MYSTERIES OF EARTH.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 215, 8 June 1877, Page 7

MYSTERIES OF EARTH.

Cairo, HI., Feb. 8. — Wonderful and inexplicable physical facts are not confined to the low lands along the route of the Mississippi, and stranger than the works of primaeval man, consisting of mounds, canals, and fortified strongholds, are cavernous depths, within which rivers flow from the mountains to the great drain of the continent. Fourteen miles south-east of Bowling Green, Kv., is a cavern more extraordinary and wonderful than Mammoth Cave. The entrance to the more mysterious pit is on the front of a perpendicular height, made almost inaccessible by vines, brauible3, and densely growing forest trees. Trammel's enters Drake's creek just above the strange aperture to unknown depths and impenetrable darkness below. This adytum is ten feet long and four feet wide, and the chasm seems to yawn, and its great mouth is horrible to contemplate. Eude people in the vicinity call it "Hell's Hole," or the " Indian's Pit." From the measureless abyss there issues, ceaseless as the lapse of hours and days and years, a volume of mist. On cold, clear, frosty mornings it rises in spiral columns far above the tree-tops, and, whitened as it ascends, and gleaming in the sunlight, it floats away and is lost in the clouds. At some unknown period in the world's history Mother Exrtb. breathed heavily, aad great boulders, worn round and smooth as if ground by friction when upheld by currents of air, and falling back a^ain and ajfua, lifted up and rubbed by other stones, cover the hillside, and have rolled from the cavern's mouth into the valley below. People dwelling near by tell that in fall and winter the heavy stertorous breathings from the cavern are much warmer than sharp blasts sweeping along the deep gorge, while in summer the misty vapour from within is cooler than the exterior atmosphere. This fathomless pit grows wider in its downward course, and nothing living or inanimate that has entered ever found exit. Not the faintest echo was ever heard when great stones have been rolled into the awful depth of this descetisui A.uerni. If such massive boulders had encountered any object within, miles of the entrance, the sound produced would have been purely borne to listeners above by the strong, steady air-current. The impression fixed from childhood to age, that the solid earth must be for ever immoveable beneath our feet as surely and immoveably as the sun and stars and blue vault above our heads, is rudely shaken when one stands in the presence of such demonstrable hollowness and emptiness as this. Very much the same sensations are excited when standing at the pit's mouth as when an earthquake shakes la-ad and sea, and makes men and women shudder. When, not long ago, it was sought to ascertain the depth of the chasm, a heavy weight was attached to a strong cord, the lead went down, down, down, till the line and plummet had measured the greatest possible depth, but no sound came back to tell of the end of unutterable hollowness below. The weight, when withdrawn, was unsoiled, and by the moisture on its surface showed that in its descent and ascent it touched nothing but mist and darkness. — American Paper.