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  As a leader Stone models himself on the great expeditionary Brits of the past century. He has an engineer’s methodical mind and an explorer’s heroic self-image. He’s pragmatic about details and romantic about goals. His teammates often compare him to Ernest Shackleton, another explorer who felt most alive in the world’s most unpleasant places. But Shackleton, despite shipwreck and starvation, never lost a man under his direct command. (“I thought you’d rather have a live donkey than a dead lion,” he told his wife after failing to reach the South Pole.) Cave diving is less forgiving. Stone has lost four teammates on his expeditions, including Henry Kendall, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist. Ken­dall failed to turn on the oxygen in his rebreather while cave diving in Florida. Others have succumbed to narcosis or hypoxia, fallen from cliffs or had grand mal seizures, lost their way or lost track of time. They’ve buried themselves so deep that they couldn’t come back up.

  Stone’s single-minded, almost mechanistic style can sometimes raise hackles. He can be inspiring one moment and dismissive the next. “Bill has problems identifying people’s emotions,” Gala told me. “So he doesn’t always react to them well.” Then again, it’s hard to avoid tension in a sport that takes such a mortal toll. Stone’s mentor, the legendary cave diver Sheck Exley, retrieved 40 corpses from diving sites in Florida alone, then drowned in a Mexican cenote in 1994. “When cavers become cave divers, they usually die because of it,” Stone’s friend James Brown told me. In 1988 Brown and Stone were called in to help remove the body of a female diver from a cave near Altoona, Pennsylvania. When they found her, she was tangled in rope at the bottom of a sump, arms so stiff that, Brown recalled, Stone suggested they cut them off for easier transport. “Nobody liked that idea much,” Brown said. “But after a while her arms softened up, and we were able to fold them down.”

  It took them two days to get her out, with Stone pushing from behind. “He kept saying, ‘Don’t leave me back here if she gets stuck!’” Brown said. If there’s one rule of caving, Stone told me, it’s that you never leave a person behind. Especially if they’re alive, he added. “If they’re dead, it’s another matter.”

  By the time I arrived at base camp, in mid-March, the team had settled into a soggy routine. A week underground followed by 10 days on the surface. Five days of drizzle followed by one day of sun. They’d spent most of the first month hauling gear up the mountain—a muddy three-hour hike from a farmhouse in the valley—loading the heaviest items on burros and the rest on their backs. They’d set up tents and dug latrines, strung lights and cut trails to the cave. The camp was spread out beneath pines and low-hanging clouds, on a rare stretch of relatively flat ground. To one side the Discovery crew had erected a geodesic dome with two full editing stations inside. To the other the cavers had hung a giant blue tarp, sheltering a long plywood table, stacks of provisions, and a pair of two-burner camp stoves. On most expeditions base camp is a place to dry out and recover from infections acquired underground—cracked skin and inflamed cuts and staph bacteria that burrow under your fingernails till they ooze pus. But this forest was nearly as wet as the cave.

  “Welcome to hell,” one of the cavers told me when I joined him by the campfire that first night. “Where happiness goes to die,” another added. There was a pause, then someone launched into the colonel’s monologue from Avatar: “Out there, beyond that fence, every living thing that crawls, flies, or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes . . . If you wish to survive, you need to cultivate a strong mental attitude.” It was a favorite conceit around camp: the cloud forest as hostile planet. But looking at all the gleaming eyes around the fire, I was mostly reminded of the Island of Lost Boys. Beneath all the mud and gloom and dire admonitions, there burned an ember of self-satisfaction—of pride in their wretched circumstance and willingness to endure it. As Gala put it, “It’s just one continuous miserable.”

  Fifty-four cavers from 13 countries, 43 of them men and 11 women, would pass through the camp that spring. The team had a core of 20 or so veteran members, reinforced by recruits from caving groups worldwide. On any given day the cave might be home to a particle physicist from Berkeley, a molecular biologist from Russia, a spacecraft engineer from Washington, D.C., a rancher from Mexico, a geologist from Sweden, a tree surgeon from Colorado, a mathematician from Slovenia, a theater director from Poland, and a cave guide from Canada who lived in a Jeep and spent 200 days a year underground. They were a paradoxical breed: restlessly active yet fond of tight places, highly analytical yet indifferent to risk. They seemed built for solitude—pale, phlegmatic creatures drawn to deep holes and dark passages—yet they worked together as a selfless unit: the naked mole rats of extreme sport. As far as I could tell, only two things truly connected them: a love of the unknown and a tolerance for pain.

