TO HELL AND BACK

摘要

Bill Stone has'invented diving gear and roving robots to explore the deepest - and deadliest - caves on earth. In the icy water 4,500 feet below Mexico he had to figure out how to bring his dead friend home. "Ian drowned." In a cave 4,500 feet beneath Oaxaca, Mexico, with an underground waterfall roaring in the background, Bill Stone didn't hear those words as much as he sensed them. He knew that the odds of survival at close to a mile deep aren't great for even the strongest cavers, a chiseled superset of explorers who routinely haul 180-pound loads down 65-foot vertical shafts, live for weeks underground, and dive through bone-chilling water. Mapping the last uncharted land on earth is a dangerous proposition. One slip, one momentary lapse of concentration, and you die.