Survivor: The Autobiography (46 page)

We adjusted our eyes to the gloom of the crater. Monsieur Garcin had lent us a Canadian canoe, which was floated over the throat of the Fountain, to anchor the guide rope. There was a heavy pig-iron weight on the end of the rope, which we wanted lowered beforehand as far as it would go down. The underwater entry was partially blocked by a huge stone buttress, but we managed to lower the pig-iron fifty-five feet. Chief Petty Officer Jean Pinard volunteered to dive without a protective suit to attempt to roll the pig-iron down as far as it was possible. Pinard returned lobster-red with cold and reported he had shoved the weight down to ninety feet. He did not suspect that he had been down further than Negri.

I donned my constant-volume diving dress over long woollens under the eyes of an appreciative audience perched round the rocky lip of the crater. My wife was among them, not liking this venture at all. Dumas wore an Italian Navy frogman outfit. We were loaded like donkeys. Each wore a three-cylinder lung, rubber foot fins, a heavy dagger, and two large waterproof flashlights, one in hand and one on the belt. Over my left arm was coiled three hundred feet of line in three pieces. Dumas carried an emergency micro-aqualung on his belt, a depth gauge, and a
piolet
, the alpinist’s ice-axe. There were rock slopes to be negotiated: with our heavy ballast we might need the
piolet
.

The surface commander was the late Lieutenant Maurice Fargues, our resourceful equipment officer. He was to keep his hand on the guide line as we transported the pig-iron down with us. The guide rope was our only communication with the surface. We had memorized a signal code. One tug from below requested Fargues to tighten the rope to clear snags. Three tugs meant pay out more line. Six tugs was the emergency signal for Fargues to haul us up as quickly as possible.

When the
cordée
reached Negri’s syphon, we planned to station the pig-iron, and attach to it one of the lengths of rope I carried over my arm. As we climbed on into the syphon, I would unreel this line behind me. We believed that our goal would be found past Negri’s see-sawing rock, up a long sloping arm of the syphon, in an air cave, where in some manner unknown Vaucluse’s annual eruption was launched.

Embarrassed by the wealth of gadgets we had hanging on to us, and needing our comrades’ support, we waded into the pool. We looked around for the last time. I saw the reassuring silhouette of Fargues and the crowd round the amphitheatre. In their forefront was a young abbé, who had no doubt come to be of service in a certain eventuality.

As we submerged, the water liberated us from weight. We stayed motionless in the pool for a minute to test our ballast and communications system. Under my flexible helmet I had a special mouthpiece which allowed me to articulate underwater. Dumas had no speaking facility, but could answer me with nods and gestures.

I turned face down and plunged through the dark door. I rapidly passed the buttress into the shaft, unworried about Dumas’ keeping pace on the thirty-foot cord at my waist. He can outswim me any time. Our dive was a trial run: we were the first
cordée
of a series. We intended to waste no time on details of topography but to proceed directly to the pig-iron and take it on to the elbow of Negri’s syphon, from which we would quickly take up a new thread into the secret of the Fountain. In retrospect, I also find that my subconscious mechanism was anxious to conclude the first dive as soon as possible.

I glanced back and saw Didi gliding easily through the door against a faint green haze. The sky was no longer our business. We belonged now to a world where no light had ever struck. I could not see my flashlight beam beneath me in the frightening dark – the water had no suspended motes to reflect light. A disc of light blinked on and off in the darkness when my flashlight beam hit rock. I went head down with tigerish speed, sinking by my overballast, unmindful of Dumas. Suddenly I was held by the belt and stones rattled past me. Heavier borne than I, Dumas was trying to brake his fall with his feet. His suit was filling with water. Big limestone blocks came loose and rumbled down round me. A stone bounced off my shoulder. I remotely realized I should try to think. I could not think.

Ninety feet down I found the pig-iron standing on a ledge. It did not appear in the torch beam as an object from the world above, but as something germane to this place. Dimly I recalled that I must do something about the pig-iron. I shoved it down the slope. It roared down with Dumas’ stones. During this blurred effort I did not notice that I had lost the lines coiled on my arm. I did not know that I had failed to give Fargues three tugs on the line to pay out the weight. I had forgotten Fargues and everything behind us. The tunnel broke into a sharper decline. I circled my right hand continuously, playing the torch in spirals on the clean and polished walls. I was travelling at two knots. I was in the Paris subway. I met nobody. There was nobody in the Metro, not a single rock bass. No fish at all.

