chest harness.

A mere minute and a half from the pit, I found a hole at the bottom of a climbable depression and crawled into a long, horizontal cave whose high walls were covered with shimmering stalactites, stalagmites, columns, "cauliflower" and more. "This is more like it," I told myself with a smile and, turning around, made my way back to call my companions.

Cauliflower Cave turned out to contain the kind of treasure that cavers really love and we spent more time exploring it than we did in the rather boring pit. We strongly suspect there may be a lot more of the same awaiting us in the hills east of Tecoman.