The Volunteer's Diary

Arrival: December 28th 2:37AM

Baghran

Helmand Province

Afghanistan

Current time: 9:22PM

Malvici's Salamander

Minutes after our preservation team reached the temporary accommodations outside the village, a sandstorm blew in. No progress made towards specimen recovery.

December 29th 5:19AM

The sandstorm stopped. Offloading sand from tents and equipment. Not really sand, more of a fine silt. Like pulverized clay. It sticks to everything. Found the housing for a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) stuck in a drift of sandy silt next to my assigned Jeep.

It's been years since I drove a manual.

8:45AM

Tomorrow we leave before sunrise to find any remaining specimens of Malvici's Salamander.

It is a strange place for a salamander. Vast blue sky, dust and endless rocks in shades of brown and gray. It looks like a barren seabed I dove off the coast of Victoria, even an unsettling feeling of being underwater at times. I think it's the angle of the sunlight. I have to get used to being at this latitude and so high in elevation.

12:45PM

The five of us climbed up a rocky outcropping at the base of a cliff rising into the hills. We smoked cigarettes and talked about where we've been. It's an okay group this time, I got set up with a nasty group out looking for beetles in Siberia once. These women are young, and the only men with us are the interpreter, Sayed and a couple of "guards." Their names are Omar and Sam. Okay dudes, but they are def mercenaries. I hope no one pays them more than we do.

Sayed is Marce's contact from her military service. He said he hasn't had any work since the security forces pulled out.

The sand is incessant. It makes the cigarettes taste like wood.

10:02PM

We all started to sit down to watch them prepare dinner, but we got shooed away.

Sayed said women don't kill. Don't watch killing. Just wait.

It's the first time since we arrived they made any demands of us. Kasey is bitching about it. She's got a thing for farm-to-table.

The butchering done by men I knew about from the pre-assignment brief. But the looking taboo intrigued me, women don't watch killing. Hadn't heard it before, but it's a big country.

We eat goat for dinner. It's good and spicy. Pam was flirting so we went back to her tent. She kicked me out, though, I guess I snore. It's the dust.

Now Marce wants me to turn the light off.

December 30th

3:45AM

The coffee tastes worse than the cigarettes. So I am the one driving. Marce, Pam, Lyra, Kasey, and Nura all said they never drove a stick at all.

It's only 10 miles to the reported coordinates.

The mountains are beautiful, hints of rivers robed with green. The sudden color is relieving, my eyes relax. The wind has died away a little.

10:48 AM

We've only gone 3 miles!!!!???

11:17 AM

The desert is slow going. The rocks are fist sized and scattered everywhere. The Jeep has big tires, but it's still struggling uphill in this heat. 6 more miles, they say.

And then the time we did get up to a good pace, there was a herd of camels in the way. We had to wait for the camel herders to show up. They were not in a hurry.

Sayed said there is an incredible fine and other consequences for killing a camel.

6PM

2 miles away, we have to stop for the night.

Dusk is magical. The blue dome is melting gold in the west, purpling in the east. The stars come out early and shine bright as the moon.

12AM

Nura, Lyra and I were woken by Sayed. There was a meteor shower. The others had ignored him.

I did want to sleep, but the shooting stars across the desert sky blurred the boundary between us and eternity. The shower slowed and finished, we went back to bed with lighter hearts.

December 31st

1AM

Sam woke us all to warn us not to go near the caves.

4AM

Here we go again.

10AM

We're here. It's hot. Dry. Looks lifeless.

They gave us each a probe camera. For the tiny, deep openings in the rocky landscape. Pam won't talk to me. I think she's mad I wouldn't let her drive this morning. Said she lied before because she didn't want to drive, but she changed her mind.

2PM

Found ants, bats, spiders, white lizards, no salamanders. Not even a good enough habitat.

The others, except Lyra, are all pissed at me because I said the mushroom they found wasn't anything special.

I don't know anything about mushrooms, I don't know why I said anything. Stupid.

Sayed said we need to go with the guards. Right now.

January 1st

We had to leave the site. We'll go back tomorrow. They got radio reports of flash floods coming through the ravines. We've gone to high ground.

11:50AM

I'm sleeping in the Jeep.

Something nudged it while I was asleep, the vehicle squeaked and rocked back and forth.

Maybe a camel? It didn't stink that much when we passed the herd before. Like a trash fire, but also musky like body odor.

I can't see anything out there. All's quiet, one of the guards is awake. Just a shape in the dark. He waves at me. I turn my light off.

January 2nd

6AM

False alarm. No floods.

