“That’s not a cave.”

I looked into the depression that was only partly covered by the sweet-smelling shrubbery. This whole place had burned badly last summer, you could tell. There were scorched tree-stumps poking out of the rapidly regrowing heather and thyme. But the place was still so tinder-dry that naked flames were completely banned that summer across the whole national park.

“Je t’ajure, elle est là!”

I jump in, feeling a bit of a dickhead. I’m sweating and uncomfortable in my caving oversuit and boots. A quick glance around and still I don’t see the entrance.

“Put your hand down there.”

I dangle my fingers where he pointed and I could feel the welcoming, cool exhalation from the cave.

“That’s it? Tell me you’re joking!”

Hanging over the empty, black void on a spider’s thread, the sequence of events which brought me here are careering through my head like a train-crash. A schoolboy error, nothing more. So foolish. And my annoying inability to admit that sometimes I am wrong. Oh yea, and that foolish ego-driven bravado. We’re all young once. I just prayed silently that I’d live to get a little older.

With hindsight, of course I know what “spéléo” means. It simply hadn’t cropped up in the French course that I’d just finished. I saw the ropes and harnesses, karabiners and helmets and assumed this was a climbing club. If I’d looked a moment longer before plunging in headlong, I’d have seen the acetylene lamps and the tell-tale, all-pervading mud that I’d later appreciate as part and parcel of a caver’s life.

I’d come to Marseille not only for the prestige of studying at the Grande Ecole but for the lifestyle. I’d just done two tough years of Chemistry at York Uni and wanted a bit of spice back in my life. I could speak French (after a fashion) and wanted to travel a while before I finished my degree and joined the Army. With the Calanques in my back garden, I was going to have a great time climbing and trekking. Oh, and do a bit of studying too, to keep my tutors happy.

But I hadn’t joined a fucking climbing club, had I?