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. 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.

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