TWELVE
“NOT SO FAST,” CAROL VESELY COUNTERED. She was far from ready to give up on Cheve. As Stone and Adams looked on, astonished, she miraculously transported herself through a crack they thought impassable. It was like watching one of those superhero movies where Plastic Man oozes under a locked door and opens it from the other side. With her guidance, Stone and Adams removed a few key rocks, joined her, and they kept on going. It took a lot to impress Bill Stone, but that did, and not only because the new passage connected Cheve with another important cave in the area called Puente. Vesely never bragged about the feat, never tried to lord it over Stone or other cavers, and he respected her almost as much for that as for the breakthrough itself.
During the next push, a team of four, which included Bill Stone, pressed on for another half mile or so, descending through a tunnel 35 feet wide by almost 70 feet high. After that half mile, though, they encountered another, even bigger breakdown pile, which stretched from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. Daunted, the team retreated, then established Camp 3, at 4,078 vertical feet, 4 linear miles, and ninety rappels from the entrance.
Not Bill Farr, though. He had not come this far to be stopped by a lousy pile of breakdown, no matter how big. This one would turn out to be 160 feet long, but Farr had no way of knowing that when he started worming and squirming his way into it. The thing could have been a mile long, for all he knew. But he also knew that there had to be a way through—there was always a way through.
Farr finally dragged himself out on the other side, looking like a beleaguered caterpillar struggling from a tenacious cocoon—face and hands skinned, arms and legs bruised, caving suit ripped. But what he found beyond that breakdown was so fantastic that it erased both pain and fatigue. Only one name fit: Through the Looking Glass. He stood before the largest passage yet in a cave of Brobdingnagian proportions. This one was 175 feet wide, ran on for almost 1,000 feet, narrowing somewhat for the last 200 yards, and was 175 feet high at its largest point.
Such vast space, so deep, challenges the imagination. Down deep in caves, Bizarro World reversals of many kinds exist. An obvious one is that darkness prevails rather than light. Another is that caves turn the relationship between mass and space on its head. Up top, for example, masses interrupt space—Mount Everest, the Great Pyramid, an aircraft carrier. Down under, though, it is just the opposite—mass is interrupted by space, and particularly by monstrous voids like this one.
Powerful signs—increasing water volume, the gigantic passages, strong wind—suggested that Cheve could take them closer to the center of the earth than humans had ever been in a cave. But caves, like appearances, are notorious for deception. Just a few hundred yards farther on, another massive boulder choke blocked the way. Not even Bill Farr’s persistence could crack that one. The expedition was finished. Cheve was now 10.1 miles long, in terms of total mapped passages, and 4,078 feet deep, the second-deepest cave in Mexico but still far from the deepest on earth. At that time, a 5,354-foot Austrian cave called Lamprechtsofen held the record.
ANOTHER EXPEDITION THAT INCLUDED STONE, FARR, Vesely, and other world-class cavers returned in 1990. They succeeded in passing the massive boulder choke, bypassed a new sump, and explored a half mile of stream passage descending along a series of steps and pools. Eventually, gathering strength, the stream became a 100-foot waterfall whose name, Nightmare Falls, reflected its character. The cave descended less steeply, the stream flowing down and through a series of pools and drops so lovely the cavers called them Wet Dreams. At that section’s end the stream flowed into a deep, cobalt-blue lake and, try as they might, no one could find a way past it. Someone would have to dive that lake, and that would have to wait for another year, which was not altogether a bad thing. Stone’s rebreather, still not finished, might be ready in twelve months. If so, it would usher in an entirely new era of cave exploration. But that, he knew, given its current state of development, was a big if.
That same year produced a separate, critical discovery. Expedition member Jim Smith (he of the “cheap and deep” burial joke) poured about fifteen pounds of nontoxic green dye into the stream that flowed into Cheve’s gigantic entrance. Two days later, cavers way down at Camp 3 saw the dye flowing through. Six days after that, green dye flowed into the Santo Domingo River, 11 miles distant and more than 8,000 feet below the cave entrance. Don Coons was down there when the dye came through, turning the entire resurgent river chartreuse. When Coons walked back into base camp in Llano Cheve sometime later, Smith called out, “Did you see any evidence of the dye trace?”
Coons pulled out a toothbrush dyed bright green. “Looked like that for three days,” he crowed. “That good enough for you?”
Stone was ecstatic when he heard. Because water flowed from Cheve’s top to its bottom, there had to be continuing, unblocked passage all the way down to the river. What’s more, an eight-day passage was extremely fast for such a long horizontal distance between cave mouth and resurgence. That might have happened because the water was flowing through channels big enough for people, as well. (Or it could have flowed through myriad small ones, but only someone given to the half-empty-glass worldview would interpret it that way.)
Many more people would now allow that yes, Cheve really just might become the deepest cave on earth. For Bill Stone, there had never been much question, but the dye trace confirmed that. Now they would have to get humans down where the green dye flowed, but that would not begin until yet another year passed.