October 24, 1996

Wanna raise your heartbeat? Drop down 500 steps through a door in the ground and when you reach the floor, crawl backwards, straight down, through a narrow hole. My heart was certainly racing. "Watch out - that step's a narrow one." "Yes, I know, I missed it." At the bottom of the hole, we were dumped into a sloping shaft. "Careful of your head around those turns." Normally we wouldn't be doing this sort of thing without a hard hat, but, as we didn't expect to be spelunking in North Africa, we hadn't come prepared. Once through the shaft we emerged into the Aven Room, an enormous cavern covered with stalactites and stalagmites. "Keep going?" Sure why not. We followed the small path until it disappeared and a thin string was the only thing to tell us which way to head. There might have been another hole down there but I couldn't tell; that was as far as we went.

We were at Gouffre Le Friouato, the largest cave in North Africa. The map in the small hut at the cave's entrance showed we could explore 11.5 kilometers underground if we wished. (We did significantly less). The attendant had gone that length plus more in a two day exploration the year before. Spiologists have explored up to 20 km and estimate it continues for another 35 km. The attendant pointed to the first large room and, making an "o" with his thumb and finger, drew a long line in the air from the ceiling to the floor. "Stalactites is good," he said.

Actually 'good' isn't an adequate description. This cave houses an amazing array of calcified formations. We stood in the Aven room a long while, shining our flashlights around the walls and ceiling. Against the far wall stood an enormous stalagmite growing like a tiny white castle from the floor. We had to run our lights way up before we saw it's point and. when we did, we had to run them back down again to convince ourselves that it was all a part of the same formation. From the ceiling grew another amazing shape. Redish in color it folded over on itself before plunging downward in a series of spikes. There were others too; from the walls, dripping down like soda straws; globs of brown and white pulled up from the floor; mushroom shaped creations reaching from dark holes or dripping from rock awnings. Crystal-like white lumps shining in our narrow beams of light.

Time has no meaning in the dark. Fifteen minutes slipped into half an hour. We spent an hour examining a droplet of water clinging to a small spout from an archway, or perhaps it was only a minute. On our way back up, we stopped often to move our lights to where we had been; to realize again the distance we had covered, to admire some new-found decoration. After pulling ourselves back through the narrow hole (the passage castre) I looked at my watch, elapsed time, one hour and ten minutes.

After that we no longer needed our lights. There was enough sunlight filtering in through the large hole in the cave's roof to easily see our way up the remaining steps. And enough light to spur the growth of tiny plants, fungus and further up, moss. After 500 endless steps and a thousand pants and puffs, we arrived back at the cave's entrance. Wow, it had grown hot out. Off came the hats, the sweatshirts, the mud-soaked gloves, the boots. I looked at John's smudged face; John looked at me; we both looked at the pile of dirty clothes we'd created. "Nothing like a good squeeze in a cave to convince you it's laundry day." he said. "And no better place to do laundry than in the desert." So, finding water became our next priority. We waved goodbye to the attendant and set off for less arid ground in the city of Fes.