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We have arrived, then, at the entrance of
the Haunted Chambers—a distance of barely
half a mile from the mouth of the cave; and
we have still seven or eight miles of wonders
before us. To describe these in detail would
be an endless undertaking, and, to the reader
a dull and unprofitable one—as no description,
however minute, could possibly convey
accurate ideas of them. In fact, an extended
description of a cave would, in any case,
prove wearisome. The components—the
elements of caves are few and simple—rocks,
stalactites, pools, pits, and darkness make up

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all their variety; and however interestingly,
and even variously, these may be combined
to the eye of an actual spectator, the descriptions
of them must consist of repetitions
of the same words—of changes rung over
and over again upon the same ideas. My
aim is, therefore, not so much to describe the
Mammoth Cave in detail, as to present a
general idea of it, pausing to dwell, here and
there, upon features that are most important
and interesting, and upon the impressions
produced by them on the visiter's mind.

But let us, before resuming our explorations,
say a word of the atmosphere of the
cave; which, having been, at the entrance,
pronounced so icy, it may be feared, still retains
its hyperborean character. It is icy,
however, as we soon discover, only by contrast.
The transition from an atmosphere
of 90 or 95 degrees without, into one of
about 55 or 60 within the cave, may well
make us shiver for a moment. The average
temperature of the Mammoth Cave is about
58 degrees Fahr. In summer it rises a few
degrees higher, and in winter sinks as many
below. It is, therefore, always temperate.
Its purity, judging from its effects upon the
lungs, and from other circumstances, is

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remarkable, though in what its purity consists
I know not. But be its composition what it
may, it is certain, that its effects upon the
spirits and bodily powers of visiters are extremely
exhilarating; and that it is not less
salubrious than enlivening. The nitre-diggers
were a famously healthy set of men: it was a
common and humane practice to employ
labourers of enfeebled constitutions, who were
soon restored to health and strength, though
kept at constant labour; and more joyous,
merry fellows were never seen. The oxen,
of which several were kept, day and night, in
the cave hauling the nitrous earth, were, after
a month or two of toil, in as fine condition
for the shambles as if fattened in the stall.
The ordinary visiter, though rambling a
dozen hours or more over paths of the roughest
and most difficult kinds, is seldom conscious
of fatigue, until he returns to the upper
air; and then it seems to him, at least in the
summer season, that he has exchanged the
atmosphere of paradise for that of a charnel
warmed by steam, all, without, is so heavy,
so dank, so dead, so mephitic. Awe, and
even apprehension, if that has been felt, soon
yield to the influence of the delicious air of
the cave; and, after a time, a certain jocund

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feeling is found mingled with the deepest impressions
of sublimity, which there are so
many objects to awake. I recommend all
broken-hearted lovers and dyspeptic dandies
to carry their complaints to the Mammoth
Cave, where they will undoubtedly find themselves
“translated” into very buxom and
happy persons, before they are aware of it.

In the Grand Gallery, opposite the entrance
of the Haunted Chambers, are, as was
previously mentioned, the ruins of the old
nitre-works—leaching-vats, pump frames, and
lines of wooden pipes. Of the last there are
two different ranges, one of which was formerly
used for bringing fresh water from the
dripping-spring to the vats; the other for forcing
it, when saturated with the salt, back to
the furnaces at the mouth of the cave. These
pipes, now mouldering with dry-rot, serve at
present no other purpose than to amuse visiters;
they are acoustical telegraphs, through
which the adventurer who has penetrated so
far, can transmit to his more timid friend at
the entrance an assurance that he is yet in
safety. A whisper bears the intelligence:
even a sigh, breathed into the tube, falls as
distinctly on the ear half a mile off as if the

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friend who breathed it were reclining at the
listener's elbow.

At this place, the roof of the Grand Gallery,
perhaps thirty or thirty-five feet high,
suddenly rises to about the height of fifty,
which it however preserves for a distance of
only fifty or sixty feet, when it again sinks to
its former level. The break thus made in
the ceiling, forms a part of the continuous
lines of the Haunted Chambers, which may
be considered as an independent cave, running
at right angles with the Mammoth, and
above it; although, dipping downward, as it
crosses from right to left, it has broken
through into the latter. It can be entered
only on the right hand, where it opens in the
wall, fifteen or more feet from the floor; a
wide and lofty passage, cumbered with rocks,
the chief of which is the Tower Rock,—a
massive block, that looks, when viewed from
below, the guide perched, flambeau in hand,
on the top, like some old Saxon strong-hold
not yet in ruins. You see this cave continued
also on the left hand, where is a gap
in the wall still wider and higher, but choked
up by an immense mound of coarse sand
and gravel, impacted and hardened by time,
which has entirely obliterated the passage.

