Survivor: The Autobiography

by Lewis, Jon E.

  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.

  French naval officer, underwater explorer and film-maker. The inventor of the aqualung, Cousteau used the apparatus to explore, in 1946, the mysterious inland water cave of the Fountain of Vaucluse, near Avignon.

  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.

  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 susp
ect 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.
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  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.