(2/2011) Book Review: Blind Descent By James M. Tabor

The team of experienced cavers reached the bottom of Krubera’s Cave’s floor and sat “in the center of the tricorner room’s clay floor there was a circular, crater-like 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.” With their altimeter they determined that the white rock was at a depth of 2,080 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, Hilary and Norgay on Everest, Piccard and Walsh in Challenger Deep, and many other, earlier greats who had paved the way for modern explorers…they had just made the last great terrestrial discovery.”

These cavers had won a race to find the deepest hole on all the world’s continents. They had been exploring Krubera Cave while another competing team had been exploring the depths of Cheve Cave in southern Mexico. Both these teams of devoted scientists had spent years trying to find the deepest point of dry land on the planet. There may be deeper caves in the trenches of the oceans, but men will probably never personally visit them. The water pressure would crush all life out of them.

Bill Stone and Alexander Kimchouk were very much alike and neither knew whether their team or others would win the unofficial race to map the world’s deepest caves. Assuming both teams of scientists and explorers were equally talented and devoted to their task, the team that would win the race was already decided. The deepest cave would be the deepest cave. The explorers had no way of knowing in advance which cave to choose for their attempt for a place in the history of exploration. Only the gods of caves knew which cavern was the deepest.

Men have always sought to explore the remotest parts of their world. Cavers are no different and for the elites of these adventurers into the darkness and dampness of the subterranean world, this dangerous avocation can become a compulsion.

Of the two rival groups of cavers described in this excellent book, there was almost nothing that would halt their search for the deepest hole on the planet.

In order to discover which team of explorers won this race and to read in detail about both their life and death plunges into the Jules Vern’s Journey to the Center of the Earth-like trek, climb, crawl, tight squeezes and scuba diving inside the intestines of the planet, the reader of this review will have to read this excellent real-life adventure book. Like the fictional Star Ship captains of the future, these adventurers dreamed of going where no human had been before—to discover what no human had ever seen. Their eyes however were fixed on the inner world of Planet Earth and not on the stars above.

Once this achievement was accomplished, the survivors of both cave explorations have continued on their professional careers.

While still searching for an even deeper cave, engineer Bill Stone, leader of one of the cave exploring teams has continued to pursue another of his dreams. He is “building a NASA-funded interplanetary robot named Endurance. If all goes according to plan, sometime in the next decade Endurance will be flown to Jupiter’s moon Europa, where it will search for water. Before that, though, Stone himself may go to our own moon. He has vowed, publicly, to establish the first commercial mining operations there by 2017.”

By the way, the official geographic name of the point officially designated, as “bottom of the world” is “Game Over.”

James R. Holland is a film editor, producer, and author–most recently of Adventure Photographer (A Bit of Boston Books/ 2009).  He reviews movies exclusively for Basil & Spice.  Visit James R. Holland’s Writer’s Page.

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