On New Year’s Day 2005, Australian David Shaw travelled halfway around the world to a steep water-filled crater in the Kalahari Desert. His destination: nearly 900 feet below the surface. His mission: to recover the remains of a diver who disappeared a decade earlier. What happened a week later at Bushman’s Hole is the stuff of nightmarish drama.
Bushman’s Hole, Kalahari Desert, 8 January 2005. Shaw prepares for one of the most daring and ambitious dives ever attempted. Wearing some of the most advanced diving equipment ever developed, he descended. Just below the surface was a narrow fissure in the dolomite bottom of the basin. He slipped through the opening and disappeared from sight, leaving behind the world of light and life.
A second diver descended through the same crack in the stone. Don Shirley was Shaw’s friend and frequent dive partner, one of the few people in the world qualified to follow where Shaw was about to go. In the community of cave diving, Shirley was a master among masters.
Twenty-five minutes later, one of the men was dead. The other was in mortal peril, and would spend the next ten hours struggling to survive, existing literally from breath to breath.
Written with the full cooperation of the surviving families, Raising the Dead is a true story about the perilous sport of cave diving – its culture, its cult following, and the remarkable individuals who pursue it. It’s about two devoted marriages and coming to terms with the dangers undertaken by a loved one. And it is about friendship and trust, put to their ultimate test.
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