The access to it is by a cave or fissure in the rock, the opening being about the size of the inside of a capacious chimney. "The abbot crept in at a hole at the bottom, and telling me to observe where he placed his feet, he began to climb up the cleft with considerable agility. A few preliminary lessons from a chimney-sweep would have been of the greatest service to me, but in this branch of art my education had been neglected, and it was with no small difficulty that I climbed up after the abbot, whom I saw striding and sprawling in the attitude of a spread eagle above my head. My slippers soon fell off upon the head of a man under me. At least twenty men were scrambling and puffing underneath him. Arms and legs were stretched out in all manner of attitudes, the forms of the more distant climbers being lost in the gloom of the narrow cavern up which we were advancing. Thence the climb proceeded up a path. At the summit beside the monastic habitations was the church cut out of the rock, to which descent is made by a narrow flight of steps."
Mr. Curzon gives a plan of this church as half catacomb or cave, and one of the earliest Christian buildings which has preserved its originality.
The caves of Inkermann in the Crimea have been already alluded to. Here is a description of a subterranean abandoned monastery and church.
"Having traversed a passage about fifty feet long, we reached a church, or rather the remains of one; for a portion of the living rock in which these works were cut had fallen and carried with it half of this curious crypt. Its semicircular vaulted roof, and the pillars in its corners, indicated it to be of Byzantine origin; while a Greek sculptured cross, in the centre of the roof, told that it was a temple dedicated to that religion. The altar, and any sculpture which might have existed near it, are gone, and have long since been burnt into lime, or built into some work at Sevastopol. Beyond the church we found a large square apartment, entered by another passage, and looking over the valley of Inkermann. A few more cells, resembling those on the stairs, composed the whole of this series of excavated chambers, the arrangements of which at once proclaimed them to have been a monastery. These were the cells, the refectory, and the church. There is nothing in their construction as a work of art; yet there is an absence of that roughness and simplicity which exist in many caverns of the opposite mountain, and which indicate their being of a much earlier date than these." [Footnote: Scott (C. H.), "The Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Crimea," Lond. 1854, p. 280.]
CHAPTER X
CAVE ORACLES
Standing upon the pinnacle upon which is planted the marvellous Romanesque cathedral of Le Puy, and looking north, is seen in the distance the basaltic mass of Polignac crowned by a lofty donjon.
That mass of columnar basalt was occupied and held sacred in Roman times, and was dedicated to Apollo. In the courtyard of the castle is a well, l'Albime it is called, that descends to the depth of 260 feet, and there still exists an enormous stone mask of the solar god that closed it, and from the mouth of which oracles were given. How these were produced is now made clear. In the side of the well is a chamber cut out of the rock that concealed a confederate who uttered the response to the questioner, and the voice came up hollow and with reverberation betwixt the gaping lips of stone, to overawe and satisfy the inquirer.
"Before the old tribes of Hellas created temples to the divinities," says Porphyry in his treatise 'On the Cave of the Nymphs,' "they consecrated caverns and grottoes to their service in the island of Crete to Zeus, in Arcadia to Artemis and Pan, in the isle of Naxos to Dionysos."
And from caves issued the most famous Grecian oracles, and the mysteries were often celebrated in them. The cave in which Zeus as an infant was concealed on Mount Ida naturally became sacred. Kronos had received the Kingdom of the World on condition that he should rear no male children. Accordingly when one was born he ate it. But when Zeus arrived, his mother gave Kronos a stone to eat in place of the child, and hurried off the babe to Crete, where it was nourished in a cave by the Corybantes, who sounded cymbals and drums to drown his cries.