Adventure into Darkness

EXPLORING AMERICAN CAVES (280 pp.) -Franklin Folsom -Crown ($5).

The cave was man's first natural home: some atomic-age pundits fear that it may also be his last. Oddly, however, though man has probed earth's atmosphere, mapped its surface, scaled its highest peaks and scraped its ocean bottoms, he has largely neglected the myriad subterranean realms. In alpine cliche, a mountain is climbed "because it is there." The spelunker's incentive is that a cave is never even "there" until it is found and its depths are plumbed and proved. Mountaineering has its classic literature -Annapurna, The White Tower, etc. -but caves, mysterious, magnificent and challenging as mountains, still await their authors. Most Americans best know a cave as the sort of Stygian hole where Mark Twain marooned Becky Thatcher and Tom Sawyer. The society of the cave-wise in the U.S. contains a handful of scientists and spelunkers, most of them active in the National Speleological Society, whose 1,200-odd members are organized in 40 U.S. "Grottoes."

Last Frontier? Poet-Novelist Franklin Folsom, a Rhodes scholar and onetime lettuce packer, may be just the agent to swell that number. He has illuminated his gloomy subject with literary style, and Exploring American Caves -with its scores of enchanting photographs and its bold plunge into virtually virgin writing territory -may prove to be classic cave literature. "Caves," proclaims Spelunker Folsom, "are, in a sense, the last frontier. [Those] who explore the underground night have yet to reach the end of even the best-known caverns in this country."

The permanent night underground is not for sissies, as many a bruised alpinist knows after haughtily trying subterranean slumming. The most rugged U.S. cave, West Virginia's hellish Schoolhouse -featuring such obstacles as "bottomless" (down to 70 ft.) fissures and sheer-rock faces that long defied human spiders, 180-ft. dropoffs past receding walls in thin air -can be negotiated by the most skilled mountaineers in eight to ten hours, round trip. As the bat flies, Schoolhouse is a mere 1,600 ft. long, but the rate of travel for the best spelunkers is less than 7 ft. a minute.

A different challenge is presented by Arizona's Colossal Cave. In 1922 four explorers, bearing packs averaging 76 Ibs. apiece, took six days and seven nights to plod through an estimated 39 miles of labyrinth. They ran out of supplies, but did not reach the end of the main passageway. Nor has anyone reached it since.

Some caves are moneymaking sites for the individuals or government agencies that happen to own them. Otherwise, are caves good for anything? Some have been sources of saltpeter for munitions (Kentucky's Mammoth); others provide guano fertilizer from bat droppings (100,000 tons still lie in New Mexico's Carlsbad), cool storage for beer and cheese, ready-made railroad tunnels (for the Southern Railway in Virginia), chicken pens with below hen-killing summer temperatures, cesspools for at least five Pennsylvania towns, factories for moonshiners and counterfeiters, prisons (Marvel Cave, Mo.), natural air conditioning for surface buildings. Kentucky's Mammoth even served as a TB sanatorium for a time in the 1840s (one patient died; the others got sicker).

Greatest Mystery? The mysteries posed by U.S. caves alone are enough to tweak the curiosity of any red-blooded sleuth with a weakness for natural history. Is there one vast water-filled cavern system that arcs from Kentucky to Missouri under the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers? (The presence of one distinct species of blind fish in widely dispersed caves in the region implies such a linkage.) Why is Texas' Kiser Cave full of carbon dioxide? (Three airmen, equipped with oxygen tanks, almost died trying in vain to find the answer.) Do cave-dwelling bats have a burial ground to which they fly when feeling ready for death? (As many as 30 million bats live in a single cave, but few dead bats are ever found.)

Spelunkers, outfitted with mountaineering and diving equipment, delving ever deeper into the earth (unofficial world-record descent: a depth of 3,232 ft. into France's Gouffre Berger cave near Grenoble), are pushing back the last frontier. But fast as they push, the awesome unknown seems to recede before them. What is known about caves bows before the murk that is not known about them.

"The most obvious and provocative speleological problem," writes Caveman Folsom, "is this: where, exactly, are all the thousands of caves that surely exist but whose whereabouts are not yet known?"

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