“At some period, long subsequent to its original excavation, and after many large stalactites had grown, the cavern was completely filled with glacial mud, whereby the drip-stone was eroded into singularly grotesque shapes. After the mud had been mostly removed by flowing water, these eroded forms remained amid the new growths. To this contrast may be ascribed some of the most striking scenes of the cave. The many, and extraordinary monuments of aqueous energy include massive columns wrenched from their place in the ceiling and prostrate on the floor; the hollow column forty feet high and thirty feet in diameter, standing erect, but pierced by a tubular passage from top to bottom; the leaning column, nearly as large, undermined and tilting like the Campanila of Pisa; the organ, a cluster of stalactites, dropped point downward, and standing thus in the room known as the Cathedral; besides a vast bed of disintegrated carbonates left by the whirling flood in its retreat through the great space called the Elfin Ramble. “The stalactite display exceeds that of any other cavern known, and there is hardly a square yard on the walls or ceiling that is not thus ornamented. The old material is yellow, brown or red, and its wavy surface often shows layers like the gnarled grain of costly woods. The new stalactites growing from the old, and made of hard carbonates that had already once been used, are usually white as snow, though often pink, blue or amber-colored. The size attained by single specimens is surprising. The Empress Column is a stalagmite thirty-five feet high, rose-colored and elaborately draped. The Double Column is made of two fluted pillars side by side, the one twenty-five, the other sixty feet high, a mass of snowy alabaster. Several stalactites in the Giant’s Hall exceed fifty feet in length. The small pendants are innumerable; in the canopy above the Imperial Spring it is estimated that forty thousand are visible at once. “The Cascades are wonderful formations, like foaming cataracts caught in mid-air, and transformed into milk-white or amber alabaster, while the Chalcedony Cascade displays a variety of colors. Brand’s Cascade, which is the finest of all, being forty feet high, and almost as wide, is unsullied and wax-like white, each ripple and braided rill appearing to have been polished. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: