University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.

Among so many wonders and prodigies,
the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, it may be
supposed, must sink into insignificance. It
reveals no subterranean gardens, no Stygian
lakes, no stupendous waterfalls; it discharges
no volcanic flames, it emits no phosphoric
sunlight; it contains no petrified pre-Adamites,
and no hollow thunders are heard resounding
among its dreary halls. It is not two miles
deep; it is not five hundred miles long—nay,
it can no longer boast even the twenty miles
of extent, which formerly contributed so much
to its glory. The surveyor has been among
its vaults; he has stretched his chain along
its galleries, he has broken the heart of its
mystery, and, with cruel scale and protractor,

he has laid it down upon paper. He has illustrated
the truly remarkable fact, which none
but the most cold-blooded of philosophers
were ever before inclined to suspect—namely,
that when you would know the true extent
of any antre vast in which you have journeyed,
the admiring of all admirers, you
should first take the shortest extent you can
possibly believe it to be, and then divide
that length by the sum total of your
thumbs and fingers, being satisfied that,
if the answer be not exactly right, it will be
extremely near it. Thus Weyer's cave in
Virginia—the Antiparos of the Ancient Dominion,
one of the loveliest grots that fairy
ever, or never, danced in—was, until recently
surveyed, pretty universally considered as
being full three miles in length. By the rule
above, we should bring its true extent down
to between five and six hundred yards; a result
that very closely coincides with the admeasurement
of the surveyor. By the same
rule, we should reduce the Mammoth Cave to
two miles; which comes but little short of the
truth. Nevertheless, the Mammoth Cave is
still the monarch of caves: none that have
ever been measured can at all compare with
it, even in extent; in grandeur, in wild,
solemn, severe, unadorned majesty, it stands
entirely alone. “It has no brother, it is like
no brother.”

What I have said of the length of this
cave, it must be observed, applies only to a
single passage. It is a labyrinth of branches,
of which the principal one is two miles and
a half long. There are two or three others
of nearly half that length. The extent of
all the passages, taken together, is between
eight and nine miles. There are, besides,
many which have never been explored, and
perhaps never will be—some opening in the
sides, and at the bottoms, of pits that would
appal a samphire-gatherer or an Orkney fowler;
others, of which there are countless
numbers, opening by orifices so narrow that
nothing but blasting with gunpowder can
ever render them practicable; and perhaps as
many more, accessible and convenient enough,
but whose entrances, concealed among rocks
and cranmies, no lucky accident has yet discovered.
The Deserted Chambers, forming
a considerable portion of the whole cave, and
now accessible through two different approaches,
have only been known for a comparatively
brief number of years; and the
Solitary Cave, with its groves of spar, its

pools, and springs, and hollow-sounding floors,
is a still more recent discovery.

The survey of the cave, as far as it is now
known, we owe to Mr. Edmund F. Lee, an
engineer of Cincinnati, who has executed his
task with skill and fidelity. The difficulties,
labours—I might even say, the dangers—of
his enterprise (in which he was occupied, I
believe, three or four months—the whole winter
of 1834-5,) can only be appreciated by
those who are familiarly acquainted with the
cave. The exploit of surveying and levelling
eight or nine miles of cavern appears to me
unprecedented. Mr. Lee's Map, with the libretto
of “Notes” accompanying it, published
in Cincinnati by James and Gazlay, interesting
alike to the lovers of romance and of
science, is a curious and valuable production,
which I cordially recommend to my readers
and the public.

The Mammoth Cave lies upon Green
River, in a corner of Edmonson county, Kentucky,
in the heart of the district long known
as the Barrens—a vast extent of rolling hills
and knobs, once bare and naked—prairies, in
fact, as they were sometimes called—but now
overshadowed by a young forest of black-jacks
and other trees that delight in an arid

soil. The whole country is one bed of limestone,
with as many caverns below as there
are hills above, both seeming to have been
formed at the same moment, and by the same
cause—some primeval convulsion by which
the rocky substratum was torn to pieces, and
the knobs heaped up. That earthquakes had
something to do in carving out the caves of
the West, no one will doubt who has clambered
among those prodigious blocks of stone
—masses which to move would have puzzled a
Pelasgian builder of old—that lie strewn about
the floors of the Mammoth Cave, shivered from
the roofs and walls by some violent concussion.
The earthquakes that formed them, seem
however, not always to have opened the ragged
fissures to the air: that was left to another
agency—the infiltration, in most instances,
of water, by which the thinner and
weaker portions of the crust were gradually
disintegrated, and finally swept into
the interior. The Mammoth Cave itself
was evidently opened in this way, in remote
times, after remaining sealed up for
a long series of centuries; and in this case,
as in most others, the mass of falling rocks,
sinking across a spacious excavation, has
been sufficient to block it up in one direction,
while yielding easy access in the other. The
Horse-shoe Cave, however, a grotto twelve
or fifteen miles distant from the Mammoth
—is an instance in which the roof has fallen,
without obstructing the passage on either
side: you enter the cave, as it were, by a side
door, and may penetrate with equal ease to
the right hand or the left. In many cases,
there seem to exist caverns with no roof of
rock at all, the fissure having extended to the
top of the limestone, where it is covered over
only by a thin layer of soil. It is not altogether
an uncommon thing for a traveller in
Kentucky to play the Curtius, and plunge,
horse and man, into the bowels of the earth
at a moment when he feels neither patriotic
nor heroical, but very much like any other
mortal. It was but two years ago that a
gentleman of Lexington, ambling over his
fields, in the neighbourhood of that city, surveying
his stacks of hemp, and speculating
perhaps, like a philanthropist, upon the number
of rascals his crop might be expected to
hang, suddenly found himself sinking into the
earth, whirling in a Maelstrom of clay and
stones; from which, however, he succeeded
in extricating himself by leaping briskly from
his horse. The animal sank to a depth of
one hundred and fifty feet, where he became
wedged between two rocks, the sides of a
cavern, and perished. A similar accident
happened in the Barrens of which I speak, as
early as 1795, when a planter of West Tennessee
lost his horse, and saved himself, in
the same way; only, that on this occasion,
the animal tumbled into a more spacious
cavern, in which he walked about until starved
to death.

