The mineral-bearing surfaces that the miner was working when the boulder fell are still accessible — still showing the distinctive chemistry that produces gypsum formations in the cave’s dry upper passages.

If the boulder had not shifted, if the rubble had been stable, if the miner had finished his work and descended from the ledge and walked back out through two and a half miles of dark passage to the surface, his presence in the cave would be recorded only as one more set of anonymous data — one more party’s torch fragments, one more collection of mussel shell scrapers, one more depleted section of gypsum crust.

Instead, his presence is recorded as something more specific: a named absence in his community, an unrecoverable body, a specific event on a specific day that left a specific physical record preserved by the cave for more than two thousand years.

The cave kept him.