See America First Part 6

On this famous mountain top we were hailed by a man of middle age who belongs to that cla.s.s of men who are constantly reminding you they would have made good in life if they only had a chance, despite the fact that many constant toilers find the places of more educated men who are deceived into thinking their education would take the place of honest toil. This particular man doubtless never learned that "all values have their basis in cost, and labor is the first cost of everything on which we set a price." The prizes of life are not laid upon easily accessible shelves but are placed out of reach to be labored for, like the views one gets of the valley here only after paying the price in an exceedingly toilsome journey. He was content to grope in a dead past for glories that once had been.

"I stopped you," said he, "because I saw you are from Ohio and I thought you might know some people for whom I once worked."

Looking across the way at the poorly kept home with its untidy surroundings, where pigs, chickens, dogs, pet crows and children alike had access to both parlor and kitchen, we doubted whether the man could be located, for whom he ever had worked. We learned that he had business that brought him from the fertile valleys of Ohio to his mountain home. When anyone unsolicited begins to tell of his business or what it used to be, beware, for the real workers of the world have no time to tell what they are doing. "Now, you see it is like this," he said, "a man who owns forty-eight acres of timber here hired me to guard it against timber thieves. He gives me the house and all I can raise on the cleared ground, which is not much--just a few potaters, beans, and sich like. Of course, I don't live high like some, just bread and meat, no pie and cake and ice cream.

The kids ain't like they used to be, they like goin's on now and then; but when I was a boy I allus tended to my business and didn't keer to be goin' all the time."

With a stick he marked in the sand the better to represent the exact boundaries of his master's possessions. Such was his accuracy of observation. We verily believe he knew every bush- heap and stonepile on this and his neighbor's line. It had been evident from his conversation that there had been some changing of stone piles and many disputes in regard to their right location. To save a certain strip of land he "done bought eleven acres more or less, then he goes down on the other side and buys twenty-nine acres more or less, twenty-eight for sure." We soon became fairly familiar with the lay of the land over which this man held ever a watchful eye while he overlooked constantly the bigger, better things of life. With such accuracy of observation of minute details, looking inwardly and not outwardly, what a character would have been his. As far as we could discern this land was mostly stone piles and bushes, with growth of evergreen and deciduous trees in some places not worth guarding.

To look at this policeman of Old Ma.s.sanutten you would never surmise that he ever had a worry in all his life, but he told us that he had one. This even to us was not an imaginary one as he had seriously contemplated moving down in the valley some day.

He said "'a rolling stone gathers no moss,' neither does a settin' hen grow fat, but, I'll have to find a place to set for I'm gettin' old." We thought he had set too much already. "I'd as leave move a thousand miles as one hundred yards. It's the startin' I hate."

How much of what he considered his misfortune was clue to no other than his phrase, "I hate to start." He reminded us of the girl we saw in the valley sitting out at the front gate beneath an elm tree, waiting for something to turn up. She had failed to see patches of weeds in the yard and the vegetables were crying for help, yet she heard them not. Be wary, young men, for the person who waits for something to turn up usually finds only creditors.

"I was born in 1871. Yes, I was born, bred and raised near Yellow Sulphur Springs, Ohio. I ramped around thar many a day."

Looking at the flock of children who lacked many of the bare necessities of life, we thought what the Book of Books says: "He who careth not for his own is worse than an infidel."

Out across the valley we beheld the beautiful Blue Ridge rising like a grand graded way. Here was displayed a panorama that of all our Shenandoah journeys still appears as one of our most memorable mountain scenes. At our feet lay the valley interspersed with villages, homes and vast stretches of corn, oats and wheat, all clothed in that blue filmy veil making all appear like a rich garden of various emerald tints. Far away toward the horizon rose a lovely forest-crowned ridge so gloriously colored and luminous it seemed like the scene of a vast painting. Out over the tremulous billowy fields of grain and over the forest and meadow the sunlight fell in pale spangles of light over which a few gray shadows chased one another.

The sun was gilding the west as we started down the mountain side. The radiant host of evergreens stood silent in bold relief against their luminous background. High in the azure dome a few rose-colored clouds were drifting, scarce seeming to move in the light filled ether. Over all the vast expanse of sky a crimson spread which was followed by pink that was quickly succeeded by violet purple. Never had we beheld such a striking crimson sea.

Soon those radiant splendors vanished in the purple twilight. We watched the last faint color fade from the distant ridges. A soft breeze sighed among the pines and rustled the aspen leaves, then, died away. Mingled odors of pine and fern floated to us from the nearby forests. The light vanished from the sky but the mysterious charm of the time was not broken. In the east a softer and more quiet splendor tipped the foliage with silvery radiance, edging the fleecy clouds with mellow light. Only the purling music of the distant waterfall now broke the restful solemnity of the mountain solitudes. Night with its thoughts of other fairer worlds than this, was here and we with all Nature were preparing for rest.