But let us hasten to the cave. It is midsummer.
It was at that season, several
years ago, I made my first (it was not my
only) visit to the cave. It was the close of
merry June—merry, yet not merry, for the
pestilence was then abroad in the land, and
men were thinking and talking of nothing
but cholera—when I, with an excellent friend,
(alas! now no more,) who was as eager as
myself to escape to some nook where cholera
was unknown, where our ears should be no
longer pained, nor our souls sickened by
“every day's report” of cases—made my way
to the heart of the Barrens, and in good time,
one bright morning, found myself approaching
the Mammoth Cave. The air was hot
upon the hill-tops, hotter still in the little valleys
that, with their lowly cabins of logs, and

smiling, though half-cultivated corn-fields, presented
here and there a few demi-oases in
the desert of black-jacks, through which we
were jogging: there was no breeze in the forest,
but there was note of preparation among
the white and sable-silvered clouds aloft, that
now sent a heavy rain-drop pashing in our
faces and now woke the woods with rattling
peals of thunder. But what cared we for shower
or bolt? We were vagabondizing among
the knobs; and, by and by, we should be
under the canopy of the cave, deep in vaults
where the rain beats not and the thunder
is never heard. We are even now riding
over its labyrinthine halls: each of these rocky
hills is arched over one of its gloomy vaults;
and it is in a glen upon the side of the very
knob, on whose flat, plain-like summit we are
now coursing to our journey's end, we are to
find its darksome portals. Under this mouldering
stile of logs, where we leave our Rozinantes,
rejoiced to escape their excruciating
backs, under this venerable, rickety porch,
where we pause a moment to look around, at
a depth of a hundred feet below, is one of
the hugest chambers of the cave. The guide
prepares his iron torches, his bucket of oil—
or, to speak less poetically, his bucket of lard,
(for here the fat of Leviathan is unknown,)
and his basket of provisions; while we, exhorting
him to despatch, set off to explore
the mysteries of the glen, the redoubtable
Cave-Hollow, ourselves.

But first let us seduce honest Bull, the
great dog that has been wagging his tail at
us in token of friendship, to lead us to the
cavern. “You may get him into the Hollow,”
quoth the guide, nodding his head; “but you
won't get him into the cave; because dogs
are exactly the people that won't go in, no
way you can fix it.—They have a horror of
it.”—Verily, after we had ourselves got in, and
seen the last glimmer of fading daylight swallowed
up in midnight gloom, we began to
think Bull's discretion not so very extraordinary.
There actually is a point at which
dogs begin to think of themselves in preference
to their masters. I once saw a hulking
cur, who boasted the same name Bull—as all
big dogs, except Newfoundland ones, do—attempt
to follow his master over the bridge
above the falls of Niagara. It was a fine
sunshiny day, and Bull, being in a joyous humour,
had gallopped a hundred yards or so
along the bridge, without much thinking of
where he was or whither going. But on a

sudden the idea struck his mind, or whatever
part of him served for mind; he stopped, applied
his nose to a crack in the planks, and
made a dead set at the horrible green and
white billows beneath. “Come on, Bull!”
cried his master from afar. “If I do,” said
Bull, “I wish I may —;” not that he actually
said so much in words, but it was written
in his eye. His tail fell, his ears began to
to rise, he stole a sidelong look at the waters
above and the waters below; and planted himself
in the centre of the bridge, from which
he refused to budge, except upon hard jostling,
even to let myself get by. His master
called again and again; and I believe Bull
made some small effort to advance, stepping
slowly and carefully forward, as if treading
upon eggs. He did not, however, proceed
far; and when I saw him last, he had come
to a second stand, and was again surveying
the boiling surges through the gaps of the
planks, looking volumes of mute terror and
perplexity. How he ever got to firm land
again I know not; for he was evidently as
much afraid to return as to advance.

