A bare-footed black girl stuck her head out of the door and announced that dinner was ready. Being tired and hungry, I was not backward in answering this notice, and moved into the dining-room. On my plate, after helping myself from everything on the table, were a chunk of fat pork, a piece of doughy, hot, wheat bread, and some boiled green beans. A tin cup of butter-milk was beside the mess to wash it down. Let me say right here that this was an exceptional meal! I have been on many tramps and rides through the Carolina mountains, but never had I met with such a reception and such fare. They were not backward in demanding half a dollar, the usual price asked by the mountaineer for supper, lodging and breakfast for man and his horse.
The man in brown, as he mended my saddle bags after dinner, filled my ears with a recital of the mysteries of Bat cave. He represented it as the wonder of the mountains. Its gloomy depths contained chambers of marvelous dimensions, while bats, the unholy habitants of darkness, stuck to the walls and flitted in its precincts. He volunteered as a guide, and as it lay on the way to Chimney Rock hotel, I mounted and rode along with him.
By the bouldered river, before the guide’s cabin, I tied my horse, and, by means of a foot-log, crossed to the opposite bank. It was a half-mile walk. We waded through the soft soil of several corn-fields, pitched almost perpendicular on the mountain side; climbed a number of rail fences; and after a steep ascent over tree-trunks and rocks, we arrived at the mouth of the cave. An air as cold as a winter lake breeze came from the darkness. It chilled us through and through. We went in without torches. There were rifts in the apex of the roof, high above, through which sunlight poured, dimly lighting up the whole interior. It failed most miserably to meet my expectations.
“Where are your bats, Dotson?” I asked.
“Hit’s cu’rous; I don’t see nary one.”
Dotson shaded his eyes, as he spoke, and peered down into a well-like hole, that broke away from our feet, and whose opposite wall, rock-piled in front, ascended straight upward till the sides closed.
“Nor do I,” I returned; “where are they?”
“Hit ’pears they aint ’ere. I ’low they been skeered out,” he drawled, rubbing his cheek.
That was all the satisfaction I obtained in regard to bats. A little curiosity is connected with the cave, from the fact that it is in granite rocks. At some convulsion of the mountain’s crust, the walls of granite were rent asunder, and then their tops, meeting again, left an opening between them. The air in it is cold and dry, for there is no water dripping in its interior. There is another smaller, but deeper, cave near the one just described. Torches are needed and one must crawl to enter it. The rocks around it are also granite.
I was on my horse again. The scenery for the next two miles is of a sublime description. The stone portals of a collossal gateway rise against the sky. The large mountain on the north is the Round Top. It presents a red cracked-stone front, and resembles the venerable ruins of a massive building, once swept by fire. Opposite to it is a line of Titanic stone cliffs—the front of Chimney Rock mountain. A luxuriant forest grows half way up its precipitous slope to the foot of the cliffs of bare rock, in height over 1,000 feet. A silver thread of water can be seen springing from the top-most edge, and falling down the bare face. It is the highest water-fall in the mountain system. The eastern end of the mountain projects its top forward, an abrupt headland. Its summit is covered with trees. From the glimpses caught of it along the shaded river, one might liken it to the bare forehead of some Cæsar, with laurel crown, overlooking the distant lands of Rutherford county.