Norbert Casteret is the world’s most versatile speleologist—a specialist in the science of caves. He has been fascinated by caverns, abysses and underground rivers since, in his youth, he first avidly read Jules Verne’s Voyage to the Centre of the Earth. He studied under the French archeologists Cartailhac and Bergouen, under Explorer-Geologist Edouard-Alfred Martel. When he was iS, the War broke out and he went to the trenches. The life of a soldier, he says, made him physically tough and inured him to hardship.
In Ten Years Under the Earth* published last week in the U. S. Norbert Casteret declares with a refreshing lack of modesty: “Underground exploration requires unexpected talents—from prehistory, mineralogy, natural history, physics and chemistry to rope acrobatics, crawling, canoeing, swimming and even skating. . . . No one can venture underground without agility and physical stamina, and these qualifications I possessed as a champion runner, jumper and swimmer.”
Speleologist Casteret has explored more than 500 caverns and underground water courses, mostly in the Pyrenees where he was born. He has. in the words of a colleague, “made the subterranean Pyrenees his own, and this is a promising chapter in applied hydrogeology.” In Ten Years Under the Earth, a book full of first-rate scientific adventure which has been saluted by the French Academy of Sciences, he relates, among many others, this plunge into the Earth’s dark bowels.
Roaming the Pyrenees in 1922. he arrived at the village of Montespan. ruled for centuries by the Lords of Montespan one of whose ladies achieved fame as the mistress of Louis XIV. Near the ancient castle was a cavern leading into the mountain which the natives assured him was impenetrable after a short distance. Casteret undressed, slipped through a crack not much bigger than his body, waded into a grotto through which an underground stream flowed.
About 130 feet in, the ceiling dipped into the water, forming what speleologists call a “siphon.” Unwilling to stop, Casteret inhaled enough breath for two minutes, dived into the tunnel, ready to turn back after one minute if he did not reach the siphon’s end. It was short, however, and he soon emerged into another grotto. This was the beginning of explorations in the Grotte de Montespan which eventually led to the discovery of subterranean galleries inhabited by the Magdalenian cave dwellers of 20,000 years ago. Some of the Magdalenian clay images of animals were riddled with holes, apparently made by spears. Others had arrows or human hands carved on their flanks: symbols of human domination. This lent valuable support to the anthropological theory that the prehistoric cave artists did not paint and carve for amusement or esthetic satisfaction, but to provide symbols which would insure successful hunting.
Ten Years Under the Earth makes it clear that speleology is no job for a claustrophobe. “Very few tubes are im-passable,” declares Casteret, “if one knows how to crawl (there is an art to it) and dares to keep on, come what may. Thanks to his shape, man can stretch out longer and thinner than any animal of his size.”
One of Norbert Casteret’s major researches established the true source of the Garonne River in southwestern France. It had been supposed by many geographers that the glacier-fed waters pouring into a Spanish abyss called the Trou du Toro (“Hole of the Bull”) emerged as a tributary of the Ebro. eventually reaching the Mediterranean. Casteret’s explorations convinced him that the Trou du Toro’s waters passed three miles under the axis of the Pyrenees and the European watershed to France. He proved this by dumping 60 kilograms of a powerful green dye called fluorescein into the Trou du Toro. The green color reappeared several hours later in the River Garonne.
*The Greystone Press. N. Y. ($3).