After crossing the fields we reached the dale-road, leaving this at last opposite the larch planting. A wide gully, bristling with rocks and fairly steep, leads you toward shadowy sylvan recesses, and just as these are closing round, Mr. Batty turns to the left with a ‘Here we are.’
In the cliff you note a receding gap where the stone has crumbled away. This is the entrance to the cave. As you approach closer, you discover that a way has been dug here. There are steps, and at the foot a cave. Standing there, awaiting the naphtha-lamp Mr. Batty is kindling, you hear the mysterious droning voice of the great giant Yordas calling you to beware. But when, with a tallow candle in your hand, you pass the opened gate, the great Norwegian has withdrawn, though signs of his recent presence are with you for a long time. The throat of the cavern is some twelve feet wide, and perhaps six to ten feet high. There is no crawling to be done between dripping rocks and slimy floors. But a word to anyone who goes cave-exploring: the mud you are footing is very slippery, and care must be constantly taken to prevent downfall.
Mr. Batty ceases swinging the guttering light as he stands opposite a curiously-shaped rock. ‘This is the Flitch of Bacon,’ he said. Probably the giant was too much disturbed at our ingress to remove it, I thought; but on touching it, alas! it was of stone. The wily Norwegian did not trust Yorkshiremen or chance intruders. In rapid succession the Brown Bear and the Organ-Pipes were discovered, some distance apart, and with—greatest find of all—the Giant’s Hand between. Now I paused at all this, and pondered how such things could be! Yes, surely the giant, at the first distant sound of our approach, had been grinding out a tune that his pet bear might dance before him. Then, when the clashing of the sundered bars aroused him to his danger, with his left hand the full power of his patent refrigerator, and so instant was that power in action that Bear and Organ and Hand that had just left the gleesome turning of the handle were solidified ere another movement could be made. Then, as befits the grim ogre of a fairy domain, he abandoned the useless limb and fled.
But while I am piecing the story together my companion is detailing another labyrinth of evidence: The White Bear perilously anchored to an iceberg; a Lion—or is it a wolf?—ranging in stalactitic majesty along the cave wall. While Yordas was directing his circus, this stony-hearted beast was arguing which way the river flowed with a white lamb (the story is ancient, ergo the lamb has become an aged Horned Ram). But at the alarum of our approach the debate was adjourned sine die, probably because the Ram took refuge beneath the Canopy, while his tormentor chased in the direction of the Chapter-House (which, had he had his way, would speedily have become a charnel-house). The next relic, Mr. Batty informed me in an awed voice, is the Pulpit, or Throne; it is yet dinted with the impression of Yordas’s feet, for here he stood till the storming of the cave began.
From gay to grave, from the realms of fairyland to the hard facts of cave scenery, is always a difficult transition in such a locality as this. We are now standing in the Chapter-House. The light of the naphtha-lamp rises high, but not high enough to discover the roof. At a neck-tiring angle you watch fluted walls rising into far-away darkness. How wonderful is this modelling, done by Nature’s own forces! Water, holding lime in solution, trickles plentifully down the rocks. A crevice, a protrusion, however small, arrests its course, and a load of white molecules is deposited as drop by drop percolates down, till a crust of creamy white rounds off the awkward angle. The smallest obstacles cause the magic flutings. A thousand minute springs are, as we stand, busily extending the columns of the Chapter-House. Large ledges are coated with limy deposit; the outward extensions, as their foundations fail, droop over and fall into such formation as a fair representation of a bunch of bananas (christened two centuries syne the Hive of Bees). Through the gap between the Pulpit and the other wall we look into outer darkness, where the rays of our lamp are seemingly swallowed up. Then Mr. Batty kindles a piece of magnesium wire. In a moment the gurgling, yellow naphtha glow is transcended by a bright flare, which discovers, as you watch, pillars and encrustations suspended on the ones you have admired. The blaze rises higher, and the roof of the Chapter-House, some sixty feet above the damp floor, is seen. What a mysterious vault this must have appeared to a traveller of a hundred years ago, whose power of lighting was limited to a dozen tallow candles like the one in your hand! Every yard of the cliff is coated with creamy lime, on which, like diamonds, the sliding droplets reflect the intense light. Again and again the coil of wire is resorted to, and the eye wanders toward the gap to the greater cave. The top stone of the Pulpit throws a gaunt shadow across a bed of sand and shingle, in the midst of which a rivulet babbles briskly along. The strong shaft of light also reveals a dim, mysterious distance, where a congregation of rocks rises up to a world of gloom.
