Michel Siffre’s first descent was meant to be a geological expedition. Instead, it became an experiment in what happens when a person loses every ordinary clue to the passing of time. In 1962, the 23-year-old French speleologist entered a cave in the Alps and stayed there alone for 63 days, with no clock, calendar or sunlight. He ate, slept and worked according to signals from his own body while a team outside recorded what happened. By the time he emerged, Siffre believed far less time had passed than actually had. In an email interview by Joshua Foer, published in Cabinet's Summer 2008 issue, a decade later, he repeated the experiment in Texas, remaining underground for 205 days and occasionally falling into a sleep-wake cycle that stretched across almost 48 hours.
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