Experimenting with setting in fiction…
Allendra stepped into the Cave of Crystals, moving past the guide who strained to open the iron safety doors, dark eyes widening as she peered in as far as her helmet light illuminated. Selenite crystal pillars, some as long as thirty feet, criss-crossed the cave from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. Crystal blocks jutted from floor and ceiling covering both surfaces. Luminous white or icily transparent, over one hundred crystal columns and chunks formed the underground palace.
Allendra had left her Nikon back at base for this first visit into the cave a thousand feet under the lead mine in the Mexican Chihuahuan Desert. She would start shooting after she oriented herself to the orange jumpsuit weighing her down with its dozens of pockets filled with plastic bags of ice and to the mask over her mouth and nose cooling the air before it got to her lungs. Allendra was here to replace Marco who had taken off his mask for too long, boiled his lungs, and collapsed forever before someone found him.
She took a few more light steps into the cave out onto a crystal column, its perfection unmarred by any human mark, hearing her own breathing into the mask and no other sound. Out of sight of the guide Allendra took off a glove and touched a crystal point with one finger, a transparent needle piercing her skin as she ran her finger along the edge of the crystal. She winced, saying nothing to the guide. She would take a piece of the cave out with her. When Prestigio Mining had stripped the lead, they would stop pumping; the Cave of Crystals would fill again with flowing hot water and disappear forever from sight, the crystals growing once again as they had for millennia.
Allendra put her glove back on. She could taste her elusive prize.
Across the cave two of her competition in their orange jumpsuits and masks set up a camera on a crystal beam that dwarfed them, making them look unnatural, like they had been miniaturized in a science fiction film. The beams from the spot lights on their helmets, shining on a different place in the cave with each head movement, added to the strangeness of this place where crystals were larger than men.
“I don’t think I can stay in here very long,” she told the guide.
She was raw meat in an oven, insides cooking, skin absent of sweat beads to carry her heat out into the completely saturated and 122 degrees air fired by the magma field furnace flowing under the cave. Lunging toward her, pulling her hand away from the mask she had instinctively removed for relief, the guide returned the mask to her face, without a word reminding Allendra of the hostility of the place she would photograph for seven days.