FIFTY-TWO
THE NEXT DAY, TEAM B CAME down through the scary sump above and arrived in camp. With fresh troops, Vash and several others began the laborious job of surveying. Despite wearing dry suits, they had been exposed for many days to waterfalls and pools that had worked through the holes in their suits and the leaks in their ankle and wrist cuffs. Constantly wet, even with the warming respites in their sleeping bags, their bodies were slowly losing ground to the relentless chilling that produced a slow-motion, irreversible hypothermia. Before long, it trumped even Vash’s need for sleep. Now, more than food or rest or anything else, his body was craving warmth, just as intensely as one parched by a desert craves water.
They had completed the transition from surface dwellers to troglodytes, cut loose completely from surface norms, including circadian rhythms. On October 15, they didn’t start work until 2:30 P.M., finishing at about 9:00 P.M. Vash and most of the others spent the next day “slugging” in their sleeping bags, resting and trying to get warm. They were approaching the point of diminishing returns, which arrives sooner or later on all extreme expeditions, a time when the explorers feel like they are working harder and harder but achieving less and less. Vash captured this feeling of slow, ineluctable decline in words both disjointed by fatigue and yet strangely poetic, reminiscent of those penned by Robert Falcon Scott as he and his little party struggled across the polar wastes toward a fate they all knew could only be death:
I was thick and tired from the process of the permanent delivering from superfluous moisture—those reactions of the organism for the cold conditions were very strain. But nothing could be done.
Time, supplies, and their stamina were all running low, which was bad enough. Worse, though, was the knowledge that, regardless of what they found, the hardest part of their ordeal was still to come: getting out.
While Vash and the others were recuperating on October 16, Kasjan and Medvedeva continued their exploration of the new passage beyond the Large Fork. The next day, the two, joined by Igor Ischenko, continued working in the new section, which they named Windows. In the beginning there were dry, downward-sloping passages, so tight Kasjan imagined they might have been made by large earthworms. These slanting meanders alternated with sizable pits (one was 175 feet deep) down to 6,048 feet, where they were stopped by a squeeze not even the svelte Medvedeva could pass through. Stymied, they started climbing back, but before long Kasjan spied an opening, on the far side of a shallow pit, that he thought might go. They rappelled down into the pit, climbed up its other side, and entered the new passage. It did go; they explored it down to 6,272 feet and, with the passage still extending, decided to return to camp and come back the next day.
Vash and others with him, tapping their last reservoirs of energy, had spent twenty hours surveying and exploring in the other passage leading from the Large Fork before returning to camp. They were happy to hear the good news from Kasjan and Medvedeva. The team celebrated by drinking toasts of cognac with lemon slices. But even with the bracing spirits, they were so tired, dirty, and cold that it felt to Vash like they were “in the Dragon’s a*shole.” They now had food and fuel for just two more days, and energy that might last that long. Any breakthrough would have to happen soon. They were stretching all their reserves, internal and external, right to the breaking point, and this, they all knew, was when bad things usually started to happen.
Thus Kasjan declared that the next day, they would rest and organize their equipment for the final assault. Their “now or never” attempt would take place on October 19, when, as Vash wrote, “we’d go to the insuperable obstacle.”