220 TRANSLUCENT AND RESONANT STALACTITES. 



The most profusely ornamented part of the cave is that included in 

 Music Hall, Alabaster Hall and Grotto, the Bridal Chamber, and the Din- 

 ing-room. Music Hall, a chamber fifty feet long, with a level floor, even 

 sides, and a high-arched ceiling, takes its name from the musical tones 

 produced by gently striking the resonant, vibratory stalactites. Quaint 

 imitative devices occur in the abundant excrescences here, while one end 

 of the hall is a perfect little jungle of stalactites and stalagmites. Many 

 of the specimens here do not taper, but have grown from their interiors 

 by the water which trickled through, leaving successive rings at the 

 mouth of the slender pendent tube, are of exactly the same diameter 

 throughout, and, having grown rapidly, have not had time to waste into 

 the clay-stained condition of the older formations, but remain beautifully 

 translucent, as you may see by holding your yellow candle-flame behind 

 them. Alabaster Hall and the Grotto are treasure-nooks, lavishly orna- 

 mented in every pattern of cave art. 



I have said enough to show, I think, that in the Pike's Peak cave, 

 which seems to belong to the same geological age as its eastern type, the 

 conditions of excavation were substantially the same as in the Virginian 

 "Wonder," and that consequently the same kind of spaces in the lime- 

 stone rock are found in both, and the same sort of interior decoration : 

 with this important difference, however, that the far greater supply of 

 water in one has carved out vastly more spacious rooms, and furnished 

 the transportation for an immensely greater mass of material into the 

 secondary formations of both pendent and piled up drip-rock. 



