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Updated: September 24, 2025
The dome itself was not high enough to allow me to stand upright, and from the roof, principally from the central part, a complex mass of delicate icicles passed down to the floor, leaving a narrow burrowing passage round, which was itself invaded by icicles from the lower part of the sloping roof, and by stubborn stalagmites of ice rising from the floor.
The stalagmites were all a little concave, and the cavities were filled with water. The water percolates through the roof, a drop at a time often the drops several minutes apart and more or less charged with mineral matter. Evaporation goes on slowly, leaving the mineral behind.
I have visited a few, certainly extremely beautiful, adorned as they are with brilliant stalactites depending from their roofs, that seem as if supported by the stalagmites that must have required ages to be formed gradually from the floor into the massive columns, as we see them to-day.
The stalagmites were all a little concave, and the cavities were filled with water. The water percolates through the roof, a drop at a time often the drops several minutes apart and more or less charged with mineral matter. Evaporation goes on slowly, leaving the mineral behind.
Some workmen, excavating in a quarry of Jurassic limestone, found the opening to the cave, the bottom of which was covered with stalagmites, while there were no corresponding stalactites hanging from the roof. Some of these calcareous columns appear to be artificial piles covered with the limestone sheeting.
What the man said was literally true. The bear had gone into this cleft or cave to take his winter nap, and during the long weeks, while he was thus hybernating, the water, of rain and melting snow, dripping from the top of the cliff, had formed enormous stalactites of ice, with stalagmites as well: since it was one of the latter that had closed up the entrance to the den, and fairly shut him up in his own house!
This shortly brought them to a bewitching spring, whose basin was incrusted with a frostwork of glittering crystals; it was in the midst of a cavern whose walls were supported by many fantastic pillars which had been formed by the joining of great stalactites and stalagmites together, the result of the ceaseless water-drip of centuries.
Nowhere else in the world can stalactites that droop from the roof, stalagmites that spring from the floor, be seen in such perfection of form and tint.
The end of a range of rocky hills seems to have been broken off by some earthquake, or washed away by the Deluge, leaving only a series of twenty or thirty tall, thin, smooth, needle-like rocks, many hundred feet in height; some like gigantic tusks, some shaped like sugar- loaves, and some like vast stalagmites.
The water falling on the upper surface in scattering drops forms myriads of minute stalagmites; on side positions the falling drop first strikes the point exposed to its line of descent and then spreads.
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