As we drew near the Lawrence Hotel at Luray, the Moonlight Sonata floated dreamily upon the calm night air, and we seemed to feel the beauty of Hugo's lines:

Come child, to prayer; the busy day is done, A golden star gleams through the dusk of night; The hills are trembling in the rising mist, The rumbling wain looms dim upon the sight; All things wend home to rest; the roadside trees Shake off their dust, stirred by the evening breeze.

The sparkling stars gush forth in sudden blaze, As twilight open flings the doors of night; The bush, the path-all blend in one dull gray-- The doubtful traveler gropes his anxious way.

Oh, day; with toil, with wrong, with hatred rife; Oh, blessed night! with sober calmness sweet, The age-worn hind, the sheep's sad broken bleat-- All Nature groans opprest with toil and care, And wearied craves for rest, and love and prayer.

At eve the babes with angels converse hold, While we to our strange pleasures wend our way, Each with its little face upraised to heaven, With folded hands, barefoot kneels down to pray, At selfsame hour with selfsame words they call On G.o.d, the common Father of us all.

And then they sleep, the golden dreams anon, Born as the busy day's last murmurs die, In swarms tumultuous flitting through the gloom, Their breathing lips and golden locks descry, And as the bees o'er bright flowers joyous roam, Around their cl.u.s.tered cradles cl.u.s.tering come.

Oh, prayer of childhood! simple, innocent; Oh, infant slumbers! peaceful, pure and light; Oh, happy worship! ever gay with smiles, Meet prelude to the harmonies of night; As birds beneath the wing enfold their head, Nestled in prayer the infant seeks its bed.

CHAPTER III

LURAY CAVERNS AND MAMMOTH CAVE

O! bear me then to vast embowering shades, To twilight groves and visionary vales, To weeping grottoes and prophetic glooms, Where angel forms, athwart the solemn dusk Tremendous, sweep, or seem to sweep, along, And voices more than man through the void, Deep sounding, seize the enthusiastic ear.

Or is this gloom too much?

Where creeping water ooze, and where rivers wind, Cl.u.s.ter the rolling fogs and swim along The dusky mantled lawns. --Thompson.

The Shenandoah valley is not only famous for its beauty, picturesque scenery and many historical a.s.sociations, but here in Page county, Virginia, are located the beautiful caverns of Luray. Here we find caverns that for variety and beauty of their calcite formations excel many if not all caverns of the same kind in the world.

The valley at Luray is ten miles wide, extends from the Blue Ridge to the Ma.s.sanutten mountain, and displays remarkably fine scenery. These ridges lie in vast folds and wrinkles, and elevations in the valley are often found to be pierced by erosion. Cave Hill, three hundred feet above the water level, had long been an object of local interest on account of its pits and oval hollows, through one of which, August 13, 1878, Mr.

Andrew J. Campbell and others entered, thus discovering the extensive and beautiful caverns.

There is a house built on the entrance to these caverns and one does not realize that such a remarkable region is located here.

The natural arch that admits one to Mammoth Cave has a span of seventy feet. It is very high and on its edges grow ferns, vines, and various wild flowers, and the phoebe builds her nest and fills all the s.p.a.ce about with her sweet prophecy of spring.

It is what the entrance to a place so vast should be.

At the Luray Caverns cement walks have been laid, stairways, bridges and iron railings have been erected, and the entire route through this most beautiful of subterranean palaces is illuminated by brilliant electric lights. On entering the caverns you experience a thrill of strange emotion and mute wonder. One speaks, if at all, in whispers. It is too much for your imagination to grasp at once and you are overwhelmed as much as you were on first seeing Niagara. Here is silence such as never came to the outer world, darkness that far exceeds the blackest midnight; glittering stalact.i.tes that gleam like diamonds from the ceiling above; ma.s.sive artistic drapery which falls in graceful folds; cascades of rarest beauty formed by stone of marble whiteness, in place of falling water; tinted walls like evening skies; all these seen by the gleam of brilliant electric lights fill one with admiration and deepest awe. Here the Master Artist has carved s.p.a.cious palaces of rarest beauty. Columns of yellowish-brown, resembling transparent amber, support great vaulting domes above you. These lovely pillars seem to rise toward their proper arches as majestically as those of Rheims, Amiens, and Cologne, only here we find "no signs of decay" and "they never knew the cruel ravages of war."

