Following an old underground track which often narrowed down like a tunnel, we pressed on forwards. Splendid images of calcified rock surrounded us and the white walls shimmered in the light of our lantern…A glance at our burnt-down candle, for which we had no replacement, made clear to us the danger in which we found ourselves. In fact we lost the way and if, when the burning time of the candle had only a few minutes left, Dr Miltner had not found again, by a lucky coincidence, the little entry-hole into the gorge, in all likelihood we would have remained as prey for Typhon in his gloomy, stifling cave.
Josef Keil and the great epigrapher Adolf Wilhelm (who had transferred his researches from Euboea to Cilicia) recalling their experiences in the Corycian cave in 1925, in Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua, vol. 3 (1931), 215, translated from their German
THE visitor: One group [the ‘Giants’] simply grasp rocks and oak-trees with their hands and…insist that only what admits of contact and being touched exists, because they define ‘body’ and ‘being’ as the same. If one of the others says that something without a body exists, they totally despise him and refuse to hear anything more from him.
THEAETETUS: You do describe dreadful people: I, too, have met quite a few of them already.
Plato, The Sophist, 246A-B (c. 355–350 BC)