At that time of year our ears are well trained to pressure after a summer’s diving.
Why did my ears ache so?
Something was happening. The light no longer ran around the tunnel walls. The beam spread on a flat bottom, covered with pebbles. It was earth, not rock, the detritus of the chasm. I could find no walls. I was on the floor of a vast drowned cave. I found the pig-iron, but no zinc boat, no syphon, and no precariously balanced rock. My head ached. I was drained of initiative.

I returned to our purpose, to learn the geography of the immensity that had no visible roof or walls, but rolled away down at a forty-five-degree incline. I could not surface without searching the ceiling for the hole that led up to the inner cavern of our theory.

I was attached to something, I remembered. The flashlight picked out a rope which curled off to a strange form floating supine above the pebbles. Dumas hung there in his cumbersome equipment, holding his torch like a ridiculous glow-worm. Only his arms were moving. He was sleepily trying to tie his
piolet
to the pig-iron line. His black frogman suit was filling with water. He struggled weakly to inflate it with compressed air. I swam to him and looked at his depth gauge. It read one hundred and fifty feet. The dial was flooded. We were deeper than that. We were at least two hundred feet down, four hundred feet away from the surface at the bottom of a crooked slanting tunnel.

We had rapture of the depths, but not the familiar drunkenness. We felt heavy and anxious, instead of exuberant. Dumas was stricken worse than I. I thought:
This is not how I should feel at this depth . . . I can’t go back until I learn where we are. Why don’t I feel a current? The pig-iron line is our only way home. What if we lose it? Where is the rope I had on my arm?
I was able in that instant to recall that I had lost the line somewhere above. I took Dumas’ hand and closed it round the guide line. ‘Stay here,’ I shouted. ‘I’ll find the shaft.’ Dumas understood me to mean I had no air and needed the safety aqualung. I sent the beam of the flashlight round in search of the roof of the cave. I found no ceiling.

Dumas was passing under heavy narcosis. He thought I was the one in danger. He fumbled to release the emergency lung. As he tugged hopelessly at his belt, he scudded across the drowned shingle and abandoned the guide line to the surface. The rope dissolved in the dark. I was swimming above, mulishly seeking for a wall or a ceiling, when I felt his weight tugging me back like a drifting anchor, restraining my search.

Above us somewhere were seventy fathoms of tunnel and crumbling rock. My weakened brain found the power to conjure up our fate. When our air ran out we would grope along the ceiling and suffocate in dulled agony. I shook off this thought and swam down to the ebbing glow of Dumas’ flashlight.

He had almost lost consciousness. When I touched him, he grabbed my wrist with awful strength and hauled me towards him for a final experience of life, an embrace that would take me with him. I twisted out of his hold and backed away. I examined Dumas with the torch. I saw his protruding eyes rolling inside the mask.

The cave was quiet between my gasping breaths. I marshalled all my remaining brain power to consider the situation. Fortunately there was no current to carry Dumas away from the pig-iron. If there had been the least current, we would have been lost.
The pig-iron must be near.
I looked for that rusted metal block, more precious than gold. And suddenly there it was, stolid and reassuring. Its line flew away into the dark, towards the hope of life.

In his stupor, Didi lost control of his jaws and his mouthpiece slipped from his teeth. He swallowed water and took some in his lungs before he somehow got the grip back into his mouth. Now, with the guide line beckoning, I realized that I could not swim to the surface, carrying the inert Dumas, who weighed at least twenty-five pounds in his waterlogged suit. I was in a state of exhaustion from the mysterious effect of the cave. We had not exercised strenuously, yet Dumas was helpless and I was becoming idiotic.

I would climb the rope, dragging Dumas with me. I grasped the pig-iron rope and started up, hand-over-hand, with Dumas drifting below, along the smooth vertical rock.

My first three hand-holds on the line were interpreted correctly by Fargues as the signal to pay out more rope. He did so, with a will. With utter dismay I saw the rope slackening and made super-human efforts to climb it. Fargues smartly fed me rope when he felt my traction. It took an eternal minute for me to work out the right tactics, namely that I should continue to haul down the rope, until the end of it came into Fargues’ hand. He would never let go. I hauled the rope in dull glee.

