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The passages soon became narrower and we had to wait. Sasha and Olga had already passed a unbelievably narrow joint and entered another fissure passage for mapping. For security reasons Katja and I listened to every noise and comment they made. Behind us, another steep passage lead into the depth. While Katja was waiting, I crawled down. After about 20 m the passage ended. Here former visitors had tried to dig themselves through the clay. After all, they could make it through 8m sticky clay, not bad! Another 2 meters maybe, or more? No one knows what´s there underneath.
After a couple of hours we got back to the surface, frozen to the marrow. We were hungry and dirty. Anyhow, the first impressions were overwhelming.The next days we were busy with taking pictures, filming, mapping, assaying and setting up the climate station. On the antepenultimate day of the expedition, we saw smoke arising on the other side of the valley. After a short talk we were on our way to play fire brigade. A piece of woodland of several hundred square meters was on fire. If we hadn´t been able to stop the fire, it would have reached our camp and we would have needed to abort our expedition. We were all conscious about the risk and started to eradicate young trees to hit the flames. It was a sisyphean labor, because all the time new trees went up in flames. The ground was glowing and beneath the moss the fire was unquenchable. The smoke took our breathes away and only slowly we could take control over parts of the fire. But up the hill there was no chance of putting out the fire, because a faint wind drove it on and on, tree trunks were exploding and it was impossible to approach. Only a small part of the fire was extinguished. Totally exhausted, we could be sure that it would not reach our little camp. The following days the air was smokefilled and we needed to check every night how close the flames had approached.