8AM

Sayed went into the village to ask about the salamanders. Now we're alone with the "guards."

10AM

I heard some gunfire. I tried to ask Omar about it, but he wouldn't talk to me.

The war is supposed to be over.

12PM

Sayed came back, said we have to go into the caves to find the salamander.

Through the layer of sweat on my back, I felt a chill.

I like a dive now and then, a little adventure or some rock climbing. Caves never held any appeal for me. Too many things in there. Too many things in there that can see way better than I can in the dark.

Sure, some of those things are the adorable Malvici's Salamander. Which mates for life, raises its young for two years, and generally is found in shallow, muddy valleys in the central Afghanistan ranges. These must have gone underground to escape the sun and wind.

Anyway, most of the rest of cave-dwelling species are critters I can do without meeting. I'm volunteering to find butterflies next time. Or kittens.

January 3rd

5:30AM

Down we go. Omar and Sam refuse to come with us. They wait at the entrance.

They give an AK to Sayed. The war is supposed to be over.

11AM

We heard gunfire at the entrance as soon as we reached the upper chamber.

The sound of it shocked me, but the underground world we'd entered made the fear seem far away.

The walls shone with green moss, small purple flowers blooming across the great wave of a southern wall. Behind the green tapestry were layers of sandstone, shale, and I swear I saw granite. (It was probably something else, said Lyra. So you don't know anything about rocks either? said Kasey. I ignored her.)

The northern wall was bare, gray, dropping down into darkness.

We wait, quiet, lights out. We don't hear anything more.

Sayed looked almost calm, but for the finger he held near the trigger and his dark eyes fixed on the cavern's ceiling.

I ask Sayed what we do now. He said go look for your lizard. Ok buddy, good luck.

7:30PM

We found some eggs, but no live ones. Took two eggs.

I lost my scope camera. Marce, who is also our team leader even though she's been with the conservation corporation half as long as me, said she is going to write me up for it.

She already wrote me up twice this year already. I'm Starting to think it's personal. She already has everything I worked for, what more does she want?

When we reached the surface the Jeeps were gone. Sam and Omar were still there. Some vigilantes, they said, came and stole the vehicles and equipment.

They radioed their commander (mercs, knew it) and were able to get us a lift. It would take two days.

Our only shelter is the cave below.

At night. In the mountains of Afghanistan.

This may be my last entry.

January 4th

Woke up to an argument being fought in Pashto. Sayed aimed his weapon up at the cave entrance while he spoke to us in English.

He said the village has changed hands. They are not going to let us out alive. The guards are no longer ours.

January 5th?

We're about a half mile into the cave system. The headlamps are holding out.

Pam and Kasey are freaking out. Marce is quiet, the Omar and Sam were her hiring decision. Nura is leading Lyra by the hand, she keeps trying to hide and go to sleep. I snapped at all of them earlier, they sent me to the rear. Sayed is the only one who will talk to me.

Moving again.

I can see daylight ahead, catching blue-white on the hair of the women in front of me.

We start for the smell of fresh air, but Lyra wasn't with us anymore.

Sayed stressed we need to leave the cave, they may have decided to flush us out.

They all look like hell, even in the bare daylight filtering in. Okay, I'll go find her.

January ??

...hopefully not the last January.

I got lost looking for Lyra. I can hear her, but I can't find her and now I'm stuck in a pit while my headlamp blinks its last.

I'll keep calling for Lyra.

There was a small opening at the bottom of the pit. I found Lyra hiding in there, but now neither of us can get back out.

She's in shock. I tied her to me with a guideline. We have to go deeper into the cave and find another way.

There's something following us. I can see its eyes when I shine my light back down the hall. Too big to be a wild dog. Are there bears in the central range? I can't remember.

Huge eyes, gleaming behind dark hair and lashes. Heavy, reeking breath.

I feel air coming from the left. Our lights are getting dimmer.

A low corridor brought us upwards. We had to shuffle through it sideways, but it opened onto a small chamber with a slight draft running through it.

Then I saw the door.

It was a rustic one, ropes nailed into the rock served as hinges for a large slab of dark wood.

The air was coming from there. There was no other way.

I opened the door.

The chamber beyond was darkness, even with our headlamps on. Lyra didn't want to go. I didn't either, really. I cracked a glowstick and threw it as far as I could. It hit ground twenty feet in, it rolled. The floor was smooth sandstone.

I cracked another, and another. It was all we had beyond the headlamps, I don't know what possessed me to spend half of them on one chamber. I wanted to know how big it was. If it was natural, or human-made.

