5 Explorers Near Goal 1,900 ft. Under Pyrenees ( Sunday Times , August 16, 1953)
From Ian Fleming
Pierre St. Martin, Saturday.
The Pyrenees are riddled with caves. So are all those counties of France, Correze, Vienne, Dordogne and the rest, that lie between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Caves that first animals lived in, then men. Caves, like those of Lascaux, that were the private cathedrals or art galleries of man 20,000 years ago. In them, deep underground by the light of bonfires, they painted like Picasso, and then repainted and engraved in the rocks, still through the centuries like Picasso.
And other caves, like some that Norbert Casteret has found, where the animals went to die. Prehistoric cemeteries for bisons and stags and bears. And still other caves, in which today the shepherds of the Pyrenees preserve their meat through the summer. Caves used by bandits and by British soldiers and airmen escaping during the war. Caves like the great Cave of Pierre Saint Martin, which was first explored last year and which contains nothing of interest but millions of gallons of water, running at a speed of a metre a second, that may soon give electricity to an area of France as big as Kent.
Desolate Site
I am writing this at the opening of this gigantic cave, 6,000 feet up among the lower peaks of the Pyrenees. The shaft goes down into the side of a mile-wide stony amphitheatre that might have been blasted by an atom bomb. It is a desolate place, grey and harsh, with only a few stunted pines to give shade. At the side of the shaft there is the winch covered by a tent and the telephone line to men who are down there now. Two members of the expedition are on watch.
For hours and even days nothing happens, and then the winch starts to whine and more than one hour later a man in a miner’s white steel helmet is helped out of the top of the shaft, taken out of his harness and’ stripped of his dripping overalls.
The people who explore caves are called speleologists, but, in fact, they are adventurers pure and simple. They like going deep into the earth in the same way that Hillary likes climbing a mountain, or Thor Heyerdahl likes drifting across the Pacific on a raft.
This cave at Pierre Saint Martin was discovered in 1950 by a speleologist named Lepineux who saw a jackdaw fly out of a lagged hole in the rock. He knew that Jackdaws nest only where there is a long drop below. Lepineux climbed down the hole and enlarged it. He threw a stone down it and could not hear the fall.
Requiem for Loubens
In 1952 a team consisting of the greatest speleologists in France made the first exploration . One of them. Marcel Loubens, was killed when his harness broke on the great vertical shaft 1,000 feet deep, down which he was being lowered on a quarter-inch steel cable. This morning I attended a Requiem Mass held at the opening of the cave on the anniversary of his death.
Before Loubens was killed the team had mapped the series of caverns that are illustrated above. This year most of the same team is present. If there is a leader it is Norbert Casteret, who, I suppose, is the greatest speleologist in the world. He was born and still lives about 20 miles from here, and has spent his whole life exploring the caves of the Pyrenees.
He has discovered the oldest statuary in the world. He has been down the deepest abyss in France and has also altered the map of south-west Europe by discovering the true source of the River Garonne. His wonderful book Ten Years Under the Earth was “crowned” by the French Academy.
This year the French Government has taken a hand. The French Army carried out a parachute drop last week of all the provisions for the expedition. They dropped ten tons of heavy equipment against the side of the mountain. Nothing was damaged and everything is working perfectly.
Reservoir of Power
So far the team has penetrated nearly two miles along the slowly descending tunnel towards the Kakouetta Gorge. There are about 1 1/2 miles still to go before the hydro-electric engineers attached to the expedition learn where they can sink a shaft to bring the huge reservoir of hydro-electric power down into the valley with a sufficient drop behind it. Twelve hundred feet below me as I write, in a temperature of three degrees centigrade, there is the base camp, with tents, heating devices and special food.
Down there at this moment are five men, including Lepineux, who first discovered the cave and has now been down for three days. They have just broken contact with the telephone and will not be heard again for 24 hours, during which time they may have learned the final course of the underground river, and, incidentally, may have broken the world record for the lowest descent into a natural cave. The record now stands at 2,000 feet. They are estimated to be 100 feet above this at the moment.
And I sit here, watching the black mouth of the cave—and vaguely mistrusting it and the validity of the whole enterprise—and the thin life-line that winds on the winch; and one hopes that the living men will come out safely and leave their dead comrade, Marcel Loubens, where he is and would wish to be with the epitaph of Charles Cotton, the friend of Izaak Walton, who wrote:
O my beloved caves!
From dogstar’s heat
And all anxieties my safe retreat!
What safety, privacy, what true delight
In the artificial night
Your gloomy entrails make,
Have I taken, do I take.
As I came down the mountain this evening a speleologist of a rival group was carried past me on a stretcher. His skull was broken. I hope I shall be able to summon more enthusiasm for this sport before the expedition closes down next Thursday.