Diving into Darkness: A True Story of Death and Survival

On New Year's Day, 2005, David Shaw traveled halfway around the world on a journey that took him to a steep crater in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa, a site known as Bushman's Hole. His destination was nearly nine hundred feet below the surface. On January 8 he descended into the water. About fifteen feet below the surface was a fissure in the bottom of the basin, barely wide enough to admit him. He slipped through the opening and disappeared from sight, leaving behind the world of light and life. Then David's friend, Don Shirley, descended through the same crack in the stone. 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.