Survivor: The Autobiography (45 page)

It was clear to those underground, as it was to us gathered round the winch, that there was only one thing to be done: the auto-hoist was a last resource whose use had been foreseen as possible, although we had entertained secret hopes that it would not prove necessary. This appliance was devised by Queffelec. It was a sort of pulley-block, hanging from which a man could raise or lower himself by hand along a steel-wire cable – rather like a plasterer on the façade of a building. It has been very seldom used by speleologists, and requires special training. Before this expedition, Bidegain, Lépineux and I had agreed to practise with it in a small chasm and so familiarize ourselves with its use. As things turned out I had not been able to take part in these exercises on account of a fall while climbing. Lépineux had been obliged therefore to act as Bidegain’s assistant; hence no one but José had so far used the apparatus, which requires a good deal of practice. As a precaution, all this gear had been stored on the balcony at –257. Here, then, Lépineux drove in expanding
pitons
to which the cable of the hoist was to be fixed. Bidegain now made himself fast, and his two companions watched him sink slowly out of sight.

Thanks be to God, the only member of the team qualified to use the hoist was a man of calm courage and herculean strength. He alone could have accomplished that overwhelming task. The lot had fallen upon him; he accepted it, and carried it out at the peril of his life and to the limit of physical endurance.

Having reached the container, he would have to release it and escort it on its way, hauling himself up meanwhile yard by yard, hugging the thing to himself and never letting go. I will let him tell the tale; his words far surpass any that I could write.

‘On my way down I was haunted by one fear: would the great cable cross my slender thread, squeeze it against a rock, and cut it through? If that happened, there could be no hope: I must inevitably hurtle into space. I recalled Casteret’s grave warning as he returned to the surface: “It is going to be a very dangerous operation . . . and I know what I’m talking about.” However, I arrived safely at my destination, level with the coffin wedged beneath that cursed overhang. After some manoeuvring, which I directed by telephone, I succeeded in placing it in the position from which I judged it easiest to pass the ledge. Now for it: “Up!”

‘With my back to the wall, pushing the massive weight with hands and feet, I got it past the obstacle. It was crushing me but it was going up. Foot by foot we rose together.’

Up there by the winch, half buried in the snow, we shared in spirit the torment of his gradual ascent. The acoustics were such that we could hear the coffin grind against the rock, the hand-chain of the hoist clicking as it moved, the heavy breathing of the man who worked it. Every now and then he would joke or try to joke, and even sang to cheer himself and reassure his wife, who was with us at the winding-gear and showed high courage notwithstanding mortal anguish in her eyes.

The engineers, however, were more worried than any of us. They understood the machinery and just how little more it could endure. At any moment it might fail, or the cable snap, and then . . . We guessed into what purgatory José’s heart was plunged; for not one of us understood more clearly than did he how near Death was hovering.

At times there was despair in his exclamations and his laboured breathing. Even more pathetic was the voice of faith, when he suddenly called out in Basque the Psalmist’s words: ‘Lord, from the depths I cry to Thee!’

His journey had begun at 1 a.m. At 4 o’clock the nose of the container touched the underside of the balcony where Lépineux and Rossini stood waiting. It had taken three hours to climb 257 feet.

Bidegain shall now resume his story.

‘My next job was to steer the coffin past the edge of this platform. The girder, leaning to my left, showed me what I must do. Thrusting all my weight on to the right guy-wire, I dragged the girder into position.

‘“Up!” shouted Rossini into the telephone, and the container rose accordingly. The
pitons
were bending, and I wondered would they hold. At long last, however, my burden rested on the balcony: I had made it! Then I collapsed, exhausted but triumphant.’

Yes, he had brought the container so far; but at what cost! The next stage of the journey must soon begin – the most difficult of all, for from this point to the surface the great shaft is a mass of points and blades of rock.

