John Pint: TELL US ABOUT LA BOCA DEL DIABLO (THE DEVILS MOUTH).

Pedro Hitz: That’s the name the local Indians give it. It’s a pit, mainly vertical, next to a river near the town of Taxco. Guerrero, and surely crated by the same river. It’s also known as the Meléndez Pit, named for a family of rich merchants said to use this hole as a convenient dump for their enemies’ bodies. However, we found no human bones down there, only those of cows.

J. Pint: IN WHAT YEAR DIO YOU MARE YOUR DESCENT?

P. Hitz: A long time ego, back in 1954. But I still have pictures, articles and a sketch of the cave. We were a group of military doctors, not scientists or such and we called our outings movidas (“moves”, as in a chess) because we moved a lot, especially in this case. We had heard that some Americans were coming to explore this pit and that spurred us on because we didn’t want to take second place to any gang of foreigners!

J. Pint: WHAT KIND OF DESCENDING GEAR DID YOU USE?

P. Hitz: Seeing it was a Vertical Cave, we decided to hire a tow truck with a winch. We would run the cable through a pulley supported by two tree trunks right across the mouth of the Diablo Pit, so we could go down in comfort and, above all, so we could get back out afterwards!

J. Pint: AT THAT TIME DID YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW DEEP IT WAS?

P. Hitz: No, there was a rumor that it was over 400 meters, which worried us because tow trucks never have 400 meters of cable available for hauling cars out of canyons. So we contacted the rep of a Swedish steel cable company and asked if he would help us with the cable, because we weren’t exactly millionaires. And the manager says, “don’t you know that 400 meters of cable, even if it was thin, would weigh a —— of a lot?” It was some tremendous amount of kilos, so we said we’d first see if the tow truck cable was long enough, which proved to be the case, seeing that the total depth of the cave came to 175 meters and the part where we needed the cable was less than 85. Se we used the winch and the pulley and we acquired military parachute harnesses for connecting us to the hook. First one person went down; then we saw we could raise or lower two or even three at a time.

J. Pint: HOW MANY PERSONS WENT DOWN ALL TOGETHER?

P. Hitz: Oh, it was at least eight. By the way, that reminds me of e funny story. Our group leader had a very jittery wife and he ended up having to swear to her that he wouldn’t go down into that awful hole. So he was running the winch and out of despair or misery at not being able to descend, he began to consume enormous quantities of tequila, along with the owner of the tow truck. After a while, the two of them were so drunk that the most dangerous thing about the whole expedition turned out to be the way those two were running the winch!

J. Pint: WHAT KIND OF LIGHTS DID YOU USE?

P. Hitz: Ah! That was interesting naturally, we had our gas lamps, but one of the doctors rigged what he called a Bengal Flare. Now, he was an ophthalmologist, so he had kind of gotten out of his field! He also invented some kind of torches made with magnesium, but more about that later.

Along with all that gear, we had hired a small electrical power plant plus plenty of wire. We had the generator up above one the wires running deep into the pit. Naturally, because the wires were rather thin, we weren’t getting much light at all down at the bottom. What we were getting, though, were terrible shocks every time we touched those wires!

And then we had a set of army surplus field telephones, older than Methuselah, the kind with a crank, you know, and these things were also zapping us with shocks every time we touched them!

Just to make matters worse, at noon on Sunday, the owner of the lighting system carne along to ask for his generator back, which he needed in order to advertise that evenings movie at his theatre. So after that these who went exploring from the halfway camp set up at the bottom of the first drop, had to use the magnesium torches for light.

Well, you can imagine the surprise of the people up on the pulley platform when, a little later, thick clouds of white smoke suddenly came billowing up from below. It was. ¡Mire panic: “THE CAVE IS ON FIRE! EVERYBODY OUT ON THE DOUBLE! That’s when they started hauling us up in clusters of three, figuring they were saving our lives! And all the ruckus and all the smoke were just due to those damned magnesium torches!

J. Pint: WERE YOU THE FIRST ONES TO GO DOWN THIS PIT?

P. Hitz: Well, strictly speaking, not the first, because others had entered it in the past, but none had ever gone very deep.

J. Pint: DID YOU FIND ANYTHING INTERESTING INSIDE?

P. Hitz: No, but on the surface we found a gigantic boa, but we had nothing to tie it down with, so one guy took off his belt and went after it with his pants practically falling off. The poor snake ended up getting stoned to death.

J. Pint: WAS THERE ANY WATER IN THE CAVE?

P. Hitz: Nope. Dry.

J. Pint: BATS?

P. Hitz: No bats either.

J. Pint: WELL, At LEAST IN THIS PIT NOBODY GOT HISTOPLASMOSIS

P. Hitz: No, but in one of our early explorations of the Caves of Cacahuamilpa, the majority of our group contracted Histo.

In those days nobody knew a thing about its origin; I mean that it’s caused by guano. We had been climbing all over the place when we stopped to eat, still inside. And there we were, eating and drinking with dirty hands and so on.

A week after the caving trip, I had to go to Monterrey on business. I felt in great shape the whole time. On my return, I discovered that all the others were in the hospital, seriously ill, and that they were being treated for pneumonia. The worst off was a fellow from Switzerland.

Because the Mexicans in the group were military doctors, they heard of histoplasmosis and suspected that that was what they had (this malady has been known for 50 years or more). Since the military hospital had recently received medicines for Histo, all of my friends were treated for it except the poor Swiss. He had lost contact with the rest of us and had been under the care of other doctors who hadn’t the faintest idea what he had. But later we got him the right medicine.

It’s interesting that this was the first time a case of histoplasmosis was recorded in Mexico. That was in 52 or ’54, before we went down the Boca del Diablo.