The route now taken leads us behind the Giant’s Coffin, through a low and narrow passage which would never have been discovered had not the monster rock fallen. This is styled Dante’s Gateway, from which a rude stairway leads us into the Wooden Bowl Room, so named either from its peculiar shape or because an Indian wooden bowl was found there. To the left is the opening to what has variously been styled Indian Avenue, Blacksnake Avenue, and Welcome Avenue. Really it is a combination of several avenues, running for the distance of eight thousand five hundred feet, as measured by the writer, which have been made passable by the skill and industry of Mr. H. C. Ganter when he was manager of the Cave, and which for this reason is generally called Ganter Avenue. Its inner end is at Serpent Hall, and it gives an exit for any one who may get caught beyond the rivers by a sudden rise of water.
Our present path goes through the “Dog-Hole,” down a stairway fancifully called “The Steeps of Time,” leading into the region of pits and domes. We pause a while by Richardson’s Spring, which is a small pool filled by a running stream that has worn for itself a narrow channel in the rock, illustrating what has been done for the entire Cave on a grander scale. Small crustaceans are found in this clear pool, and blind insects abound under the flat rocks near by. Numberless blind crickets leap away from us, and white eyeless spiders, brown beetles, thousand-legged worms, and other abnormal forms of life are found by careful search. Nothing harmful, however, appears, either here or elsewhere. As a rule cave-life is timid.
Side-saddle Pit, fifty feet deep, was named from its imagined resemblance to a lady’s saddle. Above it rises Minerva’s Dome, thirty feet high. The spot used to be dangerous, but is now guarded by a stout railing. Once a terrier leaped down the Chasm after a fire-ball flung by a guide. The guide’s wife allowed herself to be lowered by a rope and rescued the poor dog, which did not seem to be seriously hurt by his perilous adventure. Calypso’s Avenue, to the left, leads to the Covered Pit and Scylla and Charybdis, which are rarely visited.
Near the entrance to the Labyrinth is a window through which we behold the wonderful and lofty chamber discovered by a former owner of the Cave, Mr. Frank Gorin, in whose honor it is named Gorin’s Dome. Perhaps the earliest account of it was that published by Dr. Davidson. Its height, as measured by myself with the aid of a cluster of small balloons, is one hundred and sixty feet, its width is thirty-five feet and its length sixty feet. Its vertical walls sweep in an S-shaped curve and spring from the river level to the apex of the dome, with projecting bosses of coral and with cascades that awake the echoes as they fall.
Darnall’s Way was cut through the sandbank, in 1896, to the summit, where a bridge cast directly across the abyss gives us the most complete view to be had of the locality. One remarkable feature is a folded alabaster curtain one hundred and nineteen feet high. By casting fire-balls down the whole interior is grandly illuminated. Davidson descended to the bottom, as others have occasionally done since, by means of a well some thirty feet deep, down which one clambers like a chimney-sweep. He found there “stretching away in midnight blackness a horrid pool of water.” In 1863 Mr. F. J. Stevenson, of London, had a boat made and lowered through the window, on which he floated away for seven long hours on a perilous voyage that no man has since then repeated. The water now setting back from Green River has closed the entrance to what we term “Stevenson’s Lost River”; but his old boat still lies where it was stranded at the bottom of Gorin’s Dome.
Another huge abyss, the Bottomless Pit, was long regarded as ending further progress, till Stephen Bishop crossed it in 1840 by means of a slender cedar sapling thrown over the yawning gulf; since when it has been spanned by a substantial and safe bridge. Instead of being “bottomless” it is exactly one hundred and five feet deep. Above it is Shelby’s Dome, named for the first Governor of Kentucky. Balls of cotton waste saturated with coal-oil are flung down by the guides, which grandly display the wrinkled and corrugated walls of the pit. Looking directly across, we see an opening through which the writer and William Garvin emerged from their explorations around Scylla and Charybdis. There are other ways of approach, one from Gorin’s Dome, another from near the Scotchman’s Trap, and still another from River Hall to the very bottom, from which the upward view almost equals that from the base of Gorin’s Dome. All this great group of pits is connected below to form an immense hall, about four hundred feet long, which at high water is flooded by the overflow from River Hall. By Special permission, of former President of the United States Benjamin Harrison, this vast room was named Harrison Hall.
“Bottomless Pit”
On crossing the Bridge of Sighs we find an enlargement of the Cave formerly used as a dining place, and hence known as Reveller’s Hall. Pensico Avenue, along which we go, is crossed underneath by an invisible passageway, causing sounds to be reproduced in Echo Chamber with marvelous reverberations. Wending our way amid the huge rocks that encumber Wild Hall we next reach the Grand Crossing, and beyond it the singular dry stalactite, the Pineapple Bush, and end our path in Angelica’s Grotto, with its curious Hanging Grove.
Retracing our steps to Reveller’s Hall, we descend by an opening overhung by an enormous slab so poised as to make it seem as if a careless breath might make it fall. This is the Scotchman’s Trap, so named for a canny Scot who refused to go farther lest he should be entrapped. But we dive under and go on, coming presently to the Fat Man’s Misery. This is a serpentine passage, its walls changing direction eight times in two hundred and thirty-six feet, its width but eighteen inches and its height in places only five feet. It is indeed enough to try a fat man’s soul and body. The sides are marked by ripples and waves, and are polished by the friction of many vexed visitors.