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Curiosity has not yet attempted to dig a
path through this barrier, heaped up by some
mighty flood of old days; though a few hours'
labor might perhaps disclose a new batch of
wonders and mysteries. Clambering up the
huge sand-heap, till you reach what from
below seemed the ceiling, you perceive on
one hand a broad cornice-work like that seen
in the Vestibule, which runs from the chokedup
passage clear across the Grand Gallery,
until it is lost in the entrance of the Haunted
Chambers opposite. Surveying this cornice-work
more closely, you find that it consists
of a broad horizontal plate of rock, forming
a gallery, or bridge, by which you may walk
across the Grand Gallery, immediately under
its roof, into the Haunted Chambers, landing
on the top of the Tower Rock. But it
is an Al-Sirat,—a bridge for disembodied
spirits, rather than mortals of flesh and bone,
to traverse. It has an ugly inclination or
dip downwards, and looks as if expressly
contrived for dropping ambitious personages
into the horrible profound below. Shall we
enter the Haunted Chambers by this highway
of the dauntless—the Bridge Gallery, so narrow,
so treacherous, so dizzy? Not if we
were as solidipous as an elephant; not if we

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had air-pumps to our feet, like lizards and
house-flies. The broad ladder laid against
the wall, rickety and somewhat rungless
though it be, and leading humbly, a lubberway,
to the foot of the Tower, is more to
our own taste. It is but six or seven wellstretched
steps from rung to rung, and we
are in the Haunted Chambers, whose name
itself fills us with expectant awe.

Our guide leaves us to admire alone the
gulf-like abyss of the Grand Gallery, now
under our feet; he has stolen away in advance,
and his steps are no longer heard clattering
along the rocky path. But hark! what
sound is that, like the deep bell of a cathedral,
or the gong of a theatre, booming in the
distance, peal after peal, clang after clang,
so solemn, so wild, so strange? A walk,
with a few stumbles and tumbles—we have
not yet our cave-legs (there are cave-legs as
well as sea-legs)—reveals the mystery; and
we discover our conductor standing under a
pendent stalactite, thumping it with great enthusiasm
and a big stone, and filling the sursounding
vaults with the clangour of his flinty
drum. This is one of the many bells (so
called) which the Mammoth Cave, in common
with most other caves, possesses.

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We have reached, then, the abode of stalactites?
Ay, here they are, pillars old and dry
(for the oozing springs that formed them
have long since vanished), venerable and
majestic columns, once perhaps white and
ghastly, like so many giants in winding-sheets,
but now black, withered, and mummy-like,
begrimed with smoke, that has been fastening
around them for many generations. Here
we see them in groves, looking like the trunks
of an old forest at midnight, the rough concretions
on the low roof seeming not unlike
the umbrage of thick-matted boughs; there
they appear singly, or in cosy family groups—
Noibe and her children, Dian and her
nymphs, or any such mythologic party—that
Nature, like an idle sculptor, began, a thousand
years ago, to hew out of stone, without,
however, hewing enough to enable us to guess
what might have been her real intentions.

The name of the Haunted Chambers, however
poetical it may be, is incorrect, inasmuch
as it conveys the idea of a series of
different chambers; whereas this branch of
the cave consists of but a single passage,
fifty or sixty feet wide and half a mile long,
leading to a lower branch, which is of equal
extent, though of inferior width. The whole

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length of the Haunted Chambers is, therefore,
one mile. The upper branch is chiefly remarkable
on account of its stalactites; at the
foot of one of which—the Arm-chair, as it is
called, from having a very royal seat hollowed
in its side—is a little basin or pool of
stone, that once received a drip of water
strongly charged with sulphur, from the roof
above. It is now dry, the spring having
gradually sealed up the crack through which
it formerly flowed. Another remarkable feature
of this branch is seen in its ceiling, which,
except in the immediate neighbourhood of the
stalactitic formations, where it is studded over
with concretions of all imaginable shapes,
is surprisingly flat and smooth, and in some
places white, looking as if it had been actually
finished off by the plasterer. This is
particularly observable in a place called the
Register Room, where, the roof being low
enough for the purpose, visiters frequently
trace their names with the smoke of a candle;
and many hundreds of such records of vanity
are already to be seen deforming the ceiling.
Its smoothness is owing to an incrustation or
deposit of calcareous matter on the surface of
the rock; though how it could ever be deposited
so regularly may well be wondered.

