“Finally, I reached a chamber—a whale of a big oval-shaped room. Looked like several hundred yards before there was a sharp curve to the right and another sharp descent. On the left was another big tunnel leading in the opposite direction ... and the floor on the left looked a little more smooth and level, so I tackled it first. It didn’t take long to discover that this one was the Bats’ Cave, so I went back to the big entrance and started down the other tunnel. “I kept going until I found myself in the mightiest wilderness of strange formations a cowboy ever laid eyes on! It was the first cave I was ever in, and I didn’t know then that those formations had names like ‘stalagmites’. But I did know, with the kind of instinct the Creator puts into a man, that there just wasn’t another scene like this one in the whole world.” To arrive at this point, Jim White had crept cat-like across a dozen dangerous ledges and past many a tremendous opening that seemed to reach downward into the very center of the earth. He dropped rocks to sound depths; into one opening he pushed a great boulder. It hit something—not bottom—and kept rolling and rolling until the sound faded into a haunting memory of sound. “I walked through more of those ‘stalagmites’, and each one seemed larger and more beautifully formed than the ones I’d already seen. I blinked at the sight of giant-size wonders that turned out to be gleaming ‘onyx’. The ceilings blinked back at me with clusters of ‘stalactites’ ... like great chandeliers. The walls sparkled and glittered.” Those walls were frozen cascades of flowstone, with jutting rocks holding long, slender formations that rang under Jim White’s experimental touch like keys on a xylophone. Floors were carpeted with formations with new shapes and new sizes at every turn. Through the gloom, Jim saw the tall, graceful, ghost-like shapes resembling totem-poles, stretching upward into darkness. Through crystal-clear water, Jim White saw that the sides of several pools at his feet were lined with what appeared to be marble. Lost in the beauty, the weirdness, the grandeur into which his inquisitive mind had led him, Jim forgot time, place and distance. Suddenly, the oil in his lantern was exhausted. The flame curled and died. Reality descended swiftly, as if millions of tons of black wool drifted down to smother and choke. With the black loneliness paralyzing his bloodstream, Jim White tried to refill his lantern from the small emergency canteen of oil, brought for just such a moment. [Illustration: _Twin Domes and Giant Stalagmites in the Big Room_] “My fingers shook so much that I fumbled the filler-cap and spilled more oil in my lap than I did in my lamp. Then I dropped the filler-cap when I tried to screw it back on.