STALACTITE GROTTO, WOOKEY HOLE.
Photo by Claude Blee.
By the natural falling in of the roof, the first great chamber of Wookey has broken through into the galleries above, and certain passages of the Upper Series now open high up in the vault of the Witch's Kitchen. One of these openings has been known for years; another, which we reconnoitred carefully in March 1903, has now had its barrier of cave earth cut through, with the result that a group of stalactite chambers of wonderful beauty has been disclosed, with untold possibilities of further advance. Boxing Day 1903 was spent in an exploration of these new chambers. Climbing on my shoulders, Mr. Balch got hand-hold in a chink of the Limestone, and pulled himself up 10 feet. Here a stalagmite peg held the rope ladder whilst we clambered after, entering a cross gallery that gives access by another short scramble to the loveliest of the new grottoes. When the discovery was made, Mr. Balch and his assistants had to keep watch and ward day and night, until a door had been fitted up, and every hole and crevice securely blocked; for the entire village was quickly on the scene, and irretrievable damage might have been committed.
The grotto is irregular in shape, and the incrustations are disposed without order or system. From every nook and corner in the superimpending rocks bundles of stalactite spears are thrust; bosses and pillars spring from the floor, and sometimes meet the descending shafts. Of all these frail pillars, the finest, rising on the very edge of the rift we had ascended, seems to support the whole ponderous roof, like the fragile column left by a dexterous architect, to cheat the eye, in some cathedral vestibule. Certain of these hanging shafts are shaped like the barbed head of a spear, a slanting stalactite having intercepted and coalesced with the dripping calcite from an inch or two away. A creamy, brownish yellow, with a golden lustre like that of amber, is the prevailing tint; but, here and there, plaques of dazzling white shine out against the burning magnesium.
Crawling in and out among the stalagmite pedestals, grievously afraid of injuring the diaphanous fabric, we emerged in a very low chamber of great area, right across which a grille of translucent rods, each a foot high and ranged in regular line, fills the narrow space between roof and floor. This extraordinary and strangely beautiful railing is some 30 feet long, and only in one spot is it possible, by dint of careful wriggling, to pass between the rods into the farther parts of the chamber. Mr. Balch entreated me not to attempt this. When he tried it, a fortnight ago, he had indeed got through to the series of caves beyond, but, in returning, a projection had caught him at the lowest spot, where the chamber is only nine inches high, and he had struggled hard for twenty minutes before he could move an inch. Two of us, notwithstanding this advice, ventured through. After draining off a pool of water that was held back by a thin rim of dripstone, we traversed the low chamber and a short tunnel beyond, climbed a vertical cleft, and entered another low chamber of immense length and breadth, whose various extensions we explored until the accumulated deposits of boulders and cave earth stopped our advance for the time being. In returning through the tunnel and the low chamber with the grille, we tried successfully to dive under the archway and wriggle into the opening head foremost, in spite of two opposing stumps of stalagmite. By these tactics we escaped the worst of the squeeze.