There are always stories flying around the office at the conservation corporation. Giant foxes in Peru the size of a cow. Nomadic film connoisseurs in the Parisian Underground.

Sometimes you can convince a pretty young thing that you saw a djinn in the Middle East. But the only real story to come out of the mountains of Afghanistan again and again was giants. Titans. Really big people. It sounds even crazier than the ones we make up, but it resonates in a way. Resonates like there may be some truth to it.

I didn't see any in there. The cavern was enormous, bare, made of dark gray-blue stone. Light gray lines curled across the cavern. There may have been shapes, ceiling-high figures. Or they were natural lines, and the wavering light played a trick.

Lyra wouldn't slow down, I only got a glimpse.

Went through the door on the far side. A long chamber leading up. Lyra is crying. Just crying and crying. I don't blame her, I would do the same if I had been down here lost and alone.

I wish I could have figured out why Pam was mad at me. I thought we were really getting along. I wanted to hear more about her childhood in Spain.

January 10th

That last hour in the cave is an untrustworthy memory. It's all in pieces.

I remember the last things I was looking at before my lamp went out. There were petroglyphs carved into the rock.

There were two rubbings folded into my notebook when I woke up in the camp later.

One was of a cavern covered in flowers. The other was of six people, three seemingly in the foreground of a pit. Three in the background on the far side.

I remember I could still hear Lyra, and she could hear me. I must have lost her again, because she kept calling my name. Just like that, echoing against the sandstone:

Lyra...

Mara...

Lyra...Mara

Half an hour into the darkness, something moved around my feet.

I was stuck down in a pit, again, the sides too steep to climb, and no way out. It was only big enough for me to turn around in. I couldn't even bend over.

Then below there was something I could see. Darting, flitting blue-green lights swirled upwards from the opening at my feet. They lit up the walls.

The salamander.

We had no idea they glowed! After half an hour or more of sheer darkness, I wept with relief at the sight of them. They were rounded, approximately 8 cm in length, eyeless, two ruffled ridges on either side of their spade-shaped heads.

I pressed my hands against the wall and felt them skittering over my fingers with little salamander feet. I was just so, so happy to see them.

I watched them dancing across the surface of the rock, illuminating the petroglyphs and making the figures come alive. It was several lines of lizards before I wondered why they might be fleeing upwards.

There was water now, ankle-deep and rising. The flash flood had gone underground.

I called out to Lyra: I found the salamander. I'm going to drown. The water is rising. Tell Pam I'm sorry. We didn't even have to fool around. I would have been happy holding her hand.

I'm sorry Marce and Kasey and Nura. I'm sorry Sayed. I'm sorry.

Nothing else seemed right. I couldn't just fall over and die. I had to say something.

After that...I must have become delirious.

But I remember something.

Something else brushed against my hair and face as the water started to reach my mouth. It was so cold. Something wrapped around me. I was hoisted free of the pit and pulled onto a surface some several feet up.

In the light of the salamanders I saw Lyra sitting up next to me. She looked glazed, I pulled her to her feet and we followed the air movement out.

Something large moved around us, footsteps scuffing and slapping along the outer edges of the chamber. Its silhouette was just visible against the pale blue-green of the salamanders. Dark hair swinging twelve feet above the ground, skin bare and tanned, joints bigger than a camel's.

Outside

They were still waiting for us when we finally reached the surface. We came out only a little way down the mountain from them.

As we left we heard a bellowing cry from behind us.

Only Lyra, Sayed and I were close enough to hear it.

Sayed smiled and wagged his head. He said one day the world will know about them. Then he walked off. Lyra stared back into the cave as if hypnotized by the darkness.

She was 19, out on her own for the first time. It was her first assignment. And from what I saw in the preceding days, Kasey was reeling Lyra as her latest catch. It can be easy to get obsessed when an older, experienced woman gives you attention. She was completely destabilized inside. A little pet that got left behind and rescued by someone she doesn't even like. I knew the feeling.

I stood in between her and the cave. She looked up at me, hardly seeing. The spell broken, she looked around and saw Kasey, ran to her and cried. Oh well.

That end of the cave system came out on the side of a mountain. We scrambled down the rocky face to a dirt road below.

Sayed flagged down a passing truck. After a brief discussion, the five of us piled into the back and Sayed climbed into the passenger seat.

Pam put her head on my shoulder.

The trip was a success. The eggs and my account confirm at least a breeding population of the Malvici's salamander.

Pam bullied the legal team into starting the process to bring Sayed to the US. He saved us all, he'll be killed if he stays. We kept asking, now she tells us every morning:

He's alive. The process is started. Any day now.