A group of us were in the pub the other day, discussing a trip to Pelican Pot up in the Dales. Sid - you know, the tall lad with the reverse Mohican hairstyle - was quite interested until someone remarked that there was some very good moonmilk there. At this point, Sid suddenly lost interest - he just dropped out of the conversation and buried his nose in his beer mug while the others organised their trip. I was a bit puzzled by this, and had a quiet word with him afterwards.
"It was when they mentioned moonmilk," he said, watching a stray fly slowly drowning in a pool of spilt beer on the bar. "When they mentioned moonmilk, I just didn't want to go any more."
"How come?" I asked, and he told me the story...
"It was the other year," he said, "While I was out in China. I was up near Lanzhou, in the north of Guangdong. The scenery there is very like Guilin - you know what I mean - those pointy little limestone hills, with rivers running between them and caves everywhere. I was poking around there with a Chinese friend - a doctor from Guangzhou - name of Fong. He'd been talking to some of the locals and heard there was an unexplored cave in one of the hills nearby, so we decided to investigate. We went along with some tackle and a couple of guys from the local village - a young lad and his girlfriend, actually - and they showed us the mouth of the cave. It was some way up on an overhanging face - a bit like Kilnsey Crag - over a river, and confoundedly difficult to get to. No wonder it was unexplored.
"While I was trying to think how to get up there, Fong was talking to the village lad. 'He says there used to be lots of bats in there,' he said. 'Thousands of them, used to fly out every evening. That's what drew his attention to the cave. But there aren't any now.'
"Well, I had other things to think about than the mystery of the missing bats. Like how to get up to the cave mouth, for one. The climb looked rather tricky, but we paddled across the river and with the aid of my trusty drill and a lot of Chinese rawlbolts I managed to scramble up and rig up a rope so that the others could climb up too. We found ourselves in a fairly roomy passage, so Fong and I helmeted up and put our lights on. The other two had brought torches, and we all set off along the passage.
"It was quite a nice passage, really. Sort of oval section, walking height, smooth floor - rather twisty, though. We'd only gone a few dozen paces and we'd lost sight of the daylight. A bit further on, the passage narrowed a bit and went round a lot more corners, and then the roof and walls disappeared and we found ourselves in a huge chamber. Don't ask me how big it was - it wasn't so very high, I don't think, but our lights wouldn't reach to the end of it. It was like Sherwood Forest in there - dozens of those big columns like trees that you get out there, with more flowstone hanging from the roof like leafy branches. A potholer's dream, you might say. And then the village guy noticed the moonmilk.
"There was a big patch of it, over to one side of the cavern, a patch of milky whiteness in the general gloom of the cave. The village guy wanted to know what it was, and - with Fong translating - I tried to tell him. 'It's a sort of calcite formation,' I said, ' believed to be formed by some sort of bacterial action...'
"'Bacteria!' interrupted Fong. 'What do they live on down here?'
"'Cavers, maybe...' I joked.
"'Bat sh*t!' said the village lad, whose limited English made him rather abrupt at times.
"So we went over to have a closer look, making our way carefully across a rather bouldery floor. That bit of the cave would have made as good a bat roost as I ever saw, but there was nary a bat in sight. Just this big patch of milky white material on the wall and roof and floor of the cave. As we got closer, something small and white suddenly dropped from the cave roof, right by the edge of the patch of moonmilk, and fell with a feeble flutter to the floor where it twitched for a moment or two and then lay still. 'A bat!' said Fong, and the girl rushed across to have a closer look.
"As she bent over the little white object, something dreadful happened. A large patch of the white stuff suddenly detached itself from the cave roof and fell on top of her. The stuff ran all over her head and face and arms- she wasn't wearing a helmet - and she reached up and tried to wipe it off. Then she started screaming. The lad rushed over to help her, and the stuff seemed to spread from her onto him, and then more of the stuff fell on him from the roof. Fong was on his way too, but I grabbed hold of him and held him back - there didn't seem to be anything anyone could do to help. So we stood and watched as they rolled about on the floor and screamed and twitched and finally lay still under a coating of that queer white stuff. I don't know what sort of toxin it produced, but it worked pretty quickly. It seemed ages while we stood watching, but it could only have been minutes.
"Then Fong looked up, grabbed my shoulder, and pointed. The filthy stuff on the roof was unmistakably moving, spreading, extending itself in our direction, reaching snotty, slimy tentacles towards us. We turned and ran. When we got to the cave entrance, Fong was down that rope and in the river before you could say 'Jack Robinson.' He never bothered with his descender - just slid down the rope, took the skin off his palms, and thought it cheap at the price. I followed him a bit more slowly - but not much - de-rigging as I went. I left most of the bolts in, but you can't see them from the other side of the river..."
"What did you do then?" I asked.
"Then?" he said. "We got back to the village, and of course everyone wanted to know where the other two were. When we told them, they all stood round in a circle, muttering to one another - we didn't think they believed us, at first - then an old grandfather spoke up. Yes, he said, he had seen stuff like that before. A long time ago. In a cave where they went looking for birds' nests, I think. Fong wasn't too sure. But it was very nasty stuff. Very dangerous. And there and then a whole lot of guys set off with bamboo ladders and cans of petrol and back we went to the cave. Fong and I stayed on the other side of the river, while a group of them shinned up and disappeared into the cave. Lots of smoke came out, the men came back down the ladders, and back we went to the village.
"On the way back, the headman told us that they had found the bodies of the young couple in there - what was left of them. And they had splashed petrol around, and incinerated the bodies and the white stuff together. And village honour was satisfied. But, for all that, eight of them had gone into the cave and only five had come out. And he didn't say what had happened to the other three...
"The first thing next morning we were on our way back to Guangzhou, and after that it was the first flight back to good old England for me. No, I haven't heard from Fong since, and, no, I don't want to go back to that part of the world, ever again.
"And no, I don't want to go looking at moonmilk, thank you - here or anywhere else."
, but in this case I think it is justified.
