FIFTY-THREE
THE EXPLORERS SPENT OCTOBER 18 AS KASJAN had directed, sewing up tattered dry suits, collecting odds and ends of food, taking photos, telling stories, eating, and sleeping. They were all aware that they could well be on the verge of making history. After a huge supper, everyone went to bed at 9:25 P.M. Maddeningly, despite his exhaustion Vash was so excited that he could not sleep that night.
He got up early: 6:05 A.M. This was it, the sharp, final point to which everything had brought them. Vash brewed up a huge pot of “fragrant, bracing, morning coffee” to jump-start their day. At 9:00 A.M. they left camp; they arrived at the Large Fork ninety minutes later, bringing along heavy bags of rope and hardware to explore any breakthroughs.
In profile on a map, the new section of cave leading downward looks something like a decrepit stairway. Vash and Kyryl Gostev set about surveying one set of passages and pits, a task made more challenging for Vash, whose diarrhea required him to make increasingly frequent “trips to the hedgehogs,” to use the quaint Ukrainian idiom for defecating in a cave. Vash’s one-piece caving dry suit made things worse.
Surveying finished, the pair climbed back up to the Large Fork, rejoined the others, and then all descended to the place where Kasjan and Medvedeva had been working. Vash perceived at once that this section was both beautiful and promising. The limestone here reminded him of the delicate hues of raspberry and lemon sorbet, its surface studded with floral formations. The pit floors were strewn with stones that looked like elaborate white pastries. He began to sense that he might be close to achieving the kind of goal that, like participation in a great battle, divides a person’s life into two distinct sections: before the event and after.
Here, too, the pitches were both wider and steeper—harbingers of depth. Presently, the entire team was gathered at the deepest point Kasjan and Medvedeva had reached. It was a small chamber, on the far side of which a steep pitch dropped off into darkness. It was eerily quiet. Kasjan was studying his altimeter intently. At some point during the last half hour, they had exceeded 2,000 meters—6,562 feet. This in itself was an epochal milestone, akin to the first ascent of an 8,000-meter peak. (That had been accomplished by the great French climber Maurice Herzog, on Annapurna, in 1950.)
As the others watched, Kasjan pulled a battered Snickers bar from one pocket, unwrapped the candy, munched some slowly, and shared the rest. I will do my best, dear son.
Then it was time. The next pitch would tell the tale. Kasjan adjusted his helmet lamps and slipped into the opening. Medvedeva followed, then Vash, then the others. They worked their way down three more vertical pitches separated by inclined passages and finally dropped into a triangular-shaped room, perhaps 15 feet on a side, with a flat, clay bottom and nondescript brown walls. Their light beams danced over floor and walls like frantic white spiders, but they could see no more windows, no more passages. This was it. The bottom of the world.
Everyone was quiet for a long time as the reality of where they were sank in. Vash, hard-pressed for words that adequately described his feelings of that moment, quoted the Russian poet Leonid Filatov:
Either the air is drunk or the hobgoblin is zealous.
Even in translation, that sentence suggests the rapture, positive at last, that Vash, Kasjan, and all of them were feeling. But they were not quite finished. In the center of the tricornered room’s clay floor there was a circular, craterlike depression about 3 feet in diameter and 2 feet deep. Down at its bottom, the hole came to a point, like the drain in a sink (which it might well have been at one time), and in that spot was lodged a small white rock. Vash and the others leaned over the hole in Krubera’s floor as Yury Kasjan used his altimeter to calculate the depth of that ultimate white rock. He straightened up, waited a moment, and announced, “Two thousand and eighty meters.” The assembled team erupted with cheers.
These were educated, sophisticated scientists and explorers. They knew that they were experiencing one of the signal moments of history, the last link in a long, hallowed chain created by Peary at the North Pole, Amundsen at the South, Hillary and Norgay on Everest, Piccard and Walsh in the Challenger Deep, and many other, earlier greats who had paved the way for modern explorers. Kasjan and his people knew: they had just made the last great terrestrial discovery.
They hugged, cried, laughed, danced. It was, for Kasjan, as it would be for Klimchouk when he learned the news soon after, the brightest moment of a very eventful life. He was overcome by a rush of emotion—they all were. There were no dry eyes in that crowd. They shed tears, hugged, laughed, took pictures. Having made the discovery of a lifetime, they were feeling once-in-a-lifetime emotions that words struggle to capture. But think of the biggest joy you have ever felt and square it.
They were certainly feeling something else, as well. If you read the memoirs of great discoverers like those noted above, you know that a recurring theme is that, at their ultimate moments, those explorers were overjoyed but also exhausted. So were the members of Yury Kasjan’s team, and the hardest part of their expedition remained undone.
No one wanted to leave, but they could not stay forever. Someone made a move toward the ascent passage.
Wait, Kasjan said. We have something still to do.
One final task remained. Discoverers in caves are privileged to name their new finds. It did not take long to reach consensus about the bottom of the world. They knew where they were, and how very long it had taken to get there, and how many other brave explorers had made possible this final act of a centuries-old drama.
They gave the place a name that, they hoped, captured all those things: Game Over.