They went into it anyway, with their bundles of burning cane and their mussel shells and their gourd bowls, generation after generation, three thousand years of trips from the surface world into the underground and back again.

They came out carrying the minerals that their communities needed for whatever purpose the community assigned to them.

They learned the routes and taught them to those who came after.

They accepted the risks as the price of the resource.

One of them, on a day around 445 BCE, stayed.

He is still there, somewhere in the cave.

Not displayed, not studied, not named by the name his community gave him.

Present in the cave that preserved him and that is now his permanent resting place — kept in the dark, in the cold, in the silence, in exactly the conditions that have held the ancient record of his people’s underground work for more than two thousand years.