Mr. Batty’s pyrotechnics being completed, he leads towards the dark rivulet, which to me rather gives a sombre thought. Coming in full vigour from a crevice in the rocks, with a hurrying, worrying gait it crosses that leviathan room, and a screen of rock acts as a barrier to those who would see whither it is hastening. How like to the fretful rush of every-day existence! By a plank we cross the stream and make toward a hole in the limestone wall.
All the time we have been in the cavern the sound of rushing, falling waters has been in our ears. At first it rumbled in a quiet monotony, fraught with a crashing note of warning; now the sound seems changed to the loud threatenings of some ancient Druid—of Yordas, maybe, hero-god of the dale. Three steps lead into a recess. Down my neck a copious splash of water pours. The ‘inner circle’ of the cave’s delights is guarded after rain by a veil of falling drops. Then walk along a wood bridge, and look up. Mr. Batty’s naphtha-lamp illumines a narrow rift in the bowels of the mountain. In front from an unseen height a stream is rushing down fifty feet of rock. The air is filled with spray as the curtain of water is torn and buffeted by rock ledges, and thrown out of its course. The whole ‘Chapel of the Force’ is not ten feet square at its base, and the great converging slabs of rock continue up and up till they seem to meet in darkness. Why cannot we be content with the lights of our forefathers? Had the ceilings of the Chapter-House not been revealed by the brilliance of modern fireworks, how imposing the recollection would have been! And here, where the water spouts from a dim height, churning down among fragments half unseen, the same thing occurs. It shows a great interval riven between two huge columns of rock, and that the leaping torrent issues from upper blackness through it—shows that even this cleft has a visible roof fifty or sixty feet away. But if magnesium’s steady combustion destroys delusions of immeasurable height and breadth, it also accentuates the beautiful gouge-marks on the damp walls, the proofs of an age’s activity by the cascade. I cannot describe the scene: for a moment the roar of the torrent seeming to slacken, then bursting into a climax of rattle and splash and tinkle almost before the ear had noted the slackening sound; the stream dashing headlong, and jetting from fragments and ledges into a continuous pearly mist; the grim, immovable seams of tough limestone, with here and there a splintered fissure or cornice torn away.
After a long pause we turned away, passed down a narrow pathway, and reached the floor of the cathedral cave again. Our lamp seemed to dwindle in importance, feebly illumining the grotesque stones on the far side of the vault.
‘How grand this would seem if the whole cave could be lit up at once!’ I remarked to Mr. Batty.
‘I’ve seen it properly lit,’ was his reply; ‘but it’s many a year ago. A few younger dalesmen hauled an empty tar-barrel from the farm into the cave. On a bonfire in the middle we placed it, and while the timber and tar lasted the light was splendid.’ Ah me! I remember the flickerings and booming explosions of light attending such a burning. How the great leaping flames would gild that giant dome, and send fugitive shadows dancing in mad riot among the pinnacles and pendant stalactites around! Mr. Batty showed me the Dropping-Well and another allegorical limestone—to me it seemed like the contour of a virgin, backgrounded by a gouge-work reredos. Then we came to the rivulet again; and here, nearly on a level with the sand-floor, my guide pointed out a confusion of paint-marks. Little colour there was left, but the paint had preserved the stone from the usual washing. ‘... Painter, Burton-in-Lonsdale, 1812,’ is, after much adjusting of light, finally shadowed on the slab. In ninety-one years Yordas Cave has presumably become one-sixteenth of an inch wider, for the paint-preserved portions are embossed to half that extent. The rivulet sinks out of view behind a lowered portcullis of rock; there is a large flow to-day, else, Mr. Batty assured me, we could have crawled down a mile of tunnel to open air. Baffled here, we retrace our steps to the bridge, cross the stream, and slowly make for the throat of the cave. Mr. Batty hangs up the pole he carries to elevate his lamp to the level of the chief encrustations, and as he does so he turns the light on to a medley of uncouth paint-marks.