The cave is absolutely quiet.

The cave is dark beyond any light that any visitor brings.

The same darkness his people entered, again and again, for three thousand years, with their bundles of burning river cane and their mussel shell scrapers and their gourd bowls, going toward the mineral walls that their communities needed and that the cave had been producing since long before any human being arrived to collect what it offered.

The longest cave on Earth kept them, and keeps their traces, and keeps its silence about why they came.

That silence is not failure.

It is the honest limit of what physical evidence can tell us about human meaning.

The cave preserves what it can.

The rest belongs to the living.