[figure description] Page 121.[end figure description]

But let us resume our explorations in the
Grand Gallery.

Three hundred yards beyond the mouth of
the Haunted Chambers, proceeding along this
wide, lofty, ever frowning, and ever majestic
highway, on the brow of a hill, you perceive,
on the left hand, a broad chasm, reaching to
the ceiling, its floor heaped with huge rocks,
This is the Ruined, or Rocky Cave, extending
a distance of a hundred and fifty yards, wide
and high throughout, but its floor covered
with blocks of stone of the most gigantic
size, some exceeding twenty feet in cubic dimensions,
and weighing six hundred tons. In

[figure description] Page 122.[end figure description]

this cave, spread out upon the path, you find
a relic of the ancient inhabitants of the place.
It is an Indian mat of bark, a cloak perhaps—
or a part of one, for it is only a fragment
about a yard square. It may have covered,
in its day, the shoulders of a warrior of renown,
or of a maiden, the pride and beauty
of her clan; in which thought we will but
look upon it, and pass it reverently by.

A hundred yards further on, the Grand
Gallery makes a majestic sweep to the right.
Just where the curve begins, you see, lying
against the right hand wall, a huge oblong
rock, pointed at its further extremity like the
prow of a ship. The Adam that gave names
to the lions of the cave has christened this
rock the Steamboat; and, it must be confessed,
that it looks very much like a steamboat,
only that wheels, and wheel-houses are entirely
wanting; not to speak of smoke-stacks
and the superstructure of cabins, pilot-boxes,
and so on. It was some considerable period—
years, in fact—after this Steamboat was
observed reposing in her river of stone, before
any curious person thought of peeping round
her bows, to see what might be concealed
behind them. The peep revealed an unanticipated
mystery. A narrow, but quite easy

[figure description] Page 123.[end figure description]

passage was discovered, leading into a circular
room a hundred feet in diameter, with
a low roof, and broken floor, hollowed like a
bowl, covered with sand and gravel, in which
floor were two different holes or pits, leading
to unknown chambers below. This room is
the Vestibule of the Deserted Chambers, but
more frequently called, in allusion to its figure,
the Wooden Bowl. The holes, which are so
small as only to admit one person to creep
down them at a time, are called the Dog and
Snake Holes, and are, in many respects, worthy
of their names. By descending either of
them to a depth of twenty or thirty feet, we
find ourselves at once in the Deserted Chambers—
to many the most impressive and terrific
portion of the cave. Here the visiter, if
he has not felt bewildered before, finds himself
at last in a labyrinth, from which no sagacity
or courage of his own could remove
him—a chaos of winding branches, once the
beds of subterraneous torrents; and he almost
dreads, at each step, to see the banished
floods come roaring upon him from some
midnight chamber. Now he beholds great
rocks—mighty flakes scaling from the roof—
hanging over him,—in one place so low that
he must stoop to pass under them,—yet

[figure description] Page 124.[end figure description]

suspended to the roof only by an edge or a corner.
What was the sword of Damocles to
these treacherous traps, that would, any one of
them, provided it should fall, smash a rhinoceros
with as much ease as a basket of eggs?
The ram of a pile-engine were a falling feather
in comparison. Now he startles aghast,
as hollow echoes under his feet bespeak the
dismal abyss from which he is separated only
by a thin shell of floor. Now he stands
trembling on the brink of a horrible chasm,
down which the rock he has toppled goes
crashing and rumbling to an immeasurable
depth; or now listens, with little less of awe,
at the verge of another, in which, far down,
he can hear the obscure dashings of a waterfall.
Now he sits upon a crag—perhaps
alone—for if he would, for once in his life,
feel what solitude is, (a thing man knows
nothing of, even in desert islands or the
solitary cells of a prison,) here is the place
to try the experiment—with nameless passages
yawning all around him, in a wilderness
and desert such as his imagination never before
dreamed of, reading such a lesson of his
impotence and insignificance as not even the
stars or the billows of the ocean can teach
him. In short, the Deserted Chambers are

[figure description] Page 125.[end figure description]

terrific, chaotic, and not to be conceived of
by those who have not seen them; for which
reason I will not attempt the task of description.
It may be observed, however, that
they consist of three principal branches, one
of which is nearly a mile long, another the
third of a mile, the remaining one only three
or four hundred yards; and that all three are
full of pits, domes, and springs without number.
The shortest branch contains three or
four fearful pits. Over one of these, called
the Side-saddle Pit, projects a rock, affording
a very comfortable seat to any visiter who
chooses to peep into the den of darkness beneath,
or the dome arching above it. Another,
a well of fourteen or fifteen feet diameter, is
covered by a thin plate of rock, lying on it
like the cover of a pot, though a cover somewhat
too small for the vessel, and seemingly
supported only at one point. This is both a
very curious and a very dangerous pit.

