#BRITISH DIVER LOST CAVES CRACKED#

All the pleasant places had already been found. The truth is they had nowhere better to go. It took three days to get back from the moon. “There is no rescue, period.” To climb straight back to the surface, without stopping to rig ropes and phone wire, would take them four days. “You don’t want to be there when that happens,” Stone said. When the heavy rain began to fall, it would flood this cave completely, trickling down from all over the mountain, gathering in ever-widening branches, dislodging boulders and carving new tunnels till it poured from the mountain into the Santo Domingo River. Gala had seen traces of its passage on the way down: old ropes shredded to fibre, phone lines stripped of insulation. It might offer swift passage to the next shaft or lead into an endless, mud-dimmed labyrinth. The water here was between fifty and sixty degrees-cold enough to chill you within minutes-and Gala had no idea where the pool would lead.

#BRITISH DIVER LOST CAVES CRACKED#

Many of the parts had been cracked or contaminated on the way down, so the two men took their time, cleaning each piece and cannibalizing components from an extra kit, knowing that they’d soon have no time to spare. They’d spent the past two days on a platform suspended above another sump, rebuilding their gear. When the call to base camp was over, Gala hiked to the edge of the pool with his partner, the British cave diver Phil Short, and they put on their scuba rebreathers, masks, and fins. When Western cavers first discovered the system, in 1986, they found some delicate white bones beneath a stone slab near the entrance: the remains of children probably sacrificed there hundreds of years ago by the Cuicatec people. They told stories of a malignant spirit that wandered Chevé’s tunnels, its feet pointing backward as it walked. The local villagers had learned to steer clear of such places. On his first trip to Mexico, in 2001, Gala nearly died of histoplasmosis, a fungal infection acquired from the bat guano that lined the upper reaches of a nearby cave. Its tunnels lie along an uneasy fault line in the Sierra de Juárez mountains and seethe with more than seven feet of rain a year. They take in organic matter and digest it, flushing it slowly through their systems. They have bloodstreams and respiratory systems, infections and infestations. Then again Chevé was more than usually unnerving.Ĭaves are like living organisms, James Tabor wrote in “Blind Descent,” a book on Bill Stone’s earlier expeditions. In the off-season, he was a technician on a Norwegian oil platform, dangling high above the North Sea to weld joints and replace rivets. Now thirty-eight, he had explored caves throughout Europe and Ukraine, Hawaii, Central America, and New Guinea.

When he was seventeen, he and another caver became the first people to climb, from top to bottom, what was then the world’s deepest cave, the Réseau Jean Bernard, in the French Alps. A baby-faced Pole of unremarkable physique-more plumber than mountaineer-he discovered caving as a young man in the Tatra Mountains, when they were one of the few places he could escape the strictures of Communism.

Gala had been this deep in the cave once before, in 2009, but never beyond the pool. Do your best, but don’t do anything radical. Then the voice of Bill Stone, the leader of the expedition, broke over the line.

He asked his seven-year-old, Zuzia, how she liked the Pippi Longstocking book she’d been reading, and wondered what the weather was like on the surface. Gala’s voice fell soft and muffled in the mountain’s belly, husky with fatigue. There, in a cloud forest in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, lay the staging area for an attempt to map the deepest cave in the world-a kind of Everest expedition turned upside down. It wound its way through sump and tunnel, up the stair-step passages of the Chevé system to a ragged cleft in a hillside seven thousand feet above sea level. Over.” His voice travelled from the handset to a Teflon-coated wire that he had strung along the wall. “Base camp, base camp, base camp,” he said. It was his last chance to hear his wife and daughter’s voices before the cave swallowed him up. He felt the weight of the mountain above him-a mile of solid rock-and wondered if he’d ever find his way back again. Now he stood at the shore of a small, dark pool under a dome of sulfurous flowstone. He’d spidered down waterfalls, inched along crumbling ledges, and bellied through tunnels so tight that his back touched the roof with every breath. He’d travelled more than three miles through the earth by then, over stalagmites and boulder fields, cave-ins and vaulting galleries. On his thirteenth day underground, when he’d come to the edge of the known world and was preparing to pass beyond it, Marcin Gala placed a call to the surface.

British diver lost caves