ELEVEN
A YEAR PASSED. STONE WORKED ON his rebreather, making slow, steady improvements. Vesely, Farr, and others interested in Cheve waited out Oaxaca’s rainy season, during which flooding made the caves lethal. In March 1989, Vesely and Farr co-led another Cheve expedition with a friend and top caver named Don Coons. Bill Stone once again came along as a team member, accompanied by Pat, for whom this would be the last big expedition. It would last six weeks and involve an initial group of twenty-three. But even before the first rope was rigged, a new problem arose: local inhabitants suspected that the explorers were pirating gold from the cave.
In the past, villagers had vandalized vehicles, threatened cavers with machetes, stolen equipment—and worse. In 1968, angry Mazatec Indians nearly killed a female caver named Meri Fish. She was about 175 feet above the cave floor, but still far below the mouth of a nearby cave called La Grieta, when machete-wielding locals chopped her rope while others held her horrified husband at bay on the surface. She had just climbed past a small ledge, which, miraculously, arrested her fall after a few feet. Seconds earlier, or later, and she would have fallen to a bad death on the rocks below.
Years had passed without such incidents, so at first the cavers were inclined to dismiss local grumblings. Though he was not the expedition’s titular leader, Bill Stone stepped to the fore and defused the situation by rigging up a screen in the center of the closest village and presenting a slide show about Cheve. He passed around copies of a handout he had written in Spanish that explained what the expedition was doing. They were scientists, he said, and explorers, too, whose sole interest was finding out how deep this cave was. Their ultimate goal, he went on, was to locate the deepest cave on earth, and this one was becoming a candidate for that honor. Again and again, Stone reiterated that their work most assuredly did not include smuggling gold out of the cave.
What probably sealed the deal was a personal Cheve tour, guided by Bill Stone, for local elders. They accepted, though perhaps warily, given their people’s ancient conception of caves, but in any case not really understanding what they were in for. He did not have to take them very far before, awestruck and intimidated, they thanked him lavishly and said it would be fine to go back now. Stone’s diplomacy quieted the locals’ fears for the time being.
After a few initial forays, single-day round-trips soon became impossible, so the team quickly occupied Camp 2, deep in Cheve. In a few ways, camping in a supercave was like doing so above ground. But there were far more differences than similarities, and one of the biggest was that in the cave, it was always absolutely dark. The cavers’ eyes would never adjust because there was not a single lumen of light to stimulate their rods and cones. Thus every step taken, every knot tied and soup bowl filled and latrine used and map read required the circle of light from a headlamp or flashlight.
Prolonged, absolute darkness has profound effects on the human body and mind. For one thing, it disrupts the normal circadian rhythms. If they do not use clocks and alarms, cavers on extended stays underground find that their sleep-wake cycles elongate. They may work twenty-four hours at a stretch and then sleep almost as long. Absolute dark can also induce auditory and visual hallucinations, and it weakens the immune system.
Scientists have measured all those effects. Others are also powerful but harder to quantify. For example, darkness is to caving as water is to diving and air is to flying, a medium, in other words, that does more than any other aspect of the environment to shape your experience. Cave darkness feels like water on a dive or air on a flight, where air is your means of support, invisible but essential. It has weight and presence, life, a character all its own. Water and air will kill you quickly if you violate your special relationship with them. Darkness can kill just as quickly—or, perhaps worse, much more slowly.
It is one thing to experience absolute darkness for an hour or even a few days. It is another to live in it for weeks on end. The great English polar explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard endured months of darkness in Antarctica during the winter of 1911–12. In such darkness, he later wrote in his classic of exploration, The Worst Journey in the World, Nature “loses much of her healing power when she cannot be seen, but only felt.”
We have a special relationship with light; sight is by far our dominant sense. Similarly, we have an equally special, but very different, relationship with its absence. We fear and loathe it. We’ve been afraid of the dark for millions of years. Perhaps it was even our First Fear, one that, to survive, our proto-human brains installed as instinct. We have all felt that spark of panic in a strange, dark cellar, or in the house when lights go out, or in a pitch-black parking lot very late at night.
ON ARRIVING IN CAMP 2, EACH person unrolled a foam pad and a sleeping bag. The caver slept here and moved on, but the pad and bag did not, remaining in place to be used over and over, for the duration of the expedition, by others passing through the camp. The navy does something like this on ships to save space and calls it “hot bunking,” so cavers call it “hot bagging.” (Some bags got hotter than others.) The best spots were level, in soft sand, and close to water that was running but quiet.
