"Cave Pearls of Meghalaya: A Cave Inventory Covering the Jaintia
Hills, Meghalaya, India. Volume 1, Pala Range and Kopili Valley."
Edited by Thomas Arbenz. By the editor, Matzendorf, Switzerland; 2012.
ISBN 978-3-033-03637-6. A4 (approx. US letter) size, 265 pages
hardbound, plus disk. $45. Order for $70 postpaid via PayPal to [email protected]
.
Meghalaya, an Indian state sandwiched between Assam to the north and
Bangladesh to the south, it the wettest place on earth. Two towns in
its karst receive over ten meters of monsoon rains every year. Rain
makes caves. Until the early 1990s, only a couple of caves more than a
kilometer long were known in India. Then various foreign cavers,
mainly from Europe, and the Meghalaya Adventurers Association formed
the Caving in the Abode of the Clouds Project and started
systematically exploring and surveying caves in Meghalaya. In 2006,
their interest was drawn to the Pala range of hills, where a village
headman claimed that Krem Tyngheng was 20 kilometers long. Another
local, whose wide knowledge of the area was perhaps due to his having
wives in seven villages, claimed that the cave ran all the way through
the hills. It turned out that they were both absolutely right.
This book, edited and largely written by Swiss caver Thomas Arbenz,
chief cartographer for the project since 2002, is another of those
beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated reports that seem to
come almost exclusively from Europe. Following an overview of the
geology and geography of the area, there are chapters on the
expeditions of 2010, 2011, and 2012, which focused entirely on the
area covered by this book, followed by three chapters on the cave
biology of the area. Is there a shorter binomial in all of biology
than the bat Ia io? Then the "inventory" starts on page 108. All the
large and small caves are described, with the longest section, 28
pages, on the 21.25-kilometer Tyngheng–Dieng Jem System. There are
regional line plots of the caves superimposed on aerial images, as
well as nicely drawn detailed maps of all but the least significant
caves. Just a couple of the maps include profiles; these are
horizontal river caves, explored, needless to say, during the dry
season. Only samples of the maps are printed for the longest caves,
with six full maps as PDF files on the disk inside the back cover. The
PDFs can be a bit difficult to navigate on screen, because they have
to be viewed at nearly actual size to see the rich detail and they are
up to about 100 inches square. But they're still a lot better than an
88-square-foot paper map, if such a thing could even be made.
A bit pricey by the time the heavy book is mailed from Switzerland,
but a model project report and valuable reference. Buy it so that
Arbenz can afford to publish volume 2.
--Bill Mixon
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Bigamy is having one wife too many. So is monogamy.
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