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Here was a mass like an immense sponge, even to the colour, and there, descending from the roof down the side of the rock, was the waved hair of an undine that had been changed into white and glistening stone. The stalactites were less remarkable. The sound of dropping water told us that another cascade was near.
No tourists stricken with that deplorable mania for taking home souvenirs of everything, and ready to spoil any beauty to gratify their vanity or their acquisitiveness, had cast stones into the midst of the fairy handicraft of the wizard water for the sake of a fragment; nor had the village boys amused themselves here at the expense of the stalactites, for happily they had been well trained in the horror of the supernatural.
In the Chapel huge stalactites and stalagmites meet each other to form arm-chairs, thrones, alcoves, pulpits, and a double niche conspicuous among its surroundings. Standing within this niche a restless pair exclaimed: "What a capital place to be married! Who will pronounce the ceremony?" "Bless you, my children!" invoked a sober-looking fellow, extending his arms in mock solemnity.
It occurs as marble, limestone; calcspar, dogtooth spar, nail head spar, stalactites, and a number of other forms, which are only valuable when occurring in perfect crystals or uniquely set upon the rock holding it.
And here and there very fine and long consoles of sculptured wood seem to fall, as it were, from the beams and hang upon the walls like stalactites; and these consoles, too, in past times, have been carefully coloured and gilded.
It was this barking dog which brought you immediately to my mind, and if I have given you too much of it you must forgive me. Now we are upon the subject of old castles, do you remember my retailing to you, at second hand, a description of my father's visit to the Marquis de la Poype's old chateau in Dauphiny, with the cavern of bats and stalactites?
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 stalactites. How long its waters must have waited to mirror these lovely formations!
When he reached the corner and looked cautiously round, he saw them again at some distance down another long passage. None of the galleries he saw that night bore signs of the work of man or of goblin either. Stalactites, far older than the mines, hung from their roofs; and their floors were rough with boulders and large round stones, showing that there water must have once run.
You go wandering for hours among hills and wooded glens, artfully contrived to leave the impression that Nature shaped them and not man; following winding paths and coming suddenly upon leaping cascades and rustic bridges; finding sylvan lakes where you expected them not; loitering through battered mediaeval castles in miniature that seem hoary with age and yet were built a dozen years ago; meditating over ancient crumbling tombs, whose marble columns were marred and broken purposely by the modern artist that made them; stumbling unawares upon toy palaces, wrought of rare and costly materials, and again upon a peasant's hut, whose dilapidated furniture would never suggest that it was made so to order; sweeping round and round in the midst of a forest on an enchanted wooden horse that is moved by some invisible agency; traversing Roman roads and passing under majestic triumphal arches; resting in quaint bowers where unseen spirits discharge jets of water on you from every possible direction, and where even the flowers you touch assail you with a shower; boating on a subterranean lake among caverns and arches royally draped with clustering stalactites, and passing out into open day upon another lake, which is bordered with sloping banks of grass and gay with patrician barges that swim at anchor in the shadow of a miniature marble temple that rises out of the clear water and glasses its white statues, its rich capitals and fluted columns in the tranquil depths.
Flag Hill is a rock formed of sand and comminuted shells; while the flat which stretches to the south-west from its foot is of limestone formation. In it we found a kind of cavern, about 15 feet deep, with a sloping entrance, in which was some slightly brackish water, that in percolating through the roof had formed a number of stalactites.
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