CHAPTER III.
DESCENT INTO THE CAVE—THE NARROWS—THE
BLAST OF CAVES—THUNDERSTORM—THE VESTIBULE.
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But let us descend. The guide has arrived;
the swinging torches are tied each to its
staff, and lighted; our canteens are filled from
the trough that receives the crystal brook,
and all is ready for the subterranean journey.
Enter the mighty portal—
Arch'd so high, that giants may jet through
And keep their impious turbands on, without
Good-morrow to
the gloom. How ragged and shivered is the
broken roof above, as if those aforesaid giants
with the “turbands” on had been employed
to rough-hew the arch. But the floor is firm,
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dry, smooth clay: so far we owe thanks to
the nitre-diggers, who have constructed a
path—it almost might be called a carriageroad—
half a mile into the cave.
Over this path, ringing with sonorous clang
to every footstep, facing full to the east—yet
what an east! an Orient that never knew a
dawn—the thunder roaring behind us, (for
the storm has at last burst,) and the gust of
the cave murmuring hollow in front, we
trudge along; until, sixty paces from the dripping-spring,
we find ourselves at the Narrows,
where the roof is but seven or eight
feet high, and the width of the cave not
much greater. The passage has been still
further contracted by a wall built up by the
miners, leaving only a narrow door-way, that
was formerly provided with a leaf to exclude
the cold air of winter. Here, if the nervous
visiter has not been appalled at the entrance,
he will perhaps be dismayed by the furious
blast rushing like a winter tempest through
the door. Its strength is indeed astonishing.
It deprives him of breath, and, what is worse,
of light; the torches are blown out; they are
relighted and again extinguished: we must
grope our way through in the dark, and trust
to flint and steel. It is done: once through
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the narrow door, and the wind appals no
longer. All is calm and still, a few feet within
the wall; it is only at the contracted gap
that we feel the fury of the current. In the
winter, or at any other period of cold weather,
the blast is reversed; the current is then inwards.
There are numerous caves in America, as
well as in other parts of the world, which
exhibit the phenomena of the blast; and this
has usually been reckoned one of their chief
wonders. It has given rise among philosophers
to a deal of fanciful theory, which,
perhaps, would never have been indulged in,
had not observers in the first place mystified
the whole subject by recording facts that only
existed in their imagination. Thus, some
caves are said to blow in and out, without
much regard to the state of the weather, a wonder
which was only to be explained by supposing
the existence of intermitting fountains—
that is, of vast pools alternately rising and falling,
and so, by increasing or diminishing the
space within, expelling or inhaling the air;
while others again were reported to blow out
perpetually—as in the case of the cave at the
Panther Gap in Virginia, described by Mr.
Jefferson. This cave Mr. Jefferson, I
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think, could never have seen, as he describes
it (in very loose terms, it must be confessed)
as having an entrance “of about one hundred
feet diameter;” whereas all travellers
represent the outlet as being quite small.
Allowing that he describes it on mere hear-say,
we need attach no great weight to his
assertion, that the current “is strongest in dry,
frosty weather, and weakest in long spells of
rain.” That it does blow in the summer is
well ascertained; that it blows at all in winter,
I feel strongly disposed to doubt, having
heard that part of the story contradicted
by a person residing in the neighbourhood of
the Gap. Our opinion is, that all caves of
any magnitude blow; that the blast becomes
perceptible only when the outlet is very small;
that it is in all caves alike—the blast being
outward in hot, and inward in cold weather;
and that to understand the mystery, nothing
more is required than to place a candle in a
door communicating betwixt a very warm
and a very cold room, holding it first near
the floor, when a cold current will be found
rushing into the warm room, and then near
the lintel, where a warm current will be
found rushing out. In other words, we think
that there is a double current flowing,
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Mediterranean-wise, at the mouth of every cave,
and flowing always, except when the temperatures
within and without are the same;
a cold current at the bottom rushing out in
summer, and in during the winter, and a warm
one above flowing in the contrary direction,
a perpetual circulation of air being thus kept
up. This is an idea, which, being too simple
and natural to be readily conceived, did
not occur to us when it was in our power to
verify or disprove it at the Mammoth Cave,
as we had many opportunities to do. Our
mind, in fact, on all such occasions, was engaged
with a sublimer idea. We thought of
musical strings—a great æolian lyre—
stretched across the door, and waked to majestic
music by the breath of the cave—such
solemn strains as were poured by the “ingenious
instrument” of Belarius over the dying
Imogen.
Bur we have passed the windy gap, and
are in the cave, where all is silence and tranquillity.
The thunder is still raving in the
upper air, but its peals already come faintly
to the ear: a few more steps and they will be
inaudible. With a rock a hundred feet thick
over our heads, we can defy their fury, and
forget it. Armies of a hundred thousand
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men might fight a Waterloo on the hills
above, and we know nothing of it. At least,
we should hear neither drum nor trumpet,
nor sound of artillery; though cascades of
blood, falling where we are to find only cascades
of water, might impart the hideous secret.
Our torches are relighted, making
each
“A little glooming light, much like a shade,”
which we take care to direct to the sounding
floor, to watch our footing, satisfied, after
one or two eager efforts to penetrate the
gloom that has now invested us, that nothing
is to be seen until we have got out cave eyes.
