Darnall’s Way was cut through the sandbank, in 1896, to the summit, where a bridge cast directly across the abyss gives us the most complete view to be had of the locality. One remarkable feature is a folded alabaster curtain one hundred and nineteen feet high. By casting fire-balls down the whole interior is grandly illuminated. Davidson descended to the bottom, as others have occasionally done since, by means of a well some thirty feet deep, down which one clambers like a chimney-sweep. He found there “stretching away in midnight blackness a horrid pool of water.” In 1863 Mr. F. J. Stevenson, of London, had a boat made and lowered through the window, on which he floated away for seven long hours on a perilous voyage that no man has since then repeated. The water now setting back from Green River has closed the entrance to what we term “Stevenson’s Lost River”; but his old boat still lies where it was stranded at the bottom of Gorin’s Dome.
Another huge abyss, the Bottomless Pit, was long regarded as ending further progress, till Stephen Bishop crossed it in 1840 by means of a slender cedar sapling thrown over the yawning gulf; since when it has been spanned by a substantial and safe bridge. Instead of being “bottomless” it is exactly one hundred and five feet deep. Above it is Shelby’s Dome, named for the first Governor of Kentucky. Balls of cotton waste saturated with coal-oil are flung down by the guides, which grandly display the wrinkled and corrugated walls of the pit. Looking directly across, we see an opening through which the writer and William Garvin emerged from their explorations around Scylla and Charybdis. There are other ways of approach, one from Gorin’s Dome, another from near the Scotchman’s Trap, and still another from River Hall to the very bottom, from which the upward view almost equals that from the base of Gorin’s Dome. All this great group of pits is connected below to form an immense hall, about four hundred feet long, which at high water is flooded by the overflow from River Hall. By Special permission, of former President of the United States Benjamin Harrison, this vast room was named Harrison Hall.
On crossing the Bridge of Sighs we find an enlargement of the Cave formerly used as a dining place, and hence known as Reveller’s Hall. Pensico Avenue, along which we go, is crossed underneath by an invisible passageway, causing sounds to be reproduced in Echo Chamber with marvelous reverberations. Wending our way amid the huge rocks that encumber Wild Hall we next reach the Grand Crossing, and beyond it the singular dry stalactite, the Pineapple Bush, and end our path in Angelica’s Grotto, with its curious Hanging Grove.