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. It is very high and on its edges grow ferns,
vines, and various wild flowers, and the phoebe builds her nest
and fills all the space about with her sweet prophecy of spring.
It is what the entrance to a place so vast should be.
At the Luray Caverns cement walks have been laid, stairways,
bridges and iron railings have been erected, and the entire
route through this most beautiful of subterranean palaces is
illuminated by brilliant electric lights. On entering the
caverns you experience a thrill of strange emotion and mute
wonder. One speaks, if at all, in whispers. It is too much for
your imagination to grasp at once and you are overwhelmed as
much as you were on first seeing Niagara. Here is silence such
as never came to the outer world, darkness that far exceeds the
blackest midnight; glittering stalactites that gleam like
diamonds from the ceiling above; massive artistic drapery which
falls in graceful folds; cascades of rarest beauty formed by
stone of marble whiteness, in place of falling water; tinted
walls like evening skies; all these seen by the gleam of
brilliant electric lights fill one with admiration and deepest
awe. Here the Master Artist has carved spacious palaces of
rarest beauty. Columns of yellowish-brown, resembling
transparent amber, support great vaulting domes above you. These
lovely pillars seem to rise toward their proper arches as
majestically as those of Rheims, Amiens, and Cologne, only here
we find "no signs of decay" and "they never knew the cruel
ravages of war."
This calls to memory a visit to the Steen, the old Spanish
prison built in the eighth century in the city of Antwerp. A
crowd of English soldiers and American doughboys were viewing
the time-worn relics of the place when they found an old map of
the world dating from the year 1300, A. D., whereupon one of the
Englishmen exclaimed, "Where is America? Why, your bloomin',
bloody country was not on the map. at that time!" Such good-
natured humor was borne with about the same patience as the
bites of "cooties" or Jersey mosquitoes. As they journeyed on, a
companion of the first speaker said, "You don't have such
wonderfully old and interesting things in America." The fiery
American doughboys accepted this remark as a challenge and could
keep silent no longer. One of them, voicing the sentiment of
all, exclaimed in a voice that fairly awoke the echoes of those
aged walls, "No, we do not have much of this old trash in our
country. Everything in America is new and up-to-date." But in
Luray Caverns we have one of the world's great wonders "that was
old long before the foundation of the Pyramid of Cheops." Here
are columns of gigantic proportions, one of which has lain on
the floor of the cave for more than four thousand years. Some
geologists state that the glacial period was sixty thousand
years ago. If their deductions be true; we have in Luray a
cavern that was fifty-four thousand years old when Adam gazed on
Paradise.
These caverns are carved from the Silurian limestone, although
they are considered to date from the Tertiary period. Long after
the cave was formed, and after many stalactites had been hung on
those spacious halls with their down-grown crystals, it was
completely filled with glacial mud charged with acid, whereby
the dripstones were eroded in singular grotesque shapes. The
eroded forms remained after the mud had been mostly removed by
flowing water. Massive columns have been wrenched from the
ceiling by this aqueous energy and lie prostrate on the floor; a
hollow column, forty feet high and thirty feet in diameter,
stands erect, but has been pierced by a tubular passage from top
to bottom in the same manner; a leaning column almost as large
has been undermined so as to resemble the leaning tower of Pisa;
these are only a few of the many wonderful forms of Nature's
architecture formed by no other tools than time and waterdrops.
We find no streams and true springs here as in Mammoth Cave, but
there are numerous basins of pellucid water, varying from one to
fifty feet in diameter, and from six to fifteen feet in depth.
Crystal Lake is a clear body of water surrounded by sparkling
stalactites. How long its waters must have waited to mirror
these lovely formations! They gleam and sparkle, forming an arch
of dazzling splendor; fit drapery for such a gem of water, which
shows again their marvelous beauty.
Here these waters have lain for countless ages with never a
breeze to ripple their surface. At Mammoth Cave the waters enter
through numerous domes and pits in cascades of great volume, and
are finally collected in River Hall where they form several
extensive lakes or rivers, which are connected with Green river
by two deep springs that appear under arches on its margin. The
water has been known to rise sixty feet above low water mark
when there is a freshet in Green river.