Before the convoy could set out on the last length of its ascent, we had to bring Mauer up. He was still at –699, and I must confess that during the excitement of the last few hours he had been well-nigh forgotten. Lévi shouted to him, but there was no reply. It was a dreadful moment.

‘Hello, –257! Try to contact Mauer; he’s not answering.’

Still there was no sound. Poor fellow, he had endured so long beneath those icy, pitiless cascades (against which he had unwisely failed to provide himself with waterproof clothing), that he was now half dead with cold. Bolted to the wall on a narrow ledge, he was in a state of prostration and practically unconscious. Aroused at length from his torpor, he was warned that the cable was on its way to pick him up; but it was repeatedly entangled or otherwise delayed, and took a very long time to reach him. Meanwhile, he suffered a relapse. Utterly exhausted and on the verge of desperation, he scarcely answered Lévi’s frantic calls . . . Eventually, however, at 7 a.m. he informed us that he had closed his snap-hook on the cable and was ready to start. He was helped out of the shaft at 8.30 in a pitiful condition; but he had reached the bottom of the chasm, and held on through thick and thin.

Rossini came to the surface at 9 o’clock. Worn out, drenched to the skin, and numb with cold, he was assisted to his tent through a curtain of alternate rain and snow.

Apart from Brosset and Ballandraux (with whom for the moment we were not concerned, for they had turned in and were fast asleep in the Salle Lépineux) only two men remained in the shaft – Bidegain and Lépineux.

They were at –257, with the container tied down on the balcony; and there at about 9 a.m. a most extraordinary scene was enacted. These two bosom friends were heard over the telephone in acrimonious dispute. Lépineux was of opinion that Bidegain had done more than his fair share and was in no condition to proceed. He wanted to take José’s place and escort the container with the hoist. Bidegain protested that he was perfectly fit, and that in any case no one but himself knew how to handle the apparatus. José won the day. Lépineux agreed to be hauled up. His face bore the marks of extreme weariness, cold, and nervous tension.

The rest is briefly told; Bidegain completed the terrible ascent, locked in combat with his tragic burden; but the difficulties appeared to increase in proportion as his endurance ebbed away. The container was repeatedly held up by one obstacle after another.

‘Up a yard! . . . Stop!’ he would say into the microphone.

‘Another yard! . . . Stop!’

‘Down a yard! . . . Stop! . . .’

And so it went on, José striving desperately to release the coffin, steering it with his body while he worked the hoist. His hands were bleeding; he was in dreadful pain; but he moved like an automaton rising yard by yard, foot by foot, through that last stretch of calvary. Another would have given in; Bidegain fought on to the bitter end. Immediately he reached the surface he collapsed. It was 2 p.m. Twenty hours had elapsed since the coffin started on its journey, and Bidegain had done battle with it for thirteen of those hours.

Our worst experience in five thousand dives befell us not in the sea but in an inland water-cave, the famous Fountain of Vaucluse near Avignon. The renowned spring is a quiet pool, a crater under a six-hundred-foot limestone cliff above the river Sorgue. A trickle flows from it the year round, until March comes when the Fountain of Vaucluse erupts in a rage of water which swells the Sorgue to a flood. It pumps furiously for five weeks then subsides. The phenomenon has occurred every year in recorded history.

The fountain has evoked the fancy of poets since the Middle Ages. Petrarch wrote sonnets to Laura by the Fountain of Vaucluse in the fourteenth century. Frederic Mistral, a Provençal poet, was another admirer of the spring. Generations of hydrologists have leaned over the fountain, evolving dozens of theories. They have measured the rainfall on the plateau above, mapped the potholes in it, analysed the water, and determined that it is invariably 55° Fahrenheit all the year round. But no one knew what happened to discharge the amazing flood.

