Chapel managed to escape the monster once again. He crawled away and rushed down another tunnel. There were no immediate signs of the monster in that tunnel. He paused to catch his breath and tend to his wound. He applied pressure before ripping off his shirt to tie around himself and to keep the pressure on the wound to his stomach.
It wouldn’t stop the bleeding completely but it should allow him a chance to complete his mission.
He felt as if he’d failed. He was to draw the beast out into the open so the team led by Mike Leopold could ambush and kill it.
Yet it had struck it first and his plans changed in that instant.
Then from another tunnel he heard water and her. Deena Hopping.
“Deena?” he screamed.
“I’m here!” Deena Hopping called back.
He reached into the other tunnel and pulled her up. She immediately hugged him. Chapel was embarrassed and turned on simultaneously even though he knew it was an inappropriate time for such feelings.
There was no time to think about much else—the monster was coming!
“Let’s see if we can make it to the water,” Chapel said.
Deena and Gary entered another tunnel from under a beautiful natural arch, about thirty feet across at the bottom, and six feet above the water at the center. The bed of the river’s stream was eroded from strata of sandstone that is extremely hard, containing corundum, and so perfect is its continuity that it conveys sounds distinctly for a distance far beyond the reach of the human voice, when tapped upon with a hammer. The top of the arch was studded with lovely stalactites, clear as glass, that extends to the outer edge of the arch and form massive and beautiful groups there. Above the arch was a large opening. In truth the side of the room was out, and a great dark space appeared like a curtain of black. A natural path leads up over one side of the arch, and following the lead of the guide they went up above and learned that a room on the higher level extended off in that direction and it got larger and higher. The walls were columns in cream color and decked in places with blood-red spots or blotches of monstrous size. The ceiling they could not see. It was too high for the lights they had to reach. On the left they were suddenly confronted by large formation stalagmites so large and so grand that all others are dwarfed into insignificance.
On the opposite side of the room from which they entered there was a hole or opening in the wall. It was large enough to go through but it went into the great dark room. An abyss confronted them, a sheer precipice which descends for many feet, perhaps hundreds. No man knew.
Their eyes having grown accustomed to the dim light of candles in passages where absolute darkness, unrelieved by the stars of midnight, always reigns, the great opened room appeared before them softly flooded with daylight diffused from a broad white beam slanting down in long straight lines from the entrance as from a rift in heavy clouds; only this rift displayed around its edges a brilliant border of vegetation that the rough rocks cherish with tender care.
As Deena and Gary stood lost in almost speechless admiration, and without the slightest warning of what was in store for them, the white beam was stabbed by a narrow, gleaming shaft of yellow moonlight. The glorious, radiant beauty of the picture presented was utterly indescribable, but it was of short duration, and in a few seconds the golden blade was withdrawn as suddenly as it had appeared.
The quarter of a mile seemed to stretch out in some mysterious way as we worked on it, but the variety and abundance of attractions are more than ample compensation.
The view was fine, including as it did the deep ravine and grassy, wooded slopes rising three hundred feet above, with here and there a handsome ledge of marble exposed like the nearly buried ruin of a forgotten temple of some past age. Scattered about in great profusion among the broken rock on the surface of these hill-sides were observed a water deposit of iron ore.
The entrance was sufficiently broad to give a good first impression, and was under a heavy ledge of limestone which broke the slope of the hill and was artistically decorated with a choice collection of foliage, among which was a coral honeysuckle; the fragrant variety grows everywhere. Under the ledge was a narrow vestibule, out of the north end of which was a passage about twenty-four inches in width, between perpendicular walls, and as steeply inclined as the average dwelling-house stairway but without any assisting depressions to serve as steps.
* * * *
The first chamber entered was the principal portion of the cave, and by actual measurement is forty feet in length by forty in greatest width and the height estimated at fifty feet. On account of irregularities it appeared smaller but higher. On opposite sides of the chamber, at elevation about midway between the floor and ceiling were two open galleries.
The floor was extremely irregular with its accumulation of fallen masses of rock, and the action of water has given to portions of the walls the appearance of pillars supporting the arches of the roof. The whole aspect is that of a small Gothic chapel. Off to the northwest was another room measuring thirty feet in each direction, and out of this were several openings, too small to squeeze through, which indicated the possible existence of other chambers beyond, along with untold horrors filling those chambers.
The topography was nearly as broken, in its way, as the natural spread over it, and very beautiful with the dense forests lighted by the slanting yellow rays of the afternoon sun. The way lead up to the “ridge road” which was at length abandoned for no road at all, and descending through the forest, more than half the distance down to the Susquehanna River flowing at the base of the hill, Deena came suddenly in view of the cave’s entrance, which was probably one of the most magnificent pieces of natural architecture she had ever seen.
The entrance to the cave was through a hole about two feet high by three in width, into which she went feet first and wiggled slowly down an incline covered with broken rock, for a distance of fifteen feet, where a standing depth was reached. A flat, straight, level ceiling extends over the whole cave without any perceptible variation, and this is bordered around its entire length and breadth with a heavy cornice of dripstone, made very ornamental by the forms it assumes, and the multitude of depending stalactites that fall as a fringe around the walls. The line of contact between the cornice and ceiling is as clear and strong as if both had been finished separately before the cornice was put in place by skillful hands.
Dripstone covers the walls, which varied in height from one foot to twenty feet, according to the irregularities of the floor, just as the width of this one-room cave varies with the curves of the walls, which are sweeping and graceful, the average being twenty-nine feet, but is much greater at the entrance where the entire slope extends out beyond the body of the cave. The length, from north to south, measured two hundred plus feet or more.
The south end of the cave rose by a steep slope to within a foot of the ceiling with which it was connected by short but heavy columns of dripstone, and another line of pillars of graduated height met this at right angles near the middle and ends in an immense stalagmite that stood at the foot of the slope like a grand newel post.
That’s when the two became separated.