The Bottomless Pit in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, America

BOTTOMLESS PIT. – The Bottomless Pit in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky is suspected by many to run through the whole diameter of the earth. The branch terminates in it, and the explorer suddenly finds himself brought upon its brink, standing upon a projecting platform, surrounded on three sides by darkness and terror, a gulf on the right and a gulf on the left, and before him what seems an interminable world. He looks aloft; but no eye has yet reached the overreaching dome; nothing is there seen but the flashing of the bright blue water dropping from above, smiling as it shoots by in the unwonted gleam of the lamp. He looks below, and nothing meets his glance save darkness, as thick as lampblack, but he hears a wild mournful melody of water, the wailing of the brook for the green and the sunny channel left in the upper world never more to be revisited. Down goes a rock, tumbled over the cliff by the guide, who is of the opinion that folks come here to see and hear, not to muse and be melancholy. There it goes – crash! it has reached the bottom. No – hark, it strikes again; once more and again, still falling. Will it never stop? One’s hair begins to bristle as he hears the sound repeated, growing less, until the ear can follow it no longer. Certainly if the Pit of Frederick shall be eleven thousand feet deep, the Bottomless Pit of the Mammoth Cave must be its equal.