Ardent Desires:
Mammoth Cave National Park

August 21, 2006

The photo above is of the "Frozen Niagara".. travertine spilling over an edge like a waterfall. This was the highlight of one of the shorter tours at Mammoth Cave National Park. Our large group reached it after following a winding and narrow metal staircase. We were warned to watch our heads; no one was doing any passing.

Stepping carefully and crouching, I thought to myself: this is a lot like entering a pyramid, except with more head room. It was just the week before that I had climbed down into the heart of a pyramid at Dahshur.

Dahshur is maybe 45 miles south of the pyramids at Giza. The angle of ascent is slightly less than the canonical pyramids. On its north side is an entrance.. and one goes down and down, crouching the whole way and going one wooden stop at a time. At the end one comes to a couple of chambers, the first of which has unique and haunting shape:

The damp air stank.. and I thought of all the accounts of pyramids I had read that mention bats and the smell of their urine. The bats are gone, but their smell remains.

Despite danger, people have always been ready to descend into the pyramids in search of unknown paths.. and perhaps treasure. One Arabic writer from the beginning of the 13th century noted the following:

In one of these two pyramids is an entrance where people have gone in, leading them to narrow corridors, labyrinthine tunnels, ruined wells, and other things, according to the report of someone who entered. Many people have an ardent desire to enter and imagine that they would penetrate far into its depths. But it always happens that they wind up at a place where they are no longer able to proceed. As for the much frequented tunnel, the narrow way leads to the top of the pyramid, and a square chamber is found there in which is a stone sarcophagus.

The writer is referring to the well-known entrance to the Great Pyramid at Giza.. but the corridor for this pyramid at Dahshur also led to a room where the king was once buried.. I asked a couple who had entered just ahead of me to take a picture:

On my way to this chamber we passed under a ceiling covered with the names of people who had preceded me.. I was pleased to see the name Burton up there:

The number 1276 stands beside his name. Typically, Burton has set down the Arabic year.. which puts us in the middle of the 19th century. I wondered how people got their name up on the ceiling like that, and it was not until I looked through a book I found at the visitor center for the Mammoth Cave National Park that I learned.. one picture says it all:

It is a method that worked equally well in natural limestone caves and pyramids made of limestone blocks.

It is a little hard for me to understand the attraction of caves. They are narrow and it is hard to get a good picture of anything in the dim light. I asked myself why people enjoy caves numerous times over the summer as I read accounts, Arabic and English, of descents into the pyramids. At Mammoth Cave National Park I came across another variety of cave description.. detailed accounts of what is to be found inside the cave.

Sometimes it seems as if Americans saw in caves (and other natural landmarks) exactly what they thought they were missing in their lack of pyramids and temples and other such ancient ruins.. the types of things in which Egypt excels. An author named Alexander Clark Bullitt wrote a descriptive tract on Mammoth Cave (1844), and describes what the visitor will see. Here he actually quotes an even earlier writer:

The Temple is an immense vault covering an area of two acres, and covered by a single dome of solid rock, one hundred and twenty feet high. It excels in size the Cave of Staffa; and rivals the celebrated vault in the Grotto of Antiparos, which is said to be the largest in the world... Every one has heard of the dome of the Mosque of St. Sophia, of St. Peter's and St. Paul's; they are never spoken of but in terms of admiration, as the chief works of architecture... and yet when compared with the dome of this Temple, they sink into comparative insignificance. Such is the surpassing grandeur of Nature's works. [Rambles in the Mammoth Cave 55, 57]

Just like large groups the pyramids and other ancient sites, we had a guide.

I forget his name, but he was quite funny.. Mammoth Cave has been a tourist attraction since the early part of the 19th century, making it one of the earliest such sites in the United States. Then and now there seems to be an ardent desire to experience what is underground.. and guides such as this channel that interest into an educational experience. But I wonder if originally this fascination with the underground stemmed from reports about the pyramids, and the mysteries to be found inside those ancient monuments.