Given the continual flows of water and air through them, supercaves are always noisy. In places, some can sound like 747 engines. One abuse banned by the Geneva Conventions is torture by loud, ceaseless noise, which is exactly what occupants endure day and night in the noisiest cave camps. The worst spots of all were in cacophonous places where the roar was bad and the sleeping was worse, the only available spaces being sloping ledges or vertical walls. There, like climbers on Half Dome or El Capitan, cavers had to fold themselves into hammocks hung from bolts in the rock walls. Somewhere between the two locale extremes came breakdown campsites that had no level floor and offered only spaces between or on top of boulders. Sleeping in those could be like folding yourself around a spare tire in the trunk of a car.
Once sleeping claims were staked out, the team set up its kitchen. Cooking was done on ultralight mountaineering stoves that used butane canisters rather than the more common Coleman stove fuel, also called white gas, which was only slightly less volatile than nitroglycerin. White gas explosions were bad in any context, but suffering one six miles underground, where the possibility of rescue was nil, would have been catastrophic.
Shaving weight, with the cavers, was something of a religion. Many cut labels off tea bags and handles off toothbrushes, and took the round cardboard tubes out of toilet paper rolls. It was not uncommon for a team to use only one pot, one bowl, and one big spoon. When a meal was ready (some kind of hot cereal for breakfast, dehydrated or treeze–dried glop for dinner), they dined like ancient Vikings, spoon and bowl passing from person to person until both were licked shiny clean.
For elimination, campsites featured latrine pits. Protocol required that both functions be performed only at the latrine, which would be filled in and covered at the expedition’s end (or, if filled to the top, covered over and replaced by a new one). But if a caver awakened from deep sleep and happened to be far from the latrine, or if reaching it required walking through a dangerous rock field, relief might be afforded by a plastic “pee bottle” (which could produce very nasty unintended consequences, as Bill Stone discovered later in Cheve) or just a nearby crack. Human nature being what it was, the longer an expedition lasted, the looser “latrine discipline” tended to become, so that by the end of some longer ones, cavers moved around in camp as though tiptoeing through a roomful of snakes. Fungus growing on spilled food called for added caution.
There was yet another important difference between surface and subterranean camping. Above, campers had sunlight by day and light from fires or electric devices at night. In the pre-LED days, incandescent bulbs consumed much more battery power. To conserve their batteries, cavers often turned their lights off unless working or traveling. Thus in camp, many hours might pass in absolute darkness. Cavers spoke to the sound of each other’s voices rather than to faces. They “saw” the same false-image flashes and glows we perceive when our eyes are closed, but they could not interrupt the process by opening their eyes. Hours of this can induce anxiety and hallucinations.
Not the most romantic environment imaginable, all things considered, but teammates having sex was not unheard of in expeditionary caving. Literally not unheard, too, in fact, because except in camps that were thunderous with water or wind noise, concealing the sounds of love on the rocks was virtually impossible, given the noisy plastic groundsheets cavers placed beneath their sleeping bags.
FOR ALL THE WORK REQUIRED TO establish it, Camp 2 was just a way station, of course, and not far beyond it loomed their immediate objective: the solid wall of breakdown that had stopped them the previous year. Bill Farr, wiry and tenacious, led a team that discovered a way through the rock pile, unlocking the rest of Cheve. This was far harder than that short phrase, “discovered a way through the rock pile,” made it sound.
Crawling into and through such a huge breakdown pile was, as a veteran caver named Dave Phillips once observed, like being an ant in a jar of marbles. Even that description doesn’t really do the experience justice, though, because marbles are packed tight in a jar. Boulders in breakdown piles are not always packed tight. They could have been thousands of delicately balanced tons of rubble needing only one good nudge to let loose. Really, working breakdown of that magnitude was like free-soloing in rock climbing. In both, the price of failure was final and absolute. Come off the wall or shove the wrong rock and you die. Splat. Squish. At least in climbing, the cracks and flakes and smooth, no-holds wall were visible. In breakdown, any rock could be the one that unlocked the avalanche.
Finding a crevice through which he could feel some airflow, Farr moved enough rocks to squeeze his body farther in. Then, crawling and worming and contorting, he kept forcing his way forward, wriggling through places big enough to admit his body and moving rocks to enlarge too tight squeezes. Eventually, he came out on the other side.
Toward the end of the expedition, Carol Vesely, Bill Stone, and an Aussie caver named Rolf Adams did a thirty-hour push deeper than anyone had gone, only to be blocked by another impassable breakdown pile.
“Well, that’s it for this trip,” Stone said, bitterly disappointed. Seeing no way to go forward, he turned around. Diving through sumps was one thing. Excavating rock, without bulldozers, was another. Cheve, it appeared, was just another vast waste of time.