GENERAL FEATURES OF THE CAVERN 3 



The Carlsbad Cavern is the largest, most spectacular, 

 and best known of the numerous caves in the vicinity. 

 Some of its striking features are enormous rooms and 

 miles of vaulted hallways. The largest single room is 

 four hundred and fifty feet wide and two hundred and 

 fifty feet high; others approach it in size. The lowest 

 point in the cave floor is some seven hundred feet 

 below the level of the entrance, and the linear extent 

 of the various rooms, halls, and passageways reaches 

 for so many miles that days are necessary for exploring 

 only those that are well known. 



Some of the rooms are dry and dusty, some are 

 moist from overhead stalactites, from the points of 

 which the mineral-laden water is slowly building up 

 groups of graceful stalagmites on the floor below, or is 

 forming pools of good drinking water in lime-encrusted 

 bowls and basins. In one of the basement rooms 

 named the rookery, these drops of water form clusters 

 of elongated or spherical nodules called "cave pearls," 

 resembling birds ' eggs of various sizes and shapes. 

 Dry beds of old streams are observed, which once were 

 potent factors in carving the cavern out of the solid 

 limestone rock, or dissolving the beds of gypsum and 

 rock salt that once filled some of the vaulted cavities, 

 but no permanent running stream has been found in 

 the cave in recent times. 



To the geologist and mineralogist the graceful, the 

 quaint, the grotesque, the massive secondary rock 

 formations decorating the interior of the cave are of 

 especial interest; but to the biologist the dry and dusty 

 rooms where animal bones and tracks have been pre- 