This calls to memory a visit to the Steen, the old Spanish prison built in the eighth century in the city of Antwerp. A crowd of English soldiers and American doughboys were viewing the time-worn relics of the place when they found an old map of the world dating from the year 1300, A. D., whereupon one of the Englishmen exclaimed, "Where is America? Why, your bloomin', b.l.o.o.d.y country was not on the map. at that time!" Such good- natured humor was borne with about the same patience as the bites of "cooties" or Jersey mosquitoes. As they journeyed on, a companion of the first speaker said, "You don't have such wonderfully old and interesting things in America." The fiery American doughboys accepted this remark as a challenge and could keep silent no longer. One of them, voicing the sentiment of all, exclaimed in a voice that fairly awoke the echoes of those aged walls, "No, we do not have much of this old trash in our country. Everything in America is new and up-to-date." But in Luray Caverns we have one of the world's great wonders "that was old long before the foundation of the Pyramid of Cheops." Here are columns of gigantic proportions, one of which has lain on the floor of the cave for more than four thousand years. Some geologists state that the glacial period was sixty thousand years ago. If their deductions be true; we have in Luray a cavern that was fifty-four thousand years old when Adam gazed on Paradise.

These caverns are carved from the Silurian limestone, although they are considered to date from the Tertiary period. Long after the cave was formed, and after many stalact.i.tes had been hung on those s.p.a.cious halls with their down-grown crystals, it was completely filled with glacial mud charged with acid, whereby the dripstones were eroded in singular grotesque shapes. The eroded forms remained after the mud had been mostly removed by flowing water. Ma.s.sive columns have been wrenched from the ceiling by this aqueous energy and lie prostrate on the floor; a hollow column, forty feet high and thirty feet in diameter, stands erect, but has been pierced by a tubular pa.s.sage from top to bottom in the same manner; a leaning column almost as large has been undermined so as to resemble the leaning tower of Pisa; these are only a few of the many wonderful forms of Nature's architecture formed by no other tools than time and waterdrops.

We find no streams and true springs here as in Mammoth Cave, but there are numerous basins of pellucid water, varying from one to fifty feet in diameter, and from six to fifteen feet in depth.

Crystal Lake is a clear body of water surrounded by sparkling stalact.i.tes. How long its waters must have waited to mirror these lovely formations! They gleam and sparkle, forming an arch of dazzling splendor; fit drapery for such a gem of water, which shows again their marvelous beauty.

Here these waters have lain for countless ages with never a breeze to ripple their surface. At Mammoth Cave the waters enter through numerous domes and pits in cascades of great volume, and are finally collected in River Hall where they form several extensive lakes or rivers, which are connected with Green river by two deep springs that appear under arches on its margin. The water has been known to rise sixty feet above low water mark when there is a freshet in Green river. The waters of these rivers are navigable from May to October.

The first lake approached is called the Dead Sea. Here you gaze upward at vast cliffs sixty feet high and one hundred feet long, above which you go with cautious tread, then up a stone stairway that leads to the river Styx, a body of water forty feet wide and four hundred feet long, which is crossed by a natural bridge. A beach of finest yellow sand extends for five hundred yards to Echo river, the largest of all, being from twenty to two hundred feet wide, ten to forty feet deep, and about three miles long.

You never can forget your trip on this river of Stygian darkness. With oil lanterns that emit but a feeble flickering flame you see ghostlike figures, goblins and grim cave monsters that loom before you; your imagination peoples these subterranean halls and their t.i.tanic masonry with fantastic forms of its own creation. At this place these lines from Poe will perhaps flash through your mind:

By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where the Eidalon, named night On a black throne reigns upright; I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule, From a wild, weird c.h.i.n.k sublime, Out of s.p.a.ce and out of time.

When you speak loudly your words have a weird sepulchral tone that echoes far and near through the s.p.a.cious halls and avenues that makes the black pall of mystery all the more uncanny. As you first enter on your journey on this stream of inky blackness you are appalled by the awful darkness, and the stillness so intense is like that of some vast primeval forest at midnight.

The ceiling is so low at one place you can touch it with your hands. With rock above and on both sides of you and water beneath, you think you have a faint conception of Hades. You hear no sound but the gentle splash of the water struck by the oars, or the labored and rapid breathing of the more timid ones of your party.

