IROISLECXE

By John Skow

THE LONGEST CAVE by ROGER W. BRUCKER and

RICHARD A. WATSON 316 pages. Knopf. $12.95.

Flatlanders never have been able to understand mountain climbers, and not even mountain climbers understand the pale, mud-smeared troglodytes whose curious passion it is to worm their way down through the clammy dark into the deepest and narrowest capillaries of caves. These low adventurers are brave, but their squirmy feats seem inglorious. If, slithering downward, one of them carried a banner, its strange device might well read !IROISLECXE.

Now come a Yellow Springs, Ohio, advertising man named Roger Brucker, and Richard Watson, a philosophy professor at Washington University in St. Louis, to explain the damp fascinations of caving ("spelunking" seems to be a word not much used by cavers). Their book is a splendid armchair challenge, properly made, properly obsessive. For non-cavers who read it, the sensation of being trapped in Mother Earth's vermiform appendix is persuasively real, and the impulse to run gasping into the open air is strong.

Brucker, 47, and Watson, 45, are cavers of the first rank. For nearly two decades they belly-crawled toward what they call "the Everest of world spelology," a presumed connection between Kentucky's vast Flint Ridge cave system and neighboring Mammoth Cave. The possibility of such a connection must have occurred to Floyd Collins, the solitary caver who discovered Great Crystal Cave under Flint Ridge in 1917 and who died in nearby Sand Cave in 1925, after being trapped there for 15 days. Collins' grisly death stirred the nation's curiosity, and for years tourists in Crystal Cave paid eagerly to see the caver's body displayed in a glass-topped coffin. It is still there, though no longer on display, and minus a leg pilfered by rival cave owners. Modern cavers, say the authors, often have a word with Floyd as they head onward and downward.

Mud-Choked Fistulas. The Flint Ridge/Mammoth connection, which would establish the system as the longest known cave in the world, required techniques more organized and rigorous than Collins' lone adventuring. By the 1950s, when Brucker and Watson began caving, it was necessary to survey, with chain and compass, every foot of the miles of new cave then being discovered. Some of the finds were spacious passages and great, vaulted limestone halls, but far more often the explorers tried to keep their nerve intact and their carbide lamps lit while jammed into mud-choked fistulas less than a foot high. The authors' implied comparison of Kentucky caving with the climbing of Everest is a mild hype, neither necessary nor justified; Everest is far deadlier, and an expedition there requires several arduous weeks, not the 24 to 36 hours of a Flint Ridge cave crawl. But caving is difficult enough to call for a rare sort of courage and endurance. A common technique, horrifying to imagine, is to exhale in order to reduce the size of the rib cage, then squiggle along, unable to breathe deeply until the squeezeway widens. To do this in an unknown passage, realizing that rescue is impossible and that the passage may narrow, not widen, is not simply grubby--it is gallant.

The final connection came in 1972, the authors relate. Brucker missed it because, although he is not a large man, he was not able to compress his body enough to get through a tight spot, now officially labeled the Tight Spot. The most effective member of the connection party was a small (115 lbS.), wiry woman named Pat Crowther. Large, lordly people are handicapped as cavers, of course, and flyweight readers will follow Crowther's muddy tracks with tears of appreciation in their eyes. When she and her skinny companions popped like corks through the Tight Spot and moved on into Mammoth Cave, the provable length of the great limestone entrails became 144.4 miles. The authors, still not satisfied, think that in all some 300 miles of passages exist. !ROISLECXE John Skow

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