The Cave Hunters

Spelunking along the Spanish border early this summer, Scientist Georges Lepineux watched a black mountain crow fly into a yawning pit and disappear. Since crows love dark recesses almost as much as speleologists do, Amateur Geologist Lepineux rushed to investigate. A small cave led off the pit floor, and a few feet inside the cave mouth a limestone chimney dropped away into darkness. Cautiously, Lepineux heaved a rock into the opening, waited for the faint, faraway sounds of its fall. Then he rushed to report his discovery.

Last month a twelve-man Belgian-French cave-exploring team went back to Basses-Pyrenees, made the long, hard climb from Licq-Atherey to Lepineux's discovery. They brought climbing ladders, cement to secure loose rock in the side of the chimney, and a windlass to lower the explorers into the unknown. Expedition Chief Max Cosyns, a Belgian nuclear physicist who goes after spelunking records on the side, estimated the chimney's depth by timing the echo from rocks that ricocheted off the limestone walls. The explorers were looking for a drop of about 350 meters.

Straight Down. By last week preparations were completed. Discoverer Lepineux had the traditional right to make the first descent. He buckled on his parachute harness, put a steel helmet over his woolen cap, adjusted his miner's head lamp and his altimeter, hooked his harness to the cable of the windlass and, after a quick handshake all around, stepped off into the void.

He dropped one meter every six seconds, all the while reporting regularly to Cosyns over a special telephone connected through the center of the cable. At 130 meters, the expedition got a bad scare when a short circuit cut off communication for a few moments. But by the time the windlass dial registered 300 meters, excitement on the surface was running high. If Lepineux continued for just a little longer, he would break the long-standing vertical drop record of 318 meters.* "Stop," he finally called. "I am on the bottom." The windlass dial registered 356 meters.

Vanishing Torrent. Dripping wet from the water trickling down the chimney's walls and shivering with cold, Lepineux was brought to the surface three hours and 40 minutes later. During the descent, the spinning cable had made the walls seem to revolve so fast in the light of his head lamp that he had almost been sick. But once on the bottom, he had felt up to a little exploring.

He had found the typical boulder-strewn cave that forms when mountains shudder and crack. Water filters down, eroding giant shafts, forming subterranean lakes over layers of impermeable clay. Later earthquakes sometimes crack the lake floor, draining off the water and leaving immense underground chambers.

Other members of the expedition also went down and looked around. They found other caves and a 15-ft. underground torrent that rushed along to a tantalizing disappearance in a closed vault--the water level flush with the top of the vault's entrance. "With proper equipment," said Cosyns, "we may be able to go down . . . perhaps even one thousand meters." And the thought of exploring one kilometer below the earth was something to make any speleologist's eyes bug with anticipation.

* Cavemen distinguish between vertical drops and ordinary descents, which may go even deeper but not straight down. Alltime low: 658 meters, reached by Pierre Chevalier at Dent de Crolles (TIME, June 9, 1947).

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