"As the sun moved across the sky and we drank our coffee, I noticed her observations growing more sombre. The cave experience was not something that she “would recommend to anyone,” she said, adding, “I didn’t exactly lose consciousness, but the darkness saps you of life.” She went on, “The solitude, the social uprooting, it consumes you. Or, to put it a better way, you eat—you down nutrients—but you consume yourself.” A year and a half in the Motril cave had been survivable, she continued, but if she’d stayed underground for five years she would have died. She had brought down some elastic bands to exercise with, but she had quickly lost the will to use them. “I had a scale for measuring my weight,” she remembered. “I would do ten pulls on the bands, and then I’d have to lie down because I had nothing left. I’d wake up and I’d lost weight.”

At the beginning, Flamini had written a journal on the computer and shared it with the researchers, but this didn’t last. She initially tried to keep track of the passing days, but by the middle of the second month her sense of time had become thoroughly distorted. The scientific experiments also faltered. Before descending, she had promised to use the computer to do the Iowa Gambling Task and other cognitive exercises at regular intervals, but Roldán-Tapia told me that after a couple of weeks Flamini started sending messages “complaining that the computer didn’t work.” The researcher added, “Then she began making up random or imaginary passwords.” The Time Cave group asked the Motril spelunkers to leave a request for Flamini to resume using the computer, but she ignored it.

One time, Flamini, desperate for contact, told a story aloud to the Motril team through one of the security cameras—which the volunteers monitored—even though they did not transmit sound. But she never did this again, concluding that it violated the spirit of her pledge of solitude. She told me that she could remember few details of what happened after the first few months. Ninety-five per cent of her time in the cave, she estimated, had been spent just sitting or lying in the darkness or in the dim light from her battery-powered lamps. “I went into hibernation,” she said''.

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