The following is my translation of an article called: Die Mammuthöhle in Kentucky von Wolfgang von Garvens-Garvensburg. It appeared in a German popular science magazine, Kosmos Handweiser für Naturfreunde 1909, Heft 11, Seiten 340-344. For reasons of sheer lust, the many photos of naked women in the original article have been kept to myself. To be more helpful, I'll point out that this article concerns a cave called the Mammoth Cave. Anybody hoping for the latest news on hairy elephants won't hear it. There are several articles featuring mammoths in the archive -link above- but this ain't one of them. And don't go crying to me about this being potentially misleading, as I didn't name the cave. Good grief, you provide a translation and people start moaning on about all kinds of irrelevancies and ... The article is written rather lyrically at times and, as I'm not always familiar with some of the references involved, it would require miraculous intervention to do full justice to the original text.
I'm not aware of any previous translations.
Trevor Dykes.

The Mammoth Cave in Kentucky by Wolfgang von Garvens-Garvensburg
The world famous Mammoth Cave of Kentucky lies in a rugged landscape that is characterised by many rock falls, land collapses, earth slips and caves. This is due to the occurrences of the collapse of the easily soluble, weak and fragile oolithic limestone which forms its bedrock. As the precipitations quickly finds its way into the innards of the ground, which is run through with openings like a sponge, the area has only a few water courses. In contrast, many ponds, pools and puddles can be found on the surface in ditches and dips of the collapsed ground, and these are filled with standing, opaque, green-yellow or ferrous-oxide red coloured water. When these waterholes dry out, then crystals are built from the dissolved minerals that look like rosettes fixed to the ground, or like stiff buds and leaf forms sprouting from the sediment. But the undermined rock strata often fall in, subterranean passages and caves get filled in, and little generally remains to be seen of the latter.

There is one place meriting special interest: the Mammoth Cave and its surroundings. It is protected from collapse by a sandstone ceiling, as water can do but little to this sandstone dating from the Carboniferous. Consequently, it has endured regardless of the great erosion of the limestone. In contrast, the ceiling is broken through to the sides, the ground has fallen in and those caves and passages contain debris. The upper encasement of sandstone has another significance for this cave. As the sandstone is chemically unaffected by contact with water, it cannot become saturated with mineral salts. This means that few stalagmites or stalactites have developed in the cave. The remarkable aspect of the Mammoth Cave has far more to do with its size and wonderful, subterranean erosion caused by the water from the former water courses that have run beside and beneath each other, and which are partly still present today. With its enormous extent of over 243 kilometres, the area so far explored, no other region of the Earth has anything comparable. This underground labyrinth of grottoes, passages and galleries is solely and alone the work of the ceaseless action of water which, with the help of its carbon-dioxide content, most effectively dissolves the limestone and, in accordance with the chemistry and hardness of the stone, it produces the great variety of forms that make up the Mammoth Cave of today. Apart from this dissolution, mechanical forces of gravity have moved masses of material, and the natural mechanical energy and friction of floods have cut into the rock walls, polished and worn them.

The collapse of a section of rock has produced an entrance for the cave, and its rubble provides a slope leading into its depths. Four different routes are available for viewing the cave and for making a tour of this underground landscape. The River Route is the longest and undoubtedly the nicest tour. Instead of giving a comprehensive account, I want to limit myself to a summarised overview of the main appearances and impressions of the Mammoth Cave.

At 9 o'clock we disappear into the dark corridors of the cave, and do not reach daylight again until sundown. We wander for 20km beneath the ground through passages and trenches, caves and halls, tunnels and temples, rest in grottoes and galleries, holes and alcoves, clamber through breaks and fissures, rubble and rocks, wells and basins, climb hills and caves, bridge across chasms and transverse rivers and lakes in boats. The memories of the Echo River remain unforgettable, a natural, round and bankless tunnel that the water has bored through the rock, a classic that can be compared with nothing else. Its walls make one think of Heine's Lