UNDERNEATH PIKE'S PEAK. 217 



the Virginian cave, and merits a word or two of description. This one 

 is called the Cave of the Winds, and is distant from the 'Manitou Spa 

 just a pleasant walk up Williams's Canon, one of the prettiest of the 

 gorges seaming the base of the great peak. The canon walls are lime- 

 stone, stained red and Indian yellow; they are lofty, vertical, and bro- 

 ken into a multitude of bastions, turrets, pinnacles, and sweeping, hugely 

 carved facades, whose rugged battlements tower hundreds of feet over- 

 head against a sky of violet. At their bases these upright walls are so 

 close together that much of the way there is not room for one carriage 

 to pass another, and the track lies nearly always in the very bed of the 

 sparkling brook. You seem always in a cul de sao among the zigzags 

 of this irregular chasm, and sometimes the abundant foliage, rooted in 

 the crevices above, meets in an arch across the brightly painted but nar- 

 row space you are tortuously threading. 



Half a mile up the canon, at the end of the roadway, a trail goes by 

 frequent turnings about three hundred feet up the precipitous sides of 

 the ravine to the foot of sheer cliff. Floundering in snow up this steep 

 and slippery goat-path, we arrived breathless underneath an archway of 

 native rock, giving access to a great chimney rising above a niche which 

 serves as anteroom. The cave proved a labyrinth of passages, occasionally 

 opening out into chambers of irregular size (and rarely with very high 

 ceilings), into which protruded great ledges and points of rock from the 

 stratified walls, still further limiting the space in which it is possible to 

 move about. 



These passages are often very narrow, and. frequently you must stoop 

 in crowding through, or, if you insist upon going to the end of the 

 route, squirm along, Brahmin-like, on all-fours for several rods at a time. 

 The avenues and apartments are not upon the same level, but run over 

 and under each other, and constantly show slender fox-holes branching 

 off, which the guide tells you lead to some stygian retreat you have vis- 

 ited or are about to see. Boston Avenue is one such passage, partly arti- 

 ficial, between Canopy Hall and another large chamber, originally sepa- 

 rated at that point by a thin wall of clay. Chicago Avenue is another 

 6ide-squeezing but very pretty channel which forms part of the regular 

 four hours' walk through the cave; for if one is to "do" the whole of 

 the nearly one hundred chambers already discovered, it will take him 

 fully that length of time. Often the end of one of these tortuous un- 

 derground crevices, or passage-ways, is found in a round sink, like one 

 of the great " pot-holes" sometimes occurring in a river-bottom, and the 

 like of which I have never seen in any other cave. Many of the pro- 



