SWITCHBACKS AND CHUTES.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 12814, 13 July 1912, Page 3 (Supplement)

SWITCHBACKS AND CHUTES.

SIMPLE JOYS NEVER DREAMED OF BY SHAKESPEARE. LONDON, May 29. Shakespeare's England, as they have it at Earl's Court, is not all madrigals and Morris dancers. A press representative plunged yesterday into the mystic caves and can tell of "the luiee-quakirig qualms which heset him when out of. all the blackness the floor began to shudder beneath his feet. The air is filled with the roar of angry waters and the rushing of great winds. There are stairs which shriek under one's tread, and at last, when the pilgrim has made his awesome journey through unnumbered corridors of chaos, he steps into the light of day with. the ; . pride of one who has flouted an evil conspiracy. After this the Great Bowl Slide is breezy and joyous. There are no secrets here. The plunge is made m the sunlight, arid once launched down, the chute there is no chance of an ignoble retreat. Down the chute one must go, swerving round its spirals and collapsing, at the last like a spent wave at the bottom of a gigantic polished bowl. 'There, the only thing to do is to lie helpless m the smooth curved hollow until an attendant throws out a life-line. There are three or four switchback tracks, and the experts differ which line, holds most thrills to the furlong. They are all designed on the crescendo system beginning with a murmur of little dips and rises and ending m an American College yell of flights through space and drops down chasms. Would you shoot? Here are rifles and pretty Indian maids, fringed and beaded and moocassined to load the weapons and compliment one on his skill. Although it is hard to explain his presence m a Shakespeare exhibition, the visitor should not fail to call on the gentleman who has a little house up a tree, and' can climb up to it with his bare brown feet m a way that makes a lift look foolish. He is a wdld man from the Philippines, and his war chant is "Wan Pinny, Gif me Pinny." ' There is no end to the variety of the side shows. f In one building there are incubators where tiny babies lie like sleeping flowers, m another cunning opticiaris lead one to believe that the girl who is singing on the stage is only the height of half a dozen pennies. They are Alpine rides and twin gravity rides, a siege of Ladysmith and a dragon's, gorge.