Into a show cavern

Text 1: Below the Peak, by Thomas Ingleby

An original travel writing written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

Our guide was a small, bent man of perhaps sixty years, who had led visitors into the cavern since he was a boy and who regarded the daylight, I believe, with a certain suspicion. He gave each of us a tallow candle fixed in a lump of clay, bade us keep it close to our hats, and stooped beneath the arch of rock without another word. We followed him, one by one, out of the summer afternoon.

For the first hundred yards the passage was low and wet, and we went bent double, like penitents, the water dripping upon our necks with a patience that seemed almost malicious. The candlelight did not so much illuminate the rock as quarrel with it; it threw up a jagged gleam here, a slick of black there, and between them a darkness so entire that I could not tell whether it lay a yard from my face or a mile.

Then the roof sprang away. We stood, without warning, at the edge of a chamber so vast that our five candles became five sparks, lost and trembling. The guide lit a flare of blue light, and for perhaps half a minute the whole hall leapt into being: columns of stone, pale as tallow, rising from the floor to meet their twins hanging from above; curtains of rock folded as delicately as linen; a pool, utterly still, in which a second cavern hung upside down. Nobody spoke. Then the flare guttered, and the dark came down upon us like a lid.

I have since been told that the place was made by water, drop upon drop, over ages beyond counting. I can believe it. Standing there, I felt very keenly how short a thing a man is.

We came out at five o’clock. The sun was still shining, the sheep were still grazing, and the guide blinked at the sky as though it had done something to offend him.

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