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insisted they would still be morally responsible. He was too young, they told him, too inexperienced, and above all too optimistic. Even after he made a year of detailed preparations, some still maintained the whole idea was nothing but a stunt. The turning point came when he delivered a lecture on his previous expeditions to his friends at the Club Martel potholing group. They saw that he was serious and agreed to act as a support team. Still he would need funding and written permission. He made numerous visits to the offices of officials where he would sit and wait, only to be told after an hour or more that the person in charge was too busy to see him. Michel started to feel these office visits might require more perseverance than the expedition itself.
    While he negotiated all the bureaucratic obstacles, Micheltheorised about the experiment he was hoping to carry out on his own mind. He speculated that time existed on three levels: biological time, which stretched across many years; perceived time, created by the brain and conditioned by light and dark; and the objective time as shown on a clock. His interest was in comparing the final two. Specifically he wanted to discover through extreme self-experimentation whether humans have an inner clock that somehow synchs with ‘clock time’ even without any external cues. He also wanted to know how time would feel . On past trips underground he had found that time warped. The subterranean world was so absorbing that whenever he returned to the surface he was astonished to discover how much time had passed.
    Eventually Michel raised the necessary funds and persuaded the authorities to let him go ahead. Although he would ultimately be all alone in the cavern, during the preparations he had a team of people helping him. For several weeks beforehand his friends from the potholing club stayed with him in his parents’ house, preparing equipment and supplies during the day and sleeping in the hallways at night. Meanwhile Michel had been instructed to rest. The team loaded the equipment onto trucks and drove as near to the cave as they could. When the trucks got snowed in they even built a primitive telefiric railway with a cable and brakes for moving the heaviest items. They marched through the snow for hours at a time carrying the rest of the supplies to the mouth of the cavern. They negotiated the difficult descent and ensured that Michel would have all the equipment and supplies he needed. Once theunderground camp was set up, two of the men spent three nights in the tent as a trial.
    Michel said goodbye to his mother. Again she told him how afraid she was. Again he told her how hopeful he felt. He spent the last night before his descent in a tent at base-camp with the idea that he would feel rested before his descent. Instead his fear kept him awake, and when he emerged from his sleeping bag next morning he had slept so little that his bones ached. As he began the climb up to the mouth of the cavern he was struck by an attack of amoebic dysentery. Things weren’t looking good. Still he gave the team strict instructions not to join him underground until two months had passed, signing a statement immediately before his descent, which declared that during the first month no one must attempt to rescue him, whatever the circumstances. Finally he handed over his wristwatch and began his descent with the team. They checked that the tent and camp bed were as he wanted them, taught him how to change the batteries powering the light bulb and the telephone, took some samples of ice from the glacier and then they left. Calls of ‘Au revoir ’ echoed down the chamber. Michel heard them pull the ladders up. Until they came to fetch him in two months he really was alone. Did his mind or body contain a clock that could judge the passage of time, and would he continue to be able to guess when a minute had passed?
    Before we return to Michel at the end of his two lonely months, I want to look