We issued into a good-sized passage. Immediately on the left a twisting fissure went down to the head of the first perpendicular drop; but, leaving this for a while, we spent nearly an hour exploring the lofty chamber straight ahead of us. It rises to an unknown height in a vertical fissure, narrowing gradually. At the bottom is a deep cutting, which some of us passed by back and knee work, at a height above the floor. On the left, that is the eastern, wall are openings into a parallel tunnel with good stalactites. At the far end both this tunnel and the passage itself are blocked with clay and gravel.[3] On our second visit, a day or two later, I explored a tunnel in the other wall 10 feet from the floor. It led into another of the vast sloping fissures already described, which I was too much exhausted to explore very far. These fissures, all inclined at the same angle, and either parallel or else lying in one plane, are most impressive features of the Eastwater Cavern; their extent is evidently enormous, and it seems as if only a few frail pillars of jammed stones served to prevent the great mass of the hill from settling down and crushing roof and floor together. On a more minute survey it may turn out that these are all portions of one huge fissure, merely partitioned off by different chokes.
It was four in the afternoon when we entered the twisting fissure leading to the first vertical descent, and two of the party had now to return. Through an oversight in not bringing a short rope for harnessing the pulley, nearly two hours were spent in rigging up the tackle, the situation being awkward for letting men down safely. We were ensconced in a little chamber, the boulder floor of which opened into the top of a narrow rift widening downwards, where, about 60 feet beneath, the walls funnelled into a yawning pit 60 feet deep. This pit had been explored previously, and was found to be choked at the bottom; it formed a safe and certain receptacle for anything lost or dislodged by persons descending the cliff above it. The configuration of our hole was such that only one man at a time could get a steady pull on the life-line, which ran over a pulley. A manilla rope was therefore let down from the same belaying-pin, for a man to climb up and down by, so far as he was able, the life-line being used merely as a safeguard. One by one the explorers dropped over into the abyss. The last three or four had the best of it, since, with a hauling party below, full use could be made of the pulley.
We were now drawing nigh to the final tug of war. A quarter of an hour of indescribable wriggling brought us to a narrow and lofty rift, into which as many of the party as it would accommodate wedged themselves, right over the second vertical drop. Much the same tactics were resorted to here, save that, instead of a fixed pulley, each man in turn had a large steel pulley belted to him, through which ran 200 feet of rope, one end fixed to a wedged boulder beneath us, the other end in the hands of the hauling party. A 90-foot manilla was, as before, allowed to hang free, as a guide-rope, over the crags, and enabled each man to do something for himself and assist those above. Only four men essayed this last descent.
The gigantic cavity into which we now dropped is one of the most savage and impressive things it has ever been my lot to see. At the top, over the heads of the hauling party, it runs up into the rocky mass of the hill as a vertical chimney, under the mouth of which lay what appeared to be a deep black pit. We alighted, one by one, on a sloping shelf that traversed the side of the cavity at a considerable height. Creeping along this ledge, we saw at the end of it a huge cavernous opening descending into darkness, with a mighty rock wedged across it like a bridge. The black, gaunt walls on each side of us were craggy and rifted; their surfaces glistened with streaming water. Our ledge ending abruptly, we dropped, hand over hand, on the rope, to the edge of a large pothole, into which a stream was rushing. At this point a tunnel goes off to the left, and, as it had not been explored, I was asked by Mr. Balch to proceed down it. Two of us crept and clambered and slid down a very dirty watercourse, till, at a distance of perhaps 50 yards, we found ourselves atop of a high clay bank, closely overhung by rocks, with a stream rumbling along to the south-south-west. I got within 10 feet of the water, but without a rope to get us up again we would not venture farther. We had now been in the cave nine and a half hours, and were too much fatigued to undertake new work. It was ascertained, beyond reasonable doubt, that a fine series of potholes that exist in the continuation of the great cavity must drain into the stream just discovered. Beyond those potholes, to pass which involves much hard work, is another cavity, and beyond that what?—at present no one can tell. All we know is, that the water finds its way ultimately into the vast reservoirs inside Wookey Hole; but whether there are other vast cavities, or merely narrow crevices and impassable clefts between, is a question that will require labours almost Herculean to solve.
In scrambling back along the ledge in the big cavity I gave the final shove to a dangerous loose rock weighing something like six hundredweight. It fell into the ravine beneath, and hurtled onwards toward the chain of potholes, making the whole grim place ring with a crash of echoes. It took us two hours and a half to return to the cave mouth, although we were unencumbered with apparatus, for we had left the ropes and pulleys in place for another descent. Getting seven men up the higher of the two vertical pitches was a tough undertaking at the end of an arduous day, and when we returned through the famous S tunnel more than one explorer seemed disposed to snatch a sleep on its procrustean bed. We had been twelve hours underground when we revisited the glimpses of the moon.
It had been proposed to continue the exploration next day, but no one was fit for such a repetition of exhausting labours. The day following, a party of three was mustered to recover the apparatus that had been left in the depths. Two of us reached the head of the nethermost pitch, and after hours of severe work got everything up to the mouth of the swallet. Once more we drove back over Mendip in the dark. All around us on the desolate plateau was impenetrable gloom, but in the northern sky, and it seemed but a few miles away, the lights of Bath and Bristol flared across the heavens like two immense conflagrations. Never does one feel the sublimity of the open, windy earth, the starry sky, and the free sense of space, so profoundly as after striving for a long day to break through the barriers that shut us out from the regions of mystery under the hills.
E. A. B.