“ Try to imagine a 80 km long and 50 km wide plateau, erected on a sandstone, shale and granite basement, with edges cut to the punch rising steeply in walls 600 to 700 meters high.

The area may remind of a causse, but a causse which surface, instead of gently undulating, would be bristling with peaks, ridges, spiers, pinnacles, minarets, arrows, pitons and darts distributed without order and with the most disordered fantasy, and separated by chasms, crevices or abysses. [...]

In the most typical places, sharp needles, up to and beyond ten meters, are connected together by narrow ridges limiting deep holes and distributed along the walls in the style of organ pipes . [...]

These beautiful needles of compact limestone ring like bells under the strike of a hammer, of a boot, and some even give an audible sound when the hand, merely patting the rock, clings to one of the thousand asperities of its surface. These asperities, separated by small cavities, create a specific roughness, replicating in small the landforms of the whole area. The edges may be the size of the back of a knife blade ; peaks, even sharper and, if pushed by curiosity, one enters such locations, he has the perpetual anxiety to be injured, damaged or eyed out, whatever the care given to each move. [...]

Caves, large and small, are probably countless, and it may be presumed that when the cavers of old Europe will be tired of digging her underground corners, they will still find, during many generations, enough to feed their curiosity when exploring the Indochinese karst ”.

Louis Cuisinier, February 1928.