UNDERGROUND STREAM EXPLORER

Evening Star, Issue 23370, 13 September 1939, Page 10

UNDERGROUND STREAM EXPLORER

NAKED, FACING MANY DANGERS M. Norbert Casteret has more than one title to' lasting fame says ‘ The Times,’ London, reviewing the French author’s latest book, ‘ Ten Years Underground,’ translated by Barrows Hussey. Archaeologists will know him best as the discoverer of the cave, or rather river-gallery, of Montespan, with its clay figures of a bear and two lions that a Magdalenian magician has doomed by many thrusts of a javelin. Apart from the somewhat similar sanctuary of Tuc d’Audoubert, with its male and female bisons suggestive of a fertility ceremony, there is nothing in Europe so eloquent of the primitive —the truly, chronologically, primitive—life of the human spirit, Moreover, not .oply the end achieved, but the means of. its attainment deserve our wonder, seeing that the explorer, alone and naked, had to face an underground river which in more than one place “ siphoned ” —that is, washed the very ceiling of its rocky tunnel. Indeed, subterranean adventure, as this book testifies ,on every page, offers thrills and shivers-—often all too literal shivers—such as the mere superficies of the globe can scarcely match.

Now Ingleborough or the Mendips can enable the _ British speleologist to taste these heroic joys to the full. But an expert “ Pyreneist,” such as M. Casteret, has tackled abysses four or five times as deep as anything in England; and, though the risks may not bo proportionately greater, there are special inconveniences—sudden floodings on a huge scale, pockets of foul air, perhaps a brown bear and certainly vast colonies of bats—-that are faithfully, if always modestly, dealt with in this veritable epic of Hades. France mmht have suffered the headwaters or the Garonne to be fatally tapped by Spain had not M. Casteret traced its ultimate source to the Trou du Toro at the foot of the Maladetta in the Spanish Val d’Aran. With the help of 60 kilograms of fluorescein he coloured a stream that burrows right through the main axis of the Pyrenees to emerge some 2,000 ft lower on the other side. To reform geography with a chance of breaking your neck—here indeed is a game well worth the candle.