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Within two hundred yards of the termination
of this Upper Branch of the Haunted
Chambers, the visiter finds himself suddenly
plunging down a steep of loose red sand,
poetically entitled the Lover's Leap, into a
hollow; at the bottom of which, in the left
hand wall, is a very narrow but lofty fissure,
the Devil's Elbow, winding through the wall
and leading into the Lower Branch; where,
under the roots of the stalactites that pillar
the branch above, he may spend an hour
or two among domes, pits, and sounding
springs that come spouting or showering down
from the roof, with the name, if not the grandeur
and beauty, of waterfalls. The great
Dome—or Bonaparte's Grand Dome, as the
guides delight to call it—is a lofty excavation,
in figure of a truncated cone, in the solid
roof, from which a prodigious mass of rocks
must have fallen to make it. These rocks
are, however, no where to be seen; the floor
is flat and solid below. They must have been
swept away by some raging flood; or, it may
be, that there was formerly, below the dome,
a pit, into which they fell, the pit being thus
filled up, and its entrance gradually obliterated
by incrustation.

The Haunted Chambers are said to owe

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their name to an adventure that befell one of
the miners in former days, which is thus related.—
In the Lower Branch is a room called
the Salts Room, which produces considerable
quantities of the Sulphate of Magnesia, or of
Soda, we forget which—a mineral that the
proprietor of the cave did not fail to turn to
account. The miner in question was a new
and raw hand—of course neither very well acquainted
with the cave itself, nor with the approved
modes of averting or repairing accidents,
to which, from the nature of their occupation,
the miners were greatly exposed.
Having been sent, one day, in charge of an
older workman, to the Salts Room to dig a
few sacks of the salt, and finding that the path
to this sequestered nook was pefectly plain,
and that, from the Haunted Chambers being
a single, continuous passage, without branches,
it was impossible to wander from it, our hero
disdained, on his second visit, to seek or accept
assistance, and trudged off to his work alone.
The circumstance being common enough, he
was speedily forgotten by his brother miners;
and it was not until several hours after, when
they all left off their toil for the more agreeable
duty of eating their dinner, that his absence
was remarked, and his heroical

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resolution to make his way alone to the Salts Room
remembered. As it was apparent, from the
time he had been gone, that some accident
must have happened him, half a dozen men, the
most of them negroes, stripped half naked,
their usual working costume, were sent to
hunt him up, a task supposed to be of no great
difficulty, unless he had fallen into a pit. In
the meanwhile, the poor miner, it seems, had
succeeded in reaching the Salts Room, filling
his sack, and retracing his steps half way
back to the Grand Gallery; when, finding the
distance greater than he thought it ought to
be, the conceit entered his unlucky brain that
he might perhaps be going wrong. No sooner
had the suspicion struck him, than he fell into
a violent terror, dropped his sack, ran backwards,
then returned, then ran back again,
each time more frightened and bewildered than
before; until at last he ended his adventures by
tumbling over a stone and extinguishing his
lamp. Thus left in the dark, not knowing where
to turn, frightened out of his wits besides, he
fell to remembering his sins—always remembered
by those who are lost in the Mammoth
Cave—and praying with all his might for
succour. But hours passed away, and assistance
came not: the poor fellow's frenzy

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increased; he felt himself a doomed man, he
thought his terrible situation was a judgment
imposed on him for his wickedness; nay, he
even believed, at last, that he was no longer
an inhabitant of the earth—that he had been
translated, even in the body, to the place of
torment—in other words, that he was in hell
itself, the prey of the devils, who would presently
be let loose upon him. It was at this
moment the miners in search of him made
their appearance: they lighted upon his sack,
lying where he had thrown it, and set up a
great shout, which was the first intimation he
had of their approach. He started up, and
seeing them in the distance, the half-naked
negroes in advance, all swinging their torches
aloft, he, not doubting they were those identical
devils whose appearance he had been
expecting, took to his heels, yelling lustily for
mercy; nor did he stop, notwithstanding the
calls of his amazed friends, until he had fallen
a second time among the rocks, where he
lay on his face, roaring for pity, until, by dint
of much pulling and shaking, he was convinced
that he was still in the world and the
Mammoth Cave. Such is the story they tell
of the Haunted Chambers, the name having
been given to commemorate the incident.

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This Salts Room contains a pit, if we can
so call a huge domed chamber below, communicating
with it by means of a narrow
crack in the floor. The floor is here very
thin, in fact, a mere scale of rock, but, fortunately,
rock of the most adamantine character.
By lowering down torches, and peeping
through the crack, one dimly discerns the
chamber below. Its floor is at a depth of
fifty feet, and is composed of firm and dry
sand or clay. It seems like the vestibule of
a new set of chambers, which no one has yet
explored. An attempt was made by our little
party to examine it, by lowering the lightest
individual of the company into the pit with
ropes—an enterprise that was baffled, and
had nearly produced a fatal termination,
in consequence of the rope's parting, or beginning
to part, at the moment when our adventurous
explorer was hanging midway
down the pit. With a good rope, however,
nothing would be more easy than to reach the
bottom in safety.