Space Invaders.(Entering the Stone)(Chauvet Cave)(The Mind in the Cave)(Book Review)

"It's a torture chamber, I think, a too-small casket tilted foot-up and you're the one inside," Barbara Hurd writes in Entering the Stone (Houghton Mifflin). Hurd, a caver for the past ten years, describes the difficulty of crawling through narrow subterranean passageways, called "flatteners" or "squeezes." While tourists visit "show caves" like Howe Caverns in upstate New York, Hurd seeks out the more adventurous "wild" caves, and finds herself "trying to memorize escape" from them. In a marble cave in Oregon, she stops to press her hand into a wall of moonmilk, a calcite deposit with a cream-cheese consistency. But cavers are careful to leave the underground environment much as they found it. Despite collapsed rocks, fossilized bones, and the occasional piece of litter, wild caves may be among the cleanest places on earth. ...