ILLINOIS AUDUBON SOCIETY 



have proved to our own satisfaction that this rave, though remarkable in 

 many ways, is limited in extent and without the "bottomless pit" and other 

 impossible features. It is peculiar and offers us a problem to solve, in that 

 the air comes out from the one discoverable opening at all hours and at 

 all seasons, which is not the way a limestone cave should behave. It is 

 popularly supposed, by those who do not distinguish between bats and 

 other kind of birds, to be inhabited by birds. Another peculiarity is the 

 elevation of the cave mouth which commands a view of the greater part of 

 two counties. 



Standing here on the sub-carboniferous formations above the cave 

 mouth, the view for twenty miles to the northwest is of a rolling plain 

 lying several hundred feet below — a plain covered with glacial drift almost 

 to the foot of the hills and underlaid with two thick coal seams and sev- 

 eral thin ones, the true coal measures, the richest in the State. Frequent 

 slips, revealed in almost all of the nearly two score mines whose smoke 

 darkens the sky as seen from this eminence, testify to the wide extent of 

 the disturbance which heaved this and other mountains of rock from their 

 beds in this region, to look out upon the advancing glacier as it came to 

 the very foot of the mountain, wavered, and then retreated, leaving a thin 

 sheet of drift and small boulders, small as compared with those scattered 

 over the prairies of northern Illinois, but glacial material, nevertheless. 



Sometime, a "sky line drive" will be constructed along the top of the 

 cliff, the magnificent view from which is now obtained only by tiresome 

 climbing. A few miles south from the cave, the vertical cliff is broken by 

 the picturesque Stillhouse Hollow, down which a great volume of water 

 flows from the summit which here is broad enough for fertile fields. The 

 name is due to moonshining operations in the early days. 



About a quarter of a mile further south along the faul cliff, I discov- 

 ered, more than a year ago, a very remarkable profile of a human face, 

 twelve or fifteen feet high and directly overlooking the more level country 

 below. It is all the more remarkable in that I had been that way 

 several times before and had not seen 

 it. and that no one claims to have 

 noticed it before, though the lands 

 below were the earliest to be cleared 

 and settled. Fancy may here be em- 

 ployed to add interest to local ge- 

 ology. Hawthorne had Ernest be- 

 come like the unapproachable face in 

 the distance. r I nis face is near and 

 full of sympathy. It is that of an old 

 woman with wrinkled features. Once 

 the face was young with bold out- 

 line. Her birth was when the moun- 

 tain was heaved into view by the 

 forces within. In youth she saw the 

 beginning of the eroding forces that 

 have shaped the valley below. Here 

 roamed prehistoric beasts whose bones 

 we find in the swampy lands along clarence Bonneii-Photo. 



f i Ci; • -tv, V , , . ° THE "GREAT STONE FACE" OF 



the Saline river. I he ice sheet of the saline county 