We catch, to be sure, a dim glance, now and
then, of a low roof almost touching our heads,
of two rugged walls that are ever and anon
rude to our elbows; one of them—that is,
one of the walls—the workmanship of Nature
herself, though of Nature in no pains-taking
mood, the other piled up on the left hand by
the nitre-diggers of old, who were thus wont
to dispose of the loose rocks that came in
their way. You are sensible you are thridding
a path as narrow as the road of Honour,—
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“A strait so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast;”
and you begin to have your doubts whether
the Mammoth Cave is, after all, all it has been
represented to be. You get tired even of
admiring the musical ringings of the guide's
footsteps on the hard earthen floor; you are
sure you have trudged a quarter of a mile
already, (the guide assures you, half a mile,)
along this dismal, low, narrow, stupid passage;
you become impatient; you demand “if
there is nothing better to be seen;” and the
guide, answering by bidding you look to your
footing—which, however, you are doing of
your own accord, the path having suddenly
become broken—at last directs you to pause,
and look around.—What now do you see?
What now do we see? Midnight—the
blackness of darkness—nothing! Where are
we? where is the wall we were lately elbowing
out of the way? It has vanished, it is
lost; we are walled in by darkness, and darkness
canopies us above. Look again; swing
your torches aloft! Ay, now you can see it,
far up, a hundred feet above your head, a gray
ceiling rolling dimly away like a cloud; and
heavy buttresses, bending under the weight,
curling and toppling over their base, begin to
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project their enormous masses from the shadowy
wall. How vast, how solemn, how
awful! And how silent, how dreadfully silent!
The little bells of the brain are ringing
in your ears; you hear nothing clse, not even
a sigh of air, not even the echo of a drop of
water falling from the roof. The guide triumphs
in your looks of amazement and awe,
he takes advantage of your feelings all so
solemn and romantic:—“Them that says the
Mammoth ain't a rale tear-cat don't know
nothing about it!”—
With which truly philosophic interjection,
he falls to work on certain old wooden ruins,
to you yet invisible, and builds a brace or
two of fires; by the aid of which you begin
to have a better conception of the scene
around you. You are in the Vestibule, or
ante-chamber, to which the spacious entrance
of the cave and the narrow passage that
succeeds it, should be considered the mere
gateway and covered approach. It is a basilica
of an oval figure, two hundred feet in
length by one hundred and fifty wide, with a
roof, which is as flat and level as if finished
by the trowel of the plasterer, of fifty or sixty,
or even more, feet in height. Two passages,
each a hundred feet in width, open
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into it at its opposite extremities, but in right
angles to each other; and as they preserve a
straight course for five or six hundred feet,
with the same flat roof common to each, the
appearance to the eye is that of a vast hall
in shape of the letter L, expanded at the
angle, both branches being five hundred feet
long by a hundred wide. The passage on
the right hand is the Great Bat Room; that
in front, the beginning of the Grand Gallery,
or the main cavern itself. The whole of this
prodigious space is covered by a single rock,
in which the eye can detect no break or interruption,
save at its borders, where is a
broad sweeping cornice, traced in horizontal
panel-work, exceedingly noble and regular;
and not a single pier or pillar of any kind
contributes to support it. It needs no support;
it is like the arched and ponderous
roof of the poet's mausoleum,
“By its own weight made steadfast and immoveable.”
The floor is very irregularly broken, consisting
of vast heaps of the nitrous earth, and of
the ruins of the hoppers, or vats, composed
of heavy planking, in which the miners were
accustomed to leach it. This hall was, in
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fact, one of their chief factory rooms. Before
their day, it was a cemetery; and here they
disinterred many a mouldering skeleton, belonging,
it seems, to that gigantic eight or
nine feet race of men of past days, whose
jaw-bones so many thousand veracious persons
have clapped over their own, like horsecollars,
without laying by a single one to
convince the soul of scepticism.
Such is the Vestibule of the Mammoth
Cave—a hall which hundreds of visitors have
passed through without being conscious of
its existence. The path leading into the
Grand Gallery hugs the wall on the left hand,
and is, besides, in a hollow, flanked on the
right hand by lofty mounds of earth, which
the visiter, if he looks at them at all, as he
will scarcely do at so early a period after
entering, will readily suppose to be the opposite
walls. Those who enter the Bat Rooms—
into which flying visiters are seldom conducted—
will indeed have some faint suspicion,
for a moment, that they are passing through
infinite space; but the walls of the cave being
so dark as not to reflect one single ray of
light from the dim torches, and a greater
number of them being necessary to disperse
the gloom than are usually employed, they
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will still remain in ignorance of the grandeur
around them. In an attempt which we made
to secure a drawing of the Vestibule, we had
it lighted up with a dozen or more torches
and flambeaux, and two or three bonfires beside;
but still the obscurity was so great that
it was necessary, in sketching any one part,
to have the torches for the time held before
it. It was, in fact, impossible to light it up
so as to embrace all its striking features in
one view. We saw enough of it, however,
to determine its quality. It possesses not
one particle of beauty; but its grandeur, its
air of desolation combined with majesty, are
unspeakably impressive.
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Bird, Robert Montgomery, 1806-1854 [1838], Peter Pilgrim, or, A rambler's recollections, volume 2 (Lea & Blanchard, Philadelphia) [word count] [eaf018v2].