  Matt Covington, a 33-year-old caver from Fayetteville, was a typical specimen. A professor of geology at the University of Arkansas, he had earned his PhD in astrophysics but switched fields so that he could spend more time underground. He had a build best described as Flat Stanley. Six feet four but only 150 pounds, he could squeeze through a crevice six and a half inches wide. “My head isn’t the limiting factor,” he told me. “It’s my hips.” Covington was a veteran of seven Stone expeditions as well as caving trips to Sumatra, Peru, and other remote formations. Five years earlier he was climbing up a cliff face in Lechuguilla Cave, near Carlsbad Caverns, when an anchor came loose from the rock. Covington’s feet caught on the cliff as he fell, tumbling him onto his left arm, causing compound fractures. Rather than wait for rescue, he spent the next 13 hours dragging himself to the surface. “The crawling was fairly uncomfortable,” he allowed. “There was a lot of rope to climb.”

  When I first met Covington, late one night, he’d just slouched back into camp after five days underground. His eyes were bloodshot, his blond hair clumped and matted, his skin as blanched and fuzzy as moldy yogurt. He was so tired that he could barely stand, and his clothes reeked of cave funk. Yet he seemed fairly content. “A good caver is one who forgets how bad it really is,” he said. There was more to it than that, though. Covington didn’t feel claustrophobic underground; he felt at home. The rock walls, to him, offered a kind of embrace. As a boy, he told me, he used to flop around so much in his sleep that he often fell on the floor. Rather than climb back up, he’d crawl under the bed and stay till morning. He felt better there, beneath the springs, than he did looking up at the ceiling in his big empty room.

  It was an instinct almost everyone here seemed to share. One of the cavers remembered staring at a slice of rye bread as a child, fascinated by all the air bubbles beneath the crust. He wanted to go down there. Gala was so comfortable in caves that he sometimes felt as if they were made for humans. “The passages are exactly the right size for my body to fit in,” he told me. And his wife, Kasia, who worked as a photo editor in Warsaw, was nearly as happy underground as he. They took turns exploring the cave and taking care of their daughter, Zuzia, up on the surface. Zuzia had spent much of her life watching people disappear into holes and reemerge weeks later. She traversed her first cliff face at the age of four, in Spain’s Picos de Europa mountains, and kept a map above her bed with pirate flags pinned on all the countries she’d visited. When she first came to Mexico, in 2009, she would sometimes cry out in frustration, “It’s so uncomfortable here!” Now she flitted between tents like a forest sprite, half naked in the cold, fencing with corncobs and setting traps for mice. Life at camp had built up her immune system, Gala assured me, and had taught her the “skills of dynamic risk assessment.”

  I wished that I could see Chevé through her eyes. Before her father went underground with Phil Short, for their long hike beyond Camp Four, he’d read to Zuzia from The Hobbit. Chevé was no Lonely Mountain. Yet it had glistening caverns and plummeting boreholes, stalagmites tall as organ pipes and great galleries draped in flowstone, deeper than any goblin lair. And they were right beneath her feet. “When you sque
eze through these small holes into these big halls, you feel like you’re the only person on the earth,” Gala said. “It’s like the kingdom of the dwarves.”

  Gala had been exploring Chevé with Stone so long that he could nearly navigate it blindfolded. After a while, he said, you start to create a map of the system in your mind, to memorize each contortion and foothold needed to climb through a passage. On the steepest pitches, certain rocks almost seemed to smile and wave at him and to reach for his hand. He would grab them, thinking, Old friend! And yet the deeper he went, the more unfamiliar the territory became. By the 13th day, the escalating uncertainty—the risk of a careless stumble or a snapped limb so far from the surface—was starting to weigh on him. “The further in you go, the more you begin to doubt and question yourself,” he told me. “What the fuck am I doing here?”