One principle of intermittent natural fountains is that of an underground syphon, which taps a pool of water lying higher inside the hill than the water level of the surface pool. Simple overflows of the inner pool by heavy rain seeping through the porous limestone did not explain Vaucluse, because it did not entirely respond to rainfall. There was either a huge inner reservoir or a series of inner caverns and a system of syphons. Scientific theories had no more validity than Mistral’s explanation: ‘One day the fairy of the fountain changed herself into a beautiful maiden and took an old strolling minstrel by the hand and led him down through Vaucluse’s waters to an underground prairie, where seven huge diamonds plugged seven holes. “See these diamonds?” said the fairy. “When I lift the seventh, the fountain rises to the roots of the fig tree that drinks only once a year.”’ Mistral’s theory, as a matter of fact, possessed one more piece of tangible evidence than the scientific guesses. There is a rachitic hundred-year-old fig tree hooked on the vertical wall at the waterline of the annual flood. Its roots are watered but once a year.

A retired army officer, Commandant Brunet, who had settled in the nearby village of Apt, became an addict of the Fountain as had Petrarch six hundred years before. The Commandant suggested that the Undersea Research Group dive into the Fountain and learn the secret of the mechanism. In 1946 the Navy gave us permission to try. We journeyed to Vaucluse on 24 August, when the spring was quiescent. There seemed to be no point in entering a violent flood if its source might be discovered when the Fountain was quiet.

The arrival of uniformed naval officers and sailors in trucks loaded with diving equipment started a commotion in Vaucluse. We were overwhelmed by boys, vying for the privilege of carrying our air cylinders, portable decompression chamber, aqualungs, and diving dresses, up the wooded trail to the Fountain. Half the town, led by Mayor Garcin, stopped work and accompanied us. They told us about the formidable dive into the Fountain by Señor Negri in 1936. He seemed to have been a remarkably bold type, for we were informed that he had descended in a diving suit with a microphone inside the helmet through which he broadcast a running account of his incredible rigours as he plunged one hundred and twenty feet to the lower elbow of the siphon. Our friends of Vaucluse recalled with a thrill the dramatic moment when the voice from the depths announced that Señor Negri had found Ottonelli’s zinc boat!

We already knew about Negri and Ottonelli, the two men who had preceded us into the Fountain, Ottonelli in 1878. We greatly admired Ottonelli’s dive in the primitive equipment of his era. We were somewhat mystified by Señor Negri, a Marseille salvage contractor, who had avoided seeing us on several occasions when we sought first-hand information on the topography of the Fountain. We had read his diving report, but we felt deprived of the details he might have given us personally.

The helmet divers described certain features to be found in the Fountain. Ottonelli’s report stated that he had alighted on the bottom of a basin forty-five feet down and reached a depth of ninety feet in a sloping tunnel under a huge triangular stone. During the dive his zinc boat had capsized in the pool and slid down through the shaft. Negri said he had gone to one hundred and twenty feet, to the elbow of a syphon leading uphill, and found the zinc boat. The corrosion-proof metal had, of course, survived sixty years immersion. Negri reported he could proceed no further because his air pipe was dragging against a great boulder, precariously balanced on a pivot. The slightest move might have toppled the rock and pinned him down to a gruesome death.

We had predicated our tactical planning on the physical features described by the pioneer divers. Dumas and I were to form the first
cordée
– we used the mountain climber’s term because we were to be tied together by a thirty-foot cord attached to our belts. Negri’s measurements determined the length of our guide rope – four hundred feet – and the weights we carried on our belts, which were unusually heavy to allow us to penetrate the tunnel he had described and to plant ourselves against currents inside the syphon.

What we could not know until we had gone inside the Fountain was that Negri was over-imaginative. The topography of the cavern was completely unlike his description. Señor Negri’s dramatic broadcast was probably delivered just out of sight of the watchers, about fifty feet down. Dumas and I all but gave our lives to learn that Ottonelli’s boat never existed. That misinformation was not the only burden we carried into the Fountain: the new air compressor with which we filled the breathing cylinders had prepared a fantastic fate for us.