Mountaineering Downwards (Time and Tide, January 2, 1954)
By Ian Fleming
British Caving: An Introduction to Speleology
Members of the Cave Research Group, Routledge and Kegan Paul. 35s.
“Down in a deep dark hole sat an old cow chewing a beanstalk.” Irreverently the dummy hexameter jingled through my head as I digested this weighty tome on a subject which should surely not be taken quite so seriously. ‘The Science of Speleology!’ The sport of exploring caves really cannot be rated a science any more than mountaineering (Montophily?) or treasure-hunting (Thesauromania?). It is true that the science of geology is involved, also physics and geophysics, biology (‘biospeleology’ to the potholers if you please!), palaeontology and so forth. But these can also be part of mountaineering and even of treasure-hunting. Somehow these underground mountaineers have been persuaded to take themselves very seriously indeed and this tome is one of the results.
I am sorry that the Reverend Cecil Cullingford, the editor, did not fight shy of the project. He is the author of that cheerful and expert little handbook Exploring Caves which deals with the sport at exactly the right level, as an entertaining pastime with undertones of romance and adventure. Now he treats us to a volume so comprehensive that the only subject connected with caves that is omitted (or avoided) is the psychology of speleologists—why people like exploring caves—which would have been far more interesting than the sections on meteorology, mammalogy and gravimetric surveying.
Personally I should guess the whole business has something to do with a return to the womb. Certainly there is a touch of infantilism involved, as one may learn from the commonsense chapter on “Caving Code and Ethics” in which the writer criticises the speleologist’s love of secrecy and the jealousy with which he keeps his caves to himself, barring and locking them from others with the result that ‘the relationship between the potholer and the ordinary country folk is now in danger’. Then:
“The manners of some of them are deplorable. At the village Saturday night dance they argue with the doorkeeper about the price of admission, or steal in when no one is looking. One party even stole in to a dance by an unattended door and were dancing in spiked boots, wearing their safety helmets!”
Stalactites are stolen from caves and gypsum flowers and cave pearls “have been filched in their hundreds from near Settle”.
But enough of deflating these excellent people. The best amongst them are incredibly brave expert mountaineers responsible for bringing to light a great deal of archaeological and cultural interest and who, in this scholarly though pompous work, remind us that our forebears lived in these caves, fighting for possession with sabre-toothed tigers, cave-lions, hippopotami, wolves, bears, rhinoceri, leopards and even mammoths. It is a thrilling and romantic sport that makes the skin crawl and the spine tingle and for those who enjoy it or who wish to become expert, and even for those who don’t know a spelunca from a hole in the ground, this book contains all the hard facts and some very beautiful photographs. I just wish that cavers wouldn’t call themselves speleologists.