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All we have to do is to say not "Open Sesame," like Ali Baba in the tale of the Forty Thieves but some word or two which Madam Why will teach us, and forthwith a hill will open, and we shall walk in, and behold rivers and cascades underground, stalactite pillars and stalagmite statues, and all the wonders of the grottoes of Adelsberg, Antiparos, or Kentucky. Am I joking?
Indeed, the frosty god conspired with it for our delight; building crystal bridges, with tracery of lace delicater than Valenciennes, and spangled string-pieces, and fretted vaultings, whimsical sierras, stalactite and stalagmite. An icicle is one of those careless toys of nature which the decorative art of man imitates in vain. They are among the myriad decorations of children's palaces.
Excavations made in 1886 have brought to light a series of deposits, one above the other, the gravel and red earth containing Quaternary bones and worked flints, whilst the stalagmite and ooze are evidently of more recent origin.
'T is a waterspout!" cried Fuller, pointing excitedly at the cloud, which, driven on with furious force by an upper current of wind unfelt below, was now bellying in a marked and abnormal fashion, while from the lowest point of the convexity appeared a spiral column of dense vapor rapidly elongating itself toward the sea whose waters assumed a black and sullen aspect, disturbed by chopping counter currents of short waves, which gradually, as the waterspout neared them, fell into its rotary motion, rising at the centre of the whirlpool into a column of foaming water, a liquid stalagmite climbing to meet the stalactite bending to it from above.
It is not easy to conceive that a solid horizontal floor of hard stalagmite should, after its formation, be broken up by running water; but when the walls of steep and tortuous rents, serving as feeders to the principal fissures and to inferior vaults and galleries are encrusted with stalagmite, some of the incrustation may readily be torn up when heavy fragments of rock are hurried by a flood through passages inclined at angles of 30 or 40 degrees.
In one place, near at hand, a stalagmite had been slowly growing up from the ground for ages, builded by the water-drip from a stalactite overhead.
Cicely did, however, miss his care, for the Queen could not but be engrossed by her various cicerones and attendants, and it was no one's especial business to look after the young girl over the rough descent to the dripping well called Roger Rain's House, and the grand cathedral-like gallery, with splendid pillars of stalagmite, and pendants above.
Jones said he found remains of bows and arrows and charcoal with the skulls he obtained, and which were destroyed at the time the village of Murphy's was burned. All the people spoke of the skulls as lying on the surface and not as buried in the stalagmite." It relates probably to the Innuit of Alaska.
It was about 5 inches thick, and had formed part of a stalagmite whose horizontal section, like that of the free column, would be an ellipse of considerable eccentricity; and, on examination, it turned out that the surface areas, which varied in size from a large thumb-nail to something very small, were the ends of prisms reaching through to the other side of the piece of ice, at any rate in the thinner parts, and presenting there similar faces.
Where stalactite meets stalagmite there are pillars: where stalactite meets stalactite in fissures long or short there are elegances, flimsy draperies, delicate fantasies; there were also pools of water in which hung heads and feet, and there were vacant spots at outlying spaces, where the arched roof, which continually heightened itself, was reflected in the chill gleam of the floor.
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