244 IN MAMMOTH CAVE 



seemed to come very near to the youth of the 

 century, almost to overtake it. 



At a point in one of the great avenues, if you 

 stop and listen, you hear a slow, solemn ticking 

 like a great clock in a deserted hall; you hear 

 the slight echo as it fathoms and sets off the 

 silence. It is called the clock, and is caused by 

 a single large drop of water falling every second 

 into a little pool. A ghostly kind of clock 

 there in the darkness, that is never wound up 

 and that never runs down. It seemed like a 

 mockery where time is not, and change does not 

 come — the clock of the dead. This sombre 

 and mortuary cast of one's thoughts seems so 

 natural in the great cave, that I could well un- 

 derstand the emotions of a lady who visited the 

 cave with a party a few days before I was there. 

 She went forward very reluctantly from the 

 first; the silence and the darkness of the huge 

 mausoleum evidently impressed her imagination, 

 so that when she got to the spot where the guide 

 points out the "Giant's Coffin," a huge, fallen 

 rock, which, in the dim light takes exactly the 

 form of an enormous cofiin, her fear quite over- 

 came her, and she begged piteously to be taken 

 back. Timid, highly imaginative people, es- 

 pecially women, are quite sure to have a sense 

 of fear in this strange underground world. 

 The guide told me of a lady in one of the par- 

 ties he was conducting through, who wanted to 

 linger behind a little all alone ; he suffered her 

 to do so, but presently heard a piercing scream. 

 Rushing back he found her lying prone upon 



