Caves of Adventure: Explorers Find a New Wonder of the World
(Sunday Times, August 23, 1953)
Greatest Cavern with Waterfall and Underground River
From Ian Fleming
PIERRE SAINT MARTIN (Pyrenees).
The 1953 expedition into the great caves of Pierre Saint Martin is over, without accident and with results which, in the realm of speleology, are sensational.
Now that everyone is back in the valley and the mule trains are coming down the mountain with the heavy gear, there is not an individual connected with the expedition who is not profoundly relieved. Since I reported last week there has been a series of alarms.
A majestic thunderstorm hit the central Pyrenees, washed away a small village and killed six of the inhabitants. Lightning is attracted by caves, particularly a cave into which two thousand feet of cable descends. But it never struck.
Communications broke down several times. A member of one of the relief teams (not a Frenchman) had a mild attack of claustrophobia, and had to be brought to the surface. Finally, there was difficulty in bringing out the last man. The unweighted cable would not go down the shaft. Three men had to be lashed at intervals down the face of the shaft to help the end of the cable round the corners.
Deepest Descent
But now all is well, and here are the results given to me in an exclusive interview by the leaders of the expedition: Robert Levi, the organiser, Norbert Casteret, the chief explorer, and Lepineux, the great speleologist who discovered the cave.
The record for the deepest descent into a natural cave has been handsomely beaten at 728 metres. It was previously held by the Italian Capabranca with a 632 metres’ descent into the Preta cave—the 658 metres’ descent of Chevalier into the Chartreuse massif is held not to qualify, since several intermediate lateral exits were available (of course there is the old Everest trouble about which member of the expedition actually broke the record. “It was the team,” is the official and acceptable verdict).
Four more huge chambers were discovered, the last of them far greater even than the Marcel Loubens Cave. This colossal cave is judged by Casteret to be the greatest enclosed cavern so far discovered in the world. It is certainly the deepest. It has been christened the Verna Cave, after the Verna group of speleologists from Lyons (wrongly described as scouts) who have played a great part in the whole saga.
The Great Cave
In Casteret’s opinion, which will be widely respected, the Verna Cave is undoubtedly one of the wonders of the world. It is domed. The walls and floor are straight and smooth, but the floor is encumbered here and there by uneasily balanced towers of stone blocks, each as big as a cottage, which soar up into the darkness. Through the floor runs the great black river, swift and deep and silent. The air is pure and damp, with a temperature of four degrees centigrade. The water temperature is three degrees centigrade and it runs at half a cubic metre per second.
One or two tiny coleoptera, described to me as “aphenops” were found, and a centipede, dead white and almost transparent. These were the only living organisms found in the course of the expedition.
Details, distances and dimensions are not yet available. Last year, apparently, many errors were made in the estimates, and these will have to be corrected before the official figures of the exploration to date can be made known, but it seems that about a mile and a half of fresh ground was covered, as the result of which much of the underground picture as portrayed in last Sunday’s map is changed. This map was adapted from the sketch—now out of date—in Tazieff’s Caves of Adventure (published by Hamish Hamilton).
In particular what was thought to be a long tunnel, extending in an easy slope from the Loubens Cave, turns out to be the new series of four chambers mentioned above, so that the whole underground picture looks like a string of seven different sized sausages joined together by varying lengths of tunnel which is about four times the circumference of the London Tube.
All the chambers and tunnels are encumbered by fallen rock that rendered progress most difficult and exhausting: “The whole affair was very dangerous,” Casteret told me. Before the last great cave there was a beautiful waterfall with a drop of 20 metres which had to be descended, and then the river ran on over pebbles and stones until, at the end of the last cave, it disappeared through broken rock in. the floor.
A Failure?
Thus hydro-electrically the expedition seems to have been a failure, and although this is denied by the explorers, I believe it to be the opinion of the experts. But a local group of speleologists from Pau are dynamiting a blow-hole further down the mountain, known as the “Trou du Vent,” which, it is thought, may lead towards a resurgence of the underground river. The wind comes howling up from the earth out of this hole, and there is a distant roar of great waters.
For the rest, the equipment worked perfectly and the health of the explorers was excellent, thanks to the heating of the tents at night by a new system described to me as “petrol-catalysis” which allows the men to breathe dry air. Sleep, appetite and digestion were normal. No stimulant drugs were used, and the food consumed was unusual only in its high sugar and fat content. The winch worked perfectly.
A full length 35 millimetre film with some sound was made by Hertot, the photographer of Commandant Cousteau, using acetylene torches and magnesium flares for lighting. The painful arguments about the disposal of the body of Marcel Loubens ended with the agreement of the family to allow his body to remain inside the mountain. It may not be buried or cremated. It must remain under its pile of boulders, perfectly preserved in this frigid air, surmounted by the disintegrating cross of phosphorescent paper that had long since ceased to shine and the epitaph cut into the rock face. “Ici Marcel Loubens a vecu les derniers jours de sa vie courageuse”—a perpetual warning to the explorers who go down the jagged shaft that rock is stronger than man.
Horror of the Depths
It was the oppression of this knowledge, the awareness of the puny bodies enclosed in the mammoth viscera of this mountain that awoke in most of us, as we sat comfortably above on the surface of the world in the bright light among the Alpine flowers, a deep loathing for this great cave. And it is only now, when all have been spared and when so much has been achieved, that we can grudgingly admit that this most hazardous expedition was justified. But while these men were down in the cruel bellv of the mountain—some of them not more than holiday pot-holers—there were desperate misgivings which spread throughout France, and I for one can testify that I had not witnessed such a nightmarish piece of human endeavour since the string-and-stickfast days at the beginning of the war.
But now it is over and these valiant and foolhardy men have been preserved. Casteret tells me he will certainly coma back next year, and so, I expect, will many of the others. Meanwhile the rocks will grind and shift in the mountains, and the winter snows will swell the great river underground. And in the awesome Verna Cavern there will be no one to care, least of all the questing sightless centipedes, that this gloomy antechamber of Hell has just been included among the natural wonders of the world.