FRANCE: Cave Crazy

Spelunkers are men who like to explore holes in the ground. They say in the Pyrenees, which are as full of holes as Gruyère cheese, that once you become a spelunker (short for speleologist) the passion never leaves you. Such a man was 33-year-old Marcel Loubens. Since boyhood he had been crawling in & out of caves in his native Ariège in southern France. Then he ran an office-equipment firm in Paris, but the passion was still with him. Last year he was a member of an expedition which had set up a new spelunking record: 1,168 feet in vertical descent into the earth’s crust.

A fortnight ago, at the mouth of a huge bottle-shaped abyss near the Spanish frontier in the Pyrenees, Loubens and twelve other Belgian, French and British spelunkers! led by famed Belgian Physicist Max Cosyns, set out to break their own record. Their wives, resigned to indulging their husbands’ odd vacation hobby, stayed together at a nearby hotel.

The spelunkers had an electric winch and 1,300 feet of steel cable in the core of which was embedded a telephone wire. Loubens went down first. He wore water-resistant coveralls, a miner’s head lamp, strong cleated boots, and a crash helmet for protection against falling rocks. It took him 90 minutes to get down, dangling in parachute harness, spinning round & round, but when he touched bottom he was farther down than the Eiffel Tower is up. Three other spelunkers followed him. They established a camp in the big vault, perhaps 900 feet long, half as wide, and 300 feet high. They explored the even deeper caverns that sloped away from the shaft. They threw yellow-green dye into a rushing underground river to test their theory that this was the same river which surged out of the ground three miles away. (It was.) They looked for new forms of subterranean life, such as the cockroaches they found last year, almost white and without eyes. Last week, after four days underground, Loubens telephoned that he was coming up.

Spelunker Loubens was suffering from “cavern disease,” acute depression caused by remaining too long underground. On his way up, the steel cable, sawing on jagged rocks, snapped. Loubens fell through darkness to a pile of boulders 120 feet below. He had a broken back and broken jaw. Not until next morning did Dr. André Mairey reach the unconscious Loubens. Even as he lashed the injured man to a stretcher, Loubens died. The stretcher jammed in the rocks. While Loubens’ widow and father waited at the surface, the spelunkers thoughtfully removed Loubens’ wedding ring and then buried him where no doubt he would have preferred to be buried, under a heap of boulders, a thousand feet underground.