The Sea and the Cave 85 



from the Secretary of the Interior of Cuba and we were 

 royally treated when the Rurales discovered our identity. 

 They had thought that we entered the cave for the pur- 

 pose of purloining treasure "known to be buried there." 

 But they were content to let us have our peculiar 

 "treasure." 



A totally different sort of cave was that which a guajiro 

 living near Madruga advised us to visit. This was one of 

 those deep, dark caves, whose presence is made evident by 

 the fact that the roof of one of the underground cham- 

 bers has fallen in. In this cave trees had grown up and it 

 was possible to clamber down to the floor through the 

 branches of a tall, scraggly jaguey. Once down, we found 

 that the cave spread out more or less in all directions and 

 here one needed a ball of string and candles. We took off 

 our shoes and stockings, rolled our trousers up, and slithered 

 off through the bat dung. My companions were Professor 

 J. Lewis Bremer and EHott Bacon. 



We went on and on, stirring up myriads of bats, creep- 

 ing along at times where there was only a three- or four- 

 foot space between the surface of the guano and the roof 

 of the cave. Then, farther along, we could just squeeze 

 through a crack a couple of feet wide and forty feet high. 

 Finally, when we were about tired out with the fetid heat 

 and the mean going, we reached a deep, sluggish stream 

 of water — water that had filtered down, most of it, through 

 the lime rock, so that it had become supercharged with lime 

 salts. 



In the course of ages enough salts had been given up to 

 form a crust on the surface of the water like thin ice on a 



