Two spelunkers recount their perilous and deadly trek into Mexico's Huautla cave complex, one of the world's deepest caves in this "epic to stand beside the adventure classics. Beyond the Deep is Into Thin Air without the mountain, The Perfect Storm without the sea" (Jeff Long, author of The Descent).

"An extraordinary and heroic account. I shuddered as I read it." —Wade Davis, Explorer-in-Residence, National Geographic Society, author of The Serpent and the Rainbow

The Huautla in Mexico is the deepest cave in the Western Hemisphere, possibly the world. Shafts reach skyscraper-depths, caverns are stadium-sized, and sudden floods can drown divers in an instant.

With a two-decade obsession, William Stone and his forty-four-member team entered the sinkhole at Sotano de San Augustin. The first camp settled two,328 feet below ground in a cavern where headlamps couldn't even illuminate the walls and ceiling. The second camp teetered precariously above an underground canyon where two subterranean rivers collided.

But beyond that lay the unknown territory: a flooded corridor that had blocked all previous comers, claimed a diver's life, and drove the rest of the team back-except for William Stone and Barbara am Ende, who forged on for eighteen more days, with no hope of rescue, to set the record for the deepest cave dive in the Western Hemisphere.

"This account of a 1994 caving expedition in southern Mexico produces what adventure readers crave: danger, dissension, death, and ultimate success. . . . The technicalities of this death-defying recreation, and the raw honesty with which this episode is depicted, will win over extreme-sport fans." —Booklist