The uncovered platform which serves as a station being reached a few minutes before the train arrived, I expressed an unwillingness to detain our guide longer on account of his having a walk of four and a half miles to his home; but he declined to consider the subject; saying he had been directed not to leave us until we were taken safely on the train, which came sweeping round the curve on time and stopped for us.

CHAPTER XV.

Crystal cave concluded.

According to agreement the guide again met us at the station on the following morning, for another day in the cave, which we entered with no unnecessary loss of time, and hurrying through the main entrance passage, Government Room and Statuary Hall, went down Beaver Slide, which, on the previous day, we had passed to enter Rocky Run.  Our descent into the crevice took us past those portions known as Suspension Bridge and Rebecca’s Well, and over some very “rough country” to the most wonderful parts of the cave.  Numerous passages open out in various directions; one to rooms of frost work of great beauty; another to the Ribbon Room where the drip deposits on the walls are in ribbon-like stripes of red, yellow, and white, while others yet are ways to the Catacombs.  And it is the Catacombs we particularly wish to see, as they most perfectly represent the individual character of the cave and have, as yet, received no injury from either time or man; but is a region as difficult to travel as the way of the transgressor, and many miles can be traversed with no prospect of coming to the end.  But where locomotion is so slow and painful, the owner of a pedometer would find that instrument a discouraging companion and soon learn better than to consult its record publicly.

The Catacombs are a series of connected fissures and small crevices in which every inch of exposed surface is covered with clear, translucent, almost transparent, calcite crystals, neither coated with lime nor stained with clay; nor even is the pearly lustre dimmed with the slightest trace of dust.  The crystals are very sharp and of all sizes, ranging from half an inch to three and a half inches in length, the larger sizes being conspicuously abundant.  The entire region is an enormously large, perfectly formed, and undamaged geode.  In reality, the whole cave is a great cluster of connected geodes, and a similar work probably does not exist, but if it does, has never been discovered.  The fissures from which it is formed were opened by volcanic violence and then enlarged, and afterwards decorated by the varied power of water, in action or repose.