File:Outing (1885) (14595004018).jpg

Identifier: outing63newy (find matches)
Title: Outing
Year: 1885 (1880s)
Authors:
Subjects: Leisure Sports Travel
Publisher: (New York : Outing Pub. Co.)
Contributing Library: Tisch Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries

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steps, the best I could.It was three hundred paces. With dueallowances, that meant two hundred andfifty feet across from brim to brim.By easy triangulation the opposite wallfor a base, the depth down to water wasone hundred and sixty feet. DISCOVERING AN UNDERGROUND RIVER 341 I seized an overhanging, tough, whitebirch branch and leaned far out over thehorrid brink. The walls were perpen-dicular, gray old dolomite limestone.Friendly lichens, moss, and creepingvines measurably covered the cold naked-ness and lent a touch of grim beauty, ifsuch a thing can be. In the dim depthsthe glassy sheen was almost inky black-ness. The chasm was so deep and the quite certain, therefore, that since thistree, a hundred and fifty feet long, haddived entirely beneath the water, thedepth of the monster well from rim tobottom must be more than three hundredfeet. In the immediate vicinity, and allwithin the space of forty acres, fourother shadowy caverns were found andsimilarly measured and explored. Save
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THE COURSE OF THE RIVER FROM SOURCE TO MOUTH trees so thick and high that even a tor-nado would hardly cause a ripple in thatprofound tranquillity. Athwart the surface of the inky watera monster pine-tree lay floating. I foundthe stump from which it had been cut—three feet across. The woodsman whocut the tree—for it leaned far out andcould not be saved—told me that whenit swept over to its grave, into whichit had looked since Columbus discoveredAmerica, it leaped madly from the stumpand shot like a huge javelin into thestill water and disappeared from sight.It rose slowly, denuded of all its limbs,stood a moment half submerged, andtoppled over to sleep and decay. It is the one described, all were dry, perhapspermanently so. In one were a few greatpines, tall and straight, just striving topeek over the rim. For several hundredyears the great prison walls had hemmedthem in without hope of pardon or re-lease. Would it be sacrilege to call thisholy ground ? But there are other chap-

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