But the chief glory of this branch is the
Bottomless Pit, so called, par excellence, and
suspected by many to run pretty nearly
through the whole diameter of the earth.
The branch terminates in it, and the explorer
suddenly finds himself brought up on its brink,
standing upon a projecting platform,

[figure description] Page 126.[end figure description]

surrounded on three sides by darkness and terror,
a gulf on the right hand, a gulf on the
left, and before him what seems an interminable
void. He looks aloft; but no eye has
yet reached the top of the great overarching
dome; nothing is there seen but the flashing
of water dropping from above, and smiling,
as it shoots by, in the unwonted gleam of
the lamps. He looks below, and nothing
there meets his glance, save darkness as
thick as lamp-black; but he hears a wild,
mournful melody of waters, the wailing of
the brook for the green and sunny channel
left in the upper world, never more to be revisited.
Truly, as we sit upon the brink listening,
the complaining of those plaintive
drops doth breath a sad and woful melancholy
into our inmost spirits, a nostalgic
longing for the bright and beautiful world we
have left behind us. Who could believe, in
this dismal cave, that earth was otherwise
than a paradise? that rogues and rascals
made up a part of its population? No, our
remembrance, here, is only of the good and
pure, the just and gentle, the noble and the
beautiful; those for whose society we may
yearn with a pleasant sorrow, with tears as
bright and pure as these falling drops, with

[figure description] Page 127.[end figure description]

sighs and murmurings as sweetly sad as these
of the caverned fountain.

But sweetly sad they sound no more.
Down goes a rock, tumbled over the cliff by
the guide, who is of opinion that folks come
hither to see and hear, not to muse and be
melancholy. There it goes—crash; it has
reached the bottom. No—hark! it strikes
again; once more and again, still falling, still
striking. Will it never stop? One's hair
begins to bristle, as he hears the sound repeated,
growing less and less, until the ear
can follow it no longer. Certainly, if the Pit
of Fredericshall be eleven thousand feet deep,
the Bottomless Pit of the Mammoth Cave
must be its equal: for two minutes, at least,
we can hear the stone descending.

But there is, it appears to me, something
deceptive in this mode of estimating the
depth of a pit. Mr. Lee sounded the pit in
question with a line; and, bottomless though
it be, found bottom at a depth of one hundred
and seventy-three feet; though he supposed,
as every one else who hurls stones into it,
will suppose, that his plummet had struck a
shelf, the bottom of the pit being in reality a
great many fathoms beneath. Nothing would
be easier than to ascertain, by throwing stones

[figure description] Page 128.[end figure description]

into it, the depth of a pit of perpendicular
descent, and having smooth continuous walls.
But it must be remembered that all such
cavities are very broken and ragged, with
numberless shelves and other projections, on
which have lodged stones and rubbish from
the mouldering walls above. A stone being
cast into such a pit, if it be very deep, will
naturally strike upon some shelf, from which
it dislodges much of the rubbish, that falls
with it to the bottom, each fragment making a
louder or fainter noise, according to its weight;
and of these particles the smallest ones,
which are those that make the least noise,
will be the longest in rolling off their perch;
though, of course, once off it, they will fall
as rapidly as the others. Allowing that the
bottom of the pit were but a few yards below
the shelf, it will be easy to perceive that the
sound of these dislodged particles, falling
after the stone to the bottom, the heaviest
first and the lightest last, would produce all
the phenomena caused by a single stone
dropping from ledge to ledge for a long time,
and consequently through a great depth.
There is, and, indeed, can be, no certainty
except in the line and plummet.

A few hundred feet back from this

[figure description] Page 129.[end figure description]

Bottomless Pit, is a narrow chasm, called the
Covered Way, which, on being followed, is
found to terminate in the side of the pit, fifty
feet below the platform; which is perhaps as
great a depth into the pit as any visiter will
ever choose to venture.

Previous section

Next section