O! bear me then to vast embowering shades,
To twilight groves and visionary vales,
To weeping grottoes and prophetic glooms,
Where angel forms, athwart the solemn dusk
Tremendous, sweep, or seem to sweep, along,
And voices more than man through the void,
Deep sounding, seize the enthusiastic ear.
Or is this gloom too much?
Where creeping water ooze, and where rivers wind,
Cluster the rolling fogs and swim along
The dusky mantled lawns. - Thompson.
The Shenandoah valley is not only famous for its beauty,
picturesque scenery and many historical associations, but here
in Page county, Virginia, are located the beautiful caverns of
Luray. Here we find caverns that for variety and beauty of their
calcite formations excel many if not all caverns of the same
kind in the world.
The valley at Luray is ten miles wide, extends from the Blue
Ridge to the Massanutten mountain, and displays remarkably fine
scenery. These ridges lie in vast folds and wrinkles, and
elevations in the valley are often found to be pierced by
erosion. Cave Hill, three hundred feet above the water level,
had long been an object of local interest on account of its pits
and oval hollows, through one of which, August 13, 1878, Mr.
Andrew J. Campbell and others entered, thus discovering the
extensive and beautiful caverns.
There is a house built on the entrance to these caverns and one
does not realize that such a remarkable region is located here.
The natural arch that admits one to Mammoth Cave has a span of
seventy feet.
