Word: caving
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...plot). The alternative, says the Economist, is the sprawling suburb, "the village green multiplied by unplanned expansion" that all too easily turns into an "amorphous and soulless mess ... the suburb which, proverbially, the Devil made." But Le Corbusier's solution, a hangover from the "walled stronghold and the cave-settlement," can be even more diabolic. It has advantages: e.g., it reduces commuting distance to the city, makes such amenities as washing machines and parks cheaper because they are used by more people. But, "no expanse of parkland made available by vertical concentration, no crèche on the 18th...
...less elegant spot, Ralph Solecki of the Smithsonian Institution was digging into an even more distant past. Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq is still inhabited during the winter months by about 40 Kurds and their flocks and herds. Last year Solecki became interested in the debris on the cave's floor. Back at Shanidar early this year, financed by a Fulbright grant and surrounded by fascinated Kurds, Archaeologist Solecki carefully dug a square shaft in the promising deposit. The top layers were modern. Just below, he found tools and fragments of pottery from the "historic period" when Shanidar belonged...
Under the curious eyes of the cave's living tenants, the shaft sank, foot after foot, toward the dimmest beginnings of human history. Subtle changes in bits of stone, covered by the garbage of ancient man, told of the shifts of culture. Solecki spent many feet of digging in the Aurignacian period (of the well-built Cro-Magnon men). Then he entered the Mousterian period (of the Neanderthal men, stooped and beetle-browed). At 26 feet below the surface, he found the scattered bones of a child less than a year old who had died something like...
...speleologists, the way down into the cave is often like the way up to heaven for saints-straight and narrow. Moreover, the pothole shaft is apt to be lined with slimy rock walls out of which icy waterfalls pour over the passing spelunker. He spins sickeningly sometimes, at the end of a quarter-inch strand of cable, while his fellow spelunkers lower him slowly into the unknown. Below, he is often the sole inhabitant, except for eyeless white cockroaches and the like, of a world of stone, water and darkness. Claustrophobic terror can catch him, turn him hysterical. Finally...
...even that stopped the spelunkers. After burying Loubens in the chasm, they continued their explorations, found another pothole and lowered themselves through it into the lowest and biggest cave of all, a "cathedral of rock," perhaps 500 yds. long and 400 yds. wide. In a flare of magnesium, the explorers "were confronted with a panorama of rocky coagulations -slender stalactites, suspended like long wisps of straws from the majestic vaults, hanging curtains of stone, and broad, squat, dome-shaped stalagmites, looking like huge mushrooms growing on the yellowish bottom of the cave...