The Pursuit of Potholes

CAVES OF ADVENTURE (222 pp.)--Haroun.Tazieff--Harper ($3).

For speleologists, the way down into the cave is often like the way up to heaven for saints--straight and narrow. Moreover, the pothole shaft is apt to be lined with slimy rock walls out of which icy waterfalls pour over the passing spelunker. He spins sickeningly sometimes, at the end of a quarter-inch strand of cable, while his fellow spelunkers lower him slowly into the unknown. Below, he is often the sole inhabitant, except for eyeless white cockroaches and the like, of a world of stone, water and darkness. Claustrophobic terror can catch him, turn him hysterical. Finally, he has a couple of good chances of never seeing daylight again: a snapped cable or a landslide may leave him below forever. Why do they do it?

In Caves of Adventure, which describes two trips to the bottom of the Pierre Saint-Martin pothole in the Pyrenees, Polish-born Haroun Tazieff gives a speleologist's answer. After dropping into the limestone mountain about as far down as the Empire State Building is up (1,250 ft.), Tazieff had "an astonishing feeling" of accomplishment. The experience made him skeptical of such highfalutin motives for spelunking as the advancement of scientific knowledge and the development of a nation's natural resources by discovering underground rivers for hydroelectric power. Holes and caves, Tazieff concluded, seduce speleologists with that most tempting of bait, "the lure of the unknown."

The first expedition to the Pierre Saint-Martin, in 1951, discovered two enormous caves and a river below, the 1,000-ft. perpendicular descent into the mountain chimney. Lured on a second expedition into the hole last year as the official photographer, Tazieff saw French Speleologist Marcel Louberis fall from a snapped cable and break his back on the rocks below. Thirty-six hours later, with reporters and photographers swarming around the entrance to the hole and the world waiting for news, the suspense drama of the year ended tragically as Loubens died (TIME, Aug. 25).

Not even that stopped the spelunkers. After burying Loubens in the chasm, they continued their explorations, found another pothole and lowered themselves through it into the lowest and biggest cave of all, a "cathedral of rock," perhaps 500 yds. long and 400 yds. wide. In a flare of magnesium, the explorers "were confronted with a panorama of rocky coagulations --slender stalactites, suspended like long wisps of straws from the majestic vaults, hanging curtains of stone, and broad, squat, dome-shaped stalagmites, looking like huge mushrooms growing on the yellowish bottom of the cave."

A mile from the end of their cable and 2,000 ft. underground,* the explorers felt the intoxicating glow of knowing that "neither paleolithic men, nor the pot-holers of today, had ever been here before us." Having gained the heart of the mountain from the top, they stood triumphant upon its base--a monumental mass of carboniferous schist. It was a moment speleologists dream about.

* The record: 2,158 ft. into the Dent de Crolles, a mountain in the western Alps, held by French Speleologist Pierre Chevalier since 1947.

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