The deadline has passed, I don’t have time to do all the research and I need to draw some diagrams before embarking on the continuing journey into the saga of helictites.  We examined some mechanisms in the last ANDYSEZ - and you were promised some more on this.  Well, you are not going to get them!

What you are going to get is a quote from the incomparable Norbert Casteret who probably wrote more books about his experiences than any other caving author.  His books launched many, including myself, into caving careers.  Even now you will often find Ten Years Under the Earth in its red-covered Penguin Edition in second-hand bookshops - it must have had a tremendous print-run - and in libraries.  Casteret had many adventures - however, it would seem that many of his practices would not meet with the approval of a late-twentieth century Australasian cave manager - or meet the ASF’s Minimal Impact Caving and Safety Codes!

He, and/or his translator, had a vivid writing style and great breadth of knowledge including that of classical antiquity.  The style is perhaps too flowery and erudite for modern audiences.  In an effort to get me interested in this compulsory foreign language, French, whilst I was in high school, my father made me read the works of Casteret, Martel, Trombe, Joly and Chevalier in their native tongue.  It was an interesting, but largely fruitless exercise from a high school point of  view but look where it led!

Casteret died in 1986 or 1987 and there is an interesting last interview and obituary in the Transactions of the British Cave Research Association in mid-1987 - if my memory serves me correctly - if anyone knows the correct reference or has copies I would like to hear from them. Try to get hold of Casteret’s books - they are worth dipping into.  Here is what he had to say about helictites:

In a few rare caverns there are extraordinary irregular stalactites, apparently defying the laws of gravity, and entirely apart from the usual blade (tapering) shape; they are called helictites...... Their chemical composition is that of ordinary stalactites, but the laws governing their formation and structure are still almost a complete mystery. There are several theories, all quite possibly wrong. These stalactites are a flamboyance of nature,. they are disconcerting and fairy-like, daring and fantastic. They are usually thin, almost thread-like, hanging vertically from the ceiling; suddenly, for no reason, they bend sharply, rise at an acute angle or in a spiral, fling out tentacles in all directions; they cling to neighbouring stalactites, only to free themselves again, and sometimes touch the ceiling from which they hang.

Helictites, of course, are the work of calcium carbonate dissolved in water, but know one knows how the work is done.  There has been talk of air currents, of capillary or crystallization phenomena, of a colloid state. The most likely hypothesis seems to be that of some yet unexplained kind of osmosis.  Osmosis in plants and colloid solutions in a displacement of molecules despite gravity and inertia.

But osmosis has been observed in only the animal and vegetable kingdoms: must we carry it over to the mineral kingdom, breaking down an otherwise inviolable barrier, and likening inorganic to organic cells?

The ancients imagined this possibility, and boldly took the step which gives us pause: they believed in a sort of mineral life.  It may have been a dream, ignorance or prescience; but already we have had to return to such ancient concepts as transmutation and catalysis (from alchemy), and opotherapy [treatment with gland extracts] in medicine. Must we explain helictites by the ancient and no doubt empirical concept of “vegetation of minerals”?

Abbe A. Glory, a distinguished speleologist, has proposed an ingenious theory, too technical to explain here, based on the laws of equilibrium, capillarity, and convection, and on evaporation, crystallization, and gravity. (From Ten Years Under the Earth by Norbert Casteret; first published (in French) in 1933; first published in English in 1939, translated and edited by Burrows Massey; Penguin Edition, 1952; pp 149-50).

I have been asked to bundle together and make available all the ANDYSEZs in one lump. Before embarking on this project, which requires considerable editing and re-formatting, I would like to know if there is any enthusiasm for this out there in the real world.  Please let me know your views. [No response - except from Kent]