Word: underground
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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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...
...Years Under the Earth* published last week in the U. S. Norbert Casteret declares with a refreshing lack of modesty: "Underground exploration requires unexpected talents-from prehistory, mineralogy, natural history, physics and chemistry to rope acrobatics, crawling, canoeing, swimming and even skating. . . . No one can venture underground without agility and physical stamina, and these qualifications I possessed as a champion runner, jumper and swimmer...
Speleologist Casteret has explored more than 500 caverns and underground water courses, mostly in the Pyrenees where he was born. He has. in the words of a colleague, "made the subterranean Pyrenees his own, and this is a promising chapter in applied hydrogeology." In Ten Years Under the Earth, a book full of first-rate scientific adventure which has been saluted by the French Academy of Sciences, he relates, among many others, this plunge into the Earth's dark bowels...
...achieved fame as the mistress of Louis XIV. Near the ancient castle was a cavern leading into the mountain which the natives assured him was impenetrable after a short distance. Casteret undressed, slipped through a crack not much bigger than his body, waded into a grotto through which an underground stream flowed...
Announcement of the U. S. publication of Tropic of Cancer was surprising literary news not only because of its underground reputation. It revealed the recent revival of interest in the neglected field of experimental writing-that cloudy area of modern letters with its little magazines, obscure poems, defiant manifestoes, communications from Ezra Pound. In Manhattan a plump, handsome periodical, Twice a Year, took up where The Dial left off a decade ago. In Paris appeared The Black Book, a novel by Lawrence Durrell, who gave promise of outdoing Henry Miller in the form that admirers call the dithyrambic novel...