Four hundred feet of rope passed through my hands and curled into the cave. And a knot came into my hands. Fargues was giving us more rope to penetrate the ultimate gallery of Vaucluse. He had efficiently tied on another length to encourage us to pass deeper.

I dropped the rope like an enemy. I would have to climb the tunnel slope like an alpinist. Foot by foot I climbed the finger-holds of rock, stopping when I lost my respiratory rhythm by exertion and was near to fainting. I drove myself on, and felt that I was making progress. I reached for a good hand-hold, standing on the tips of my fins. The crag eluded my fingers and I was dragged down by the weight of Dumas.

The shock turned my mind to the rope again and I suddenly recalled our signals: six tugs meant pull everything up. I grabbed the line and jerked it, confident that I could count to six. The line was slack and snagged on obstacles in the four hundred feet to Maurice Fargues.
Fargues, do you not understand my situation?
I was at the end of my strength. Dumas was hanging on me.

Why doesn’t Dumas understand how bad he is for me? Dumas, you will die, anyway. Maybe you are already gone. Didi, I hate to do it, but you are dead and you will not let me live. Go away, Didi.
I reached for my belt dagger and prepared to cut the cord to Dumas.

Even in my incompetence there was something that held the knife in its holster.
Before I cut you off, Didi, I will try again to reach Fargues.
I took the line and repeated the distress signal, again and again.
Didi, I am doing all a man can do. I am dying too.

On shore, Fargues stood in perplexed concentration. The first
cordée
had not been down for the full period of the plan, but the strange pattern of our signals disturbed him. His hard but sensitive hand on the rope had felt no clear signals since the episode a few minutes back when suddenly we wanted lots of rope. He had given it to us, eagerly adding another length.
They must have found something tremendous down there
, thought Fargues. He was eager to penetrate the mystery himself on a later dive. Yet he was uneasy about the lifelessness of the rope in the last few minutes. He frowned and fingered the rope like a pulse, and waited.

Up from the lag of rope, four hundred feet across the friction of rocks, and through the surface, a faint vibration tickled Fargue’s finger. He reacted by standing and grumbling, half to himself, half to the cave watchers, ‘
Qu’est-ce que je risque? De me faire engueuler?
’ (What do I risk? Being sworn at?) With a set face he hauled the pig-iron in.

I felt the rope tighten. I jerked my hand off the dagger and hung on. Dumas’ air cylinders rang on the rocks as we were borne swiftly up. A hundred feet above I saw a faint triangle of green light, where hope lay. In less than a minute Fargues pulled us out into the pool and leaped in the water after the senseless Dumas. Tailliez and Pinard waded in after me. I gathered what strength I had left to control my emotions, not to break down. I managed to walk out of the pool. Dumas lay on his stomach and vomited. Our friends stripped off our rubber suits. I warmed myself round a cauldron of flaming petrol. Fargues and the doctor worked over Dumas. In five minutes he was on his feet, standing by the fire. I handed him a bottle of brandy. He took a drink and said, ‘I’m going down again.’ I wondered where Simone was.

The Mayor said, ‘When your air bubbles stopped coming to the surface, your wife ran down the hill. She said she could not stand it.’ Poor Simone had raced to a café in Vaucluse and ordered the most powerful spirit in the house. A rumour-monger raced through the village, yelling that one of the divers was drowned. Simone cried, ‘Which one? What colour was his mask?’

‘Red,’ said the harbinger.

Simone gasped with relief – my mask was blue. Then she thought of Didi in his red mask and her joy collapsed. She returned distractedly up the trail to the Fountain. There stood Didi, a miracle to her.

Dumas’ recuperative powers soon brought his colour back and his mind cleared. He wanted to know why we had been drugged in the cavern. In the afternoon another
cordée
, Tailliez and Guy Morandiere, prepared to dive, without the junk we had carried. They wore only long underwear and light ballast, which made them slightly buoyant. They planned to go to the cavern and reconnoitre for the passage which led to the secret of Vaucluse. As soon as they found it, they would immediately return and sketch the layout for the third
cordée
, which would make the final plunge.