Suddenly your boat stops and the guide utters a few tones beginning low in the scale and running higher, when, lo! the whole subterranean cavern seems filled with fairy tongues and becomes melodious with softer, sweeter tones until they die away among those avenues, like the music heard only in the realm of dreams. Some one suggests that a song be sung, whereupon an Irishman with deep sonorous voice starts, "Nearer, My G.o.d, to Thee," but he only sings but one line, for the clamor of voices insisting on another selection, is like that of a flock of crows in autumn who have discovered an owl. The mult.i.tudinous echoes, if not as musical as the voice of the guide, made more obvious harmony.

Thus do these aged halls send back rarest melodies for the discordant notes received. How like the n.o.ble souls one knows who take the discordant jeers and taunts of the world and by a life of serenity and steadfastness of purpose (which is ever to help mankind onward) build for them an admiration and devotion that returns from a mult.i.tude of grateful hearts like musical echoes, perhaps too late unheard.

The temperature of both Luray Caverns and Mammoth Cave is uniformly fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit throughout the year, and the atmosphere is both chemically and optically of singular purity. For this reason stone huts were once erected for consumptives in Mammoth Cave. Thirteen was the original number and for the poor unfortunates who inhabited them it was most unlucky; the patients became worse, and on being taken from their subterranean homes in Mammoth Cave quickly died. Only two of the huts still remain.

"Those curious mortals who are always seeking morgues and graveyard scenes should come here." What a place for contemplation! "Into what vast unrecorded ages the philosopher could let his thoughts go back!"

On entering Luray Caverns one of the first of the many curious formations to attract your attention will be rows of stalact.i.tes resembling fish on market. Here are fish that were on exhibit before Noah entered the ark. How patient the old fisherman must be to have stood through innumerable years and not yet have had a sale. You will see other forms that represent hams and sidemeat. You will, perchance, detect the lean streak as most people do. This meat needs no sugarcuring or smoking and will keep many more years with no fear of the blue-bottle fly.

Glittering stalact.i.tes. blaze in front of you; fluted columns and draperies in broad folds with a formation that resembles the finest hemst.i.tching may be seen all around you, while Pluto's chasm, a wide rift in the walls, contains a spectre clothed in shadowy draperies. One wonders how long this grim, ghastly person has stood here. Long ages came and went in that shadowy and evanescent time with no record save these stony ghosts, and over all a black pall of mystery still broods.

One of the most remarkable formations as well as one of the most beautiful which may be seen in Mammoth Cave is the flower garden. Dr. Hovery describes its beauty thus: "Each rosette is made of countless fibrous crystals; each tiny crystal is in itself a study; each fascicle of carved prisms is wonderful and the whole glorious blossom is a miracle of beauty. Now multiply this mimic blossom from one to a myriad as you move down the dazzling vista as if in a dream of Elysium; not for a few yards, but for two magnificent miles all is virgin white, except here and there a patch of gray limestone, or a spot bronzed by metallic stain, or as we purposely vary the lonely monotony by burning chemical lights. We admire the effective grouping done by Nature's skillful fingers. Here is a great cross made by a ma.s.s of stone rosettes; while floral coronets, cl.u.s.ters, wreaths, and garlands embellish nearly every foot of the ceiling and walls. The overgrown ornaments actually crowd each other till they fall on the floor and make the pathway sparkle with crushed and trodden jewels."

We find several forms of life in Mammoth Cave, such as light gray or stone colored crickets, with antennae and legs twice the length of our black musician. If this cave dweller is a musician like our cheery outdoor fiddler, how the empty walls must ring!

We found several of these odd insects near Echo river and on the walls of the cave near the well known as the "Bottomless Pit."

White crayfish moved back and forth on the sand at the edge of Echo river and backed away from us when we tried to procure one for a specimen. His subterranean home has seemingly not affected his habits. This cave also contains a fish known to scientists as "Amblyopsis Speloens," meaning "A weak-eyed cave dweller."

At one place in the caverns rows of stalact.i.tes are arranged in lines of various lengths in reference to tone, just like the strings of a piano, in regular graduated system. A small boy who accompanies the guide will strike those stone harps in rapid succession which give forth delicious liquid tones, sweet and silvery as the chimes of Antwerp Cathedral. They waver and float through those vast halls until the ear catches only a faint echo from some far, dim aisle. "How many centuries elapsed before this subterranean organ gave forth its delightful tones!" It lacked only the soul of a Beethoven or Chopin to interpret them aright. How like many n.o.ble lives whose talents perhaps shall only bud "unseen" or waste upon the desert air of environment.

One thinks of Keats, whose wonderful Ode to the Nightingale and lovely Nature Poems might never have been sung had he not gone out into the fragrant fields and woods, where the song of the lark and the breezes, "heaven born," touched his great soul like an Aeolian harp which dispersed sweetest melodies for all mankind to hear.

CHAPTER IV