Were there indeed such horrors in the
Mammoth Cave as should make a dog a
coward on instinct? The thought sharpened

our expectations, and we were the more
eager to make its acquaintance.

And now let us descend the Cave-Hollow
—a ravine that begins a mere gully at first,
but, widening and deepening as you proceed,
becomes at last, on the banks of the river,
half a mile to the west, a valley that might
almost be called spacious. It is bounded by
ledges of calcareous rock overlaid by sandstone,
which, in some places, assume the appearance
of precipices, and, in others, are
piled together in loose blocks. Along the
line of wall thus bounding the valley, spring
tall oak-trees and chestnuts, rooted among
the rocks; while elms, and walnuts, maples
and papaws, and a thousand other trees, with
vines, weeds, brambles, and many a glaring
wild-flower, occupy the depths of the hollow,
shutting it out almost as much from the blue
heaven above as its rocky walls seclude it
from the habitable earth around. A brook
that runs when the clouds run, and at no
other period, has ploughed a rugged channel
down one side of the glen; and along its
banks or in its parched bed, as seems most
convenient, we make our way, looking for the
cave, which refuses to be found; hiding from
the sun, which, however, neither the scudding

thunder-clouds nor the embowering tree-tops
can wholly keep from our visages; and sighing
for something to “allay the burning
quality” of the atmosphere, some cool breeze
stirred by the wing of Favonius from fountain-side
or brim, some—But soft! we have
our wish; a cool breeze does at last breathe
over our cheeks; it rolls a gentle and invisible
stream, a river of air, down the valley.
On that grassy terrace above, we shall enjoy
it. On that grassy terrace we step, and
the cave yawns before us!—The breeze, at
first so cool, and now so icy, comes from its
marble jaws; it is the breath of the monster.

How dark, how dismal, how dreary! The
platform sinks abruptly under your feet, forming
a steep and broken declivity of thirty or
more feet in descent, and as much in width.
From the bottom of the abyss thus formed,
springs an arch, whose top is on a level lower
even than your feet, while the massive rock
that crowns it is on a plane which you can
still overlook. The cave is therefore under
your feet, you look down upon it; it is subterraneous
even at its entrance; and this is a
circumstance which adds double solemnity
and horror to its appearance. In other respects
its aspect is haggard and ghastly in

the extreme. The gray rocks, consisting of
thick horizontal plates, forming ledges and
galleries along the sides; the long grasses,
the nodding ferns, the green mosses and lichens,
that have fastened among their crannies;
the pit immediately under the spring of
the arch, loosely choked with beams, planks,
earth and stones; the stream of crystal water,
oozing from the mosses on the face of the
crowning rock, and falling with a wild pattering
sound upon the ruins below; the dismal
blackness of the vacuity, in which objects are
obscurely traced only for a few fathoms; and
the ever-breathing blast, so cold, so strange,
so sepulchre-like; form together a picture of
desolation and gloom inconceivably awful
and repelling. Indeed, instances not unfrequently
occur where visiters are so much
overcome by its appearance, as to fall back
upon their instincts, like honest Bull the dog,
and refuse to enter it altogether. A singular
addition is given to its dreariness by the presence
of several mouldering beams of wood
stretched across the mouth from ledge to
ledge, and two tottering chimneys of stone,
behind the cotton-wood tree on the right
hand; the ruins of old saltpetre works, the
manufacture of which villanous compound, in
the last war, was carried on to a great extent
in the cave. But peace came, and with
it those curses of trade, low prices, by which
the manufacturers were scattered to the
winds, and the Mammoth Cave again left to
its solitude. But that is its proper condition.
A city at Niagara, a factory in the Mammoth
Cave, are consummations of enterprising ambition
only to be hoped for by men whose
hearts are of gold and silver, and their nerves
and brains of the dross thereof.

How dark, how dismal, how dreary! One
would think that no living creature, save man
alone, the lover of romance and adventure,
would willingly enter this horrible pit. Yet
a swallow has built her nest under the grim
arch; and as she darts with flashing wing
through the thin waters of the falling brook,
and turns gamesomely about, and darts
through them again and again, her twittering
cries are as full of jocund mirth as of music.
What is it to her that all around is darkness,
fear, and desolation? The chirping of her
young from the shattered roof makes the
cave her paradise. And that little lizard, striped
with azure and scarlet,that dances around
the trunk of the stunted crab-apple growing on
the face of the descent—the most beautiful,

delicate, graceful, resplendent, mischievous
little rascal my eyes ever beheld—he mocks
me, but he will not let me catch him!—there
is something here, though what I know not,
to make the chill, moist entrance of the cave
more delighiful even to him than the gray,
heated rocks above, where his comrades are
basking. And yet the lizard and swallow are
frisking at the mouth of a sepulchre. The
nitre taken from this cave was dug from
among the bones of buried Indians. If we
can believe the account of those who should
know best, many a generation of dead men
sleeps among the vaults of the Mammoth
Cave. Perhaps this thought, busy in the
mind of the visiter, invests its aspect with a
more awful solemnity than it really possesses.