Science: Speleologist

Norbert Casteret is the world's most versatile speleologist—a specialist in the science of caves. He has been fascinated by caverns, abysses and underground rivers since, in his youth, he first avidly read Jules Verne's Voyage to the Centre of the Earth. He studied under the French archeologists Cartailhac and Bergouen, under Explorer-Geologist Edouard-Alfred Martel. When he was iS, the War broke out and he went to the trenches. The life of a soldier, he says, made him physically tough and inured him to hardship.

In Ten Years Under the Earth* published last week...