I found in the "Snowball Room" and in a large chamber called "Cleveland's Cabinet," a beautiful display of these flowers. In the Snowball Room, the likeness to winter appears again, in the knots strongly resembling snowballs stuck all over the ceiling. And in Cleveland's Cabinet I found some singularly beautiful specimens of alabaster formations. One kind seemed to be literally growing from the ceiling as a vegetable would, and looked more than anything else like short, thick stalks of celery. If an ordinary stalk of celery were split, so that its natural tendency to curl over backward could be freely exercised, it would give a very good idea of the shape of some of the gypsum flowers, except that these are not often longer than four inches, and in that length frequently curl so as to make a complete circle. They have the same fibrous appearance as celery, and are as white as snow.
When five or six of these stalks—if I may call them so—start from one point, and curve outward in different directions from a common centre, they frequently form beautiful rosettes. Imagine one of the common tiger-lilies, which, instead of its thin, red curving petals, has stalks of celery, curving as much, but broken off square at the ends; then imagine the celery to be of the purest conceivable white; and you have a tolerable conception of one of these beautiful alabaster flowers.
This alabaster growth is found only in a few places throughout the cave; when it is in chambers or spaces in which the atmosphere is very dry, it invariably has a beautiful fibrous texture like wood or celery, and the curved form; but if the atmosphere is damp, it forms on the ceiling in round nodules, from two to three inches in diameter, as in the Snowball Room.
In the Gothic Arcade there is a sort of colonnade formed along the side of the tunnel by the meeting of the down-growing stalactites and the upward-growing stalagmites; the two together having formed slender columns of spar, from three to six feet in height. One group of these, about eight feet high, which is the most beautiful in the cave, is called the Gothic Chapel. In many of the formations, it is very difficult to trace even the remotest resemblance to the objects after which they have been named; but in one instance, that of a stalactite called the "Elephant's Head," the resemblance is remarkable.
Ordinarily it is the custom for one guide to conduct a party of four or five persons into the cave. I dislike over-officious guides and the hackneyed comparisons and wordy wonder of gabbling tourists in grand and solemn places like this; therefore, in the morning, before starting, I congratulated myself that I should be alone, with the exception of the guide, who fortunately seemed thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the place in which he had spent the greater portion of his time for seventeen years.
He was as grave and taciturn as some cave-keeping anchorite. During our inward progress, he had carefully pointed out every place and object of interest, and hurled his blue-lights here and there into domes and pits and cavernous retreats of darkness. But now, on our backward course, he stalked silently and abstractedly before, though he seemed to listen to every step of my feet; for, if I paused or made a misstep, he instantly looked round.
At last he turned, and, looking me curiously in the face, asked whether I thought I should be afraid if left in the dark there a little while. Some people could not bear it, he said, and one gentleman who had consented to the ordeal of darkness had been half crazed by it, and when the guide, who had withdrawn and concealed himself, with his light, returned, the traveller tried first to run away into the darkness, and then, under some strange hallucination, fired his pistol in the guide's face.
I had a suspicion that the effect of the obscurity was exaggerated; I was disposed, moreover, to "try the dark," from curiosity. But I must acknowledge that, when the guide, with that doubting look, repeated his inquiry, I hesitated, asking, "Is there any danger? and from what?"
"Nobody knows, massa," said he seriously; "only some people's nerve can't stan' it, dat 's all."
The mention of that odious word, "nerve" sounded so much like the familiar solicitation, "Try your nerves, gentlemen?" from the electrical-machine man,—who is found on the curbstone of some thoroughfare in every city,—that for one brief instant the prestige of the great cave was gone.