  The sump beyond Camp Four was like nothing Short and Gala had seen before. The three sumps higher up in this system were relatively shallow and less than 500 feet long. This sump was more than 30 feet deep, and it seemed to go on and on. And something more rare: it was beautiful. The water was a luminous turquoise, flowing over pure white sand; the limestone was streaked with ocher and rust. Most sumps are cloudy, tubelike passages carved by underground streams, but this one had been a dry cave not long ago. The stalactites on its ceiling could only have been formed by slow drip. With its lofty chambers and limpid water, it reminded Gala of the blue holes of Florida and the caves of the Yucatán. Finning through it felt like flying.

  The hazards of cave diving are inseparable from its seductions. Wide-open tunnels can fork into a maze; white sands swirl up to obscure your view. You think that you know the way back, only to reach a dead end, with no place to come up for air. “People think that cave diving is an adrenaline sport, but really it’s the opposite,” Short told me. “Whenever you feel your adrenaline racing, you have to slow down. Stop, breathe, think, act, and, in general, abort. That’s the rule in cave diving.”

  Short is one of the sport’s premier practitioners, with experience as far afield as the Sahara and shipwrecks off Guam. His body is a testament to its rigors: long and arachnid, skin taut over bone, head shaved to shed its last encumbrance. With his rapid-fire talk and glasses that seem to magnify his eyes, he could pass for a street preacher or a pamphleteer. But his absurdist wit was a great gift around a campfire, and his diplomacy often took the edge off Stone’s blunt directives. Gala and Short were a good match: one quiet, the other loquacious; one expert at climbing, the other at diving. Just as Gala could pick his way through Chevé by memory and internal gyroscope, Short could divine a sump’s path from half-conscious clues: the flow of current and its fluctuating temperature, the shape of the walls and ripples in the sand. Still, he took no chances. As they swam from chamber to chamber, the beams of their headlamps needling the dark, he unspooled a three-millimeter line behind him, like Theseus in the Labyrinth.

  An hour later he signaled for Gala to stop. Below them in the sand was the line they’d laid down 15 minutes earlier. The tunnel had led them on a loop. They’d expected the sump to be about 1,000 feet long, but they’d already gone twice that distance, and time was running out. Cave divers like to ration their air supply by a rule of thirds: one part for the way in, another for the way out, and a third in reserve. On a four-hour rebreather, that left them less than half an hour for exploring. The cave was a honeycomb, they realized, with tunnels angling off in every direction and hardly any current to guide them. “There were passages everywhere, everywhere,” Gala recalled. “It was so complex we could spend a year looking.”

  In the end they just picked a tunnel and hoped for the best. When they’d backtracked around the loop, reeling in their line, they came to a kind of four-way intersection. One passage led back to the beginning of the sump, another to the loop behind them, a third to a dead end they’d explored earlier. That left one unexplored passage. It took them up a short corridor, along a rising slope of terraced mustard-colored flowstone, and into a small domed chamber. There was an air bell at the top about the size of a car trunk, so they swam up and took off their helmets and neoprene hoods to talk. They seemed to be at a dead end. They were cold, tired, and disoriented, and their air ration had nearly run out. There was no choice but to head back. “We were just a little overwhelmed by this dive,” Gala told me. Then they heard the waterfall.

  A mile above them, at base camp, Stone was waiting impatiently for their call. This was the pivotal moment in the expedition—the day for which he’d spent four years perfecting gear, recruiting cavers, and raising money. (The total budget for the trip was roughly $350,000, most of it paid for by equipment sponsors and the Discovery Channel.) He had expected Gala and Short’s reconnaissance trip to take less than six hours—two hours to dive the sump, two hours to look around and find a campsite, and another two to swim back and call in—yet nine hours had passed. “There are a bunch of scenarios that could be going on right now,” he told the Discovery cinematographer, Zachary Fink. “Even a one-kilometer swim with fins would take only about an hour. And that was way beyond our limit.”

