With so many people in this one huge room a long way from the outside atmosphere, someone asks the guide if the air doesn't become stale and musty. No, he replies, the air changes naturally every 24 hours. How much longer does our tour last, another wants to know. This is the halfway point, says the guide, and we have about two hours more.
Here many a traveler pauses a moment to absorb what he has seen—the beauty, the magnificence, the grace and charm. Mother Nature does her work so well—so thoroughly. But the guide said there is more. How can there be more—how can anything match what has already been seen? Man is indeed a humble creature, the tiniest detail in the great heavenly scheme. Great though man's work may be, God's work is ever greater.
The rest period is over. It is time to go on. In a moment the party is once again assembled in the main passageway section which connects the many rooms, and turns to the left past "hanging mosses" and honeycombed fissures into the famous Big Room, largest underground chamber known anywhere, and unsurpassed in length, width and height, variety and size of formations, number of colors to be seen, and value to geologists due to the many finds that have been made.
© BY ROBERT NYMEYER
Here the remainder of the 4-hour tour will be spent. The trail around the perimeter of the room is one and a quarter miles and, although many sections and alcoves are actually under one huge roof, the visitor usually feels he is in a series of separate chambers. One reason is that the big room is shaped roughly in the form of a cross, the length of the "staff" measuring some 2,000 feet while the "cross-arm" is slightly over half that length. 2,000 feet is almost 4/10 of a mile!
Two hours is not enough to see everything the big room has to offer. Many small formations are not seen but must be discovered. Every visitor sees something new—something no one else within the party has noticed, for the formations are countless and the resemblances they offer are equally as numerous.
The elaborate indirect lighting system has been designed to reveal the largest, most beautiful and ornate of the spectacles to be seen, but a flashlight aimed in a dark corner is likely to reveal formations resembling a Mermaid, Frog on a Toadstool, Queen's Necklace, Weeping Willow Trees, the Petrified Forest, and countless others, limited only by man's imagination and his ability to seek them out.
But the larger formations which have contributed to the fame of the Big Room include Giant Dome, Hall of Giants, Rock of Ages, and the Temple of the Sun.
No two people see quite the same thing when they enter the Big Room. It is so huge and there is so much to greet the eye that at first everything is taken in but no one thing is seen. Then the eye begins to settle on one formation at a time. One of the first is the Hall of Giants, so named for the size of its principal formations; the huge Giant Dome, a massive, light grey stalagmite flecked with tinges of orange, stretching upward some 62 feet above the ground, making it the largest upward growth in the Caverns, and behind it the Twin Domes, similar in structure and formation, though not as high and therefore not as old.