James M. Tabor - 006 Blind Descent - Chapter 02.2 - Stone | Текст песни

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• James M. Tabor
• 006 Blind Descent - Chapter 02.2 - Stone

Eleven days after the accident, expedition members carried Chris Yeager’s corpse (in what condition can scarcely be imagined) up a short distance to a sandy alcove where an appropriate burial site had been located. They dug a proper grave, interred Yeager with an expedition T-shirt, conducted a Christian burial service, and erected a tombstone with words inscribed in carbide-lamp soot.
The body problem had been solved, but the Mexican authorities remained agitated. Local officials understood that expeditions could make important discoveries, which in turn could stimulate tourism, as had happened in, say, the Central American countries with Aztec and Mayan ruins. The expeditions also contributed cash to local economies when they bought supplies, rented buildings, and hired local porters.
But the cavers also caused unrest among residents, most of whom believed, despite the best efforts of Stone and other leaders, that the gringos were stealing gold and precious artifacts. The locals objected more strenuously to cavers’ incursions for religious and spiritual reasons. To them, the caves were home to deities, as sacred as cathedrals and mosques are to Christians and Muslims. The idea of foreigners living in them, defecating and urinating and having sex and leaving garbage, was highly offensive—as those activities would have been in the Vatican or the Grand Mosque of Mecca.
A caver’s death was more than enough to upset the apple cart. The cavers knew that the law was different down here. People were sent to jail for any reason, and sometimes for no reason. And there might have been worse places than Mexican prisons, but they were very close to the bottom of the list.
The expedition leaders were ordered to report to a police station in nearby Cuicatlán. There, the attorney general for the state of Oaxaca grilled Stone long and hard over the telephone. Amazingly, the official demanded that Stone and the others produce Yeager’s body, and there were hints about jail if this was not done. Eventually, Stone convinced the man that he could well have more bodies on his hands if he insisted on seeing Yeager’s. All right, the attorney general growled, but if anybody else dies from now on, a body will be produced—or else. This had never been required before. To Stone’s way of thinking, it was absurd. It was also, he felt with some resentment, another consequence of Yeager’s recklessness.
Surprisingly, the authorities did not evict the team from Cheve or Mexico, and for a brief while Stone thought they had all dodged a bullet. But then a new request to end the expedition arose, and it came from a source as undeniable as the Mexican police, though for different reasons.
The request came not from Oaxaca but from Indiana. Chris Yeager’s parents felt that it would be inappropriate to have cavers shambling back and forth over their son’s fresh grave in the sandy passage. Cheve was now a burial site; time should be allowed to pass before active exploration resumed.
The expedition abided by the family’s wishes, though it meant ending an effort, only recently begun, for which many had sacrificed time and money and had already put themselves repeatedly at great personal risk. In truth, had it been up to Bill Stone alone, the expedition would have continued. Aware of that, some were appalled. How could you keep going—it was just a cave, after all—with the body of a freshly killed young man in there, and on your conscience as well?
Stone operated in a different frame. He liked to point out that ships coming to the New World routinely lost 30 percent or more of their crews. Nor, he said, had deaths ever stopped explorers like Scott, Amundsen, or Lewis and Clark. Turning to more recent efforts, he also derided—publicly—NASA’s timid approach to space exploration. But the decision at Cheve was not his alone to make.
As word of Chris Yeager’s death and its aftermath circulated, it caused a rift in the caving community. A serious, science-minded minority, familiar with the precedents of exploration history, tended to find t

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