  Stone looked haggard and thin, his mustache drooping over sallow skin. Weeks of shuttling supplies into the cave had taken a toll on him. He was a strong climber and diver, but he wasn’t a “squeeze freak” like some of the others. His broad, bony shoulders weren’t built for these tunnels. In the tightest fissures he had to take off his helmet just to turn his head, or strip down to his dry suit and wriggle between walls for hundreds of feet. (They called one passage the Contusion Tubes.) “It’s hypothermic as hell down there,” he told me. “The wind is whipping through, the water’s in contact with the rock, and you can just feel the calories being sucked out. It can be more dangerous than a high-altitude peak at twenty-five below.” By the time he’d resurfaced a few days earlier, he was coming down with a flu. Then it rained for three and a half days.

  It was late evening when the call finally came: “Base camp, base camp, base camp!” Stone rushed over to the phone and hit the talk button. “Tell us what happened,” he said. There was a blast of static, then Short’s clipped British accent came crackling over the line. “We have good news and we have complicated news,” he said. “From a point of view of future exploration, complicated is today’s understatement.”

  The waterfall could mean only one thing, Short and Gala knew. They’d reached the end of the sump and the river was flowing nearby. How to get there? When Gala ducked his head underwater and looked around, the chamber looked sealed off. But when he looked again his headlamp picked up an odd texture in the wall to his right. There was a gap in it just below the waterline—wide enough for a person to squeeze through. Gala could tell that his rebreather wouldn’t fit, so he handed it to Short, along with his mask, helmet, and side tanks. “I left him holding all these things with his teeth and both his hands,” he recalled later. Then he held his breath and dove through.

  When he resurfaced on the other side, he was in a fast-flowing canal of clear water. The walls were formed by ancient breakdown piles, their boulders napped in calcite; the low ceiling was hung with stalactites. As he swam, a wide, airy passage opened up ahead, with a large pool in the distance. It glimmered in his headlight. He hiked over to it and swam across, feeling light and buoyant without his rebreather. He could hear the roar of the waterfall growing louder as he went, but an enormous stalagmite blocked the way, with only a thin gap to one side. He stretched an arm and a leg through the opening and shimmied around, thankful again to be rid of his gear. When he was through, he found himself in a great chamber filled with mist and spray, its floor split by a yawning chasm. The river ran into it from the right and fell farther than his light could follow. Across the chamber, 30 or 40 feet away, a huge borehole stretched into the darkness. This is it, Gala thought, the breakthrough they’d imagined. With any luck, it would take them straight to Chevé’s main passage.

  Stone wasn’t so sure. “Is there any place at all over there that you sa
w that would be suitable for a camp?” he asked Short over the phone when the story was done. “Negative. There is not a single flat surface other than the surface of the river.” Stone clutched his head and frowned. The sump was too long. Two thousand feet! They didn’t have enough line down there to rig that distance. Without rigging, most of the team couldn’t dive the sump safely, and without their help Gala and Short couldn’t resupply for the next push. “The whole game had changed,” Stone told me later. “Just diving through wasn’t the game. The game was to get all the support material to the other side. It was like running a war: if you don’t get the food and fuel and ammo to the front line, you’re going to stall out.”

  Only a few dozen people in the world had both the caving expertise and the scuba skills to go this deep in the cave. Of those, 12 had originally agreed to join the expedition. Then the number began to drop. Three died before the expedition began: one on a deep dive in Ireland, another in an underwater crevice in Australia, the third from carbon monoxide poisoning in Cozumel. Three had left early or had not yet arrived. And three had physical limitations: James Brown had gimpy knees, a Mexican diver named Nico Escamilla had a pulled groin muscle, and a veteran diver named Tom Morris had torn a rotator cuff. “It was like getting hit in the head with a two-by-four,” Stone told me. “Oh, crap! We’ve lost most of our divers! The three that are qualified to dive the sump are the two that are down there and me—and, God bless them, Phil and Marcin want to see daylight.”

  It was too late to recruit new divers to the team. The best candidate, a veteran British caver named Jason Mallinson, had joined another expedition, across the river at a cave system called Huautla. “He’s one of the best divers in the world,” Stone told me. “But he has a certain personality—it’s abrasive, and what I really wanted this year was harmony, and I got it.” Stone had planned to join Gala and Short for the last leg of the expedition, to see the very deepest regions of the cave. But without more divers to support them he wasn’t sure it was safe to continue. “They did a fantastic thing there, but it may also be the end of that route,” he said after Short got off the line. “There is no glory in rushing into something like that and losing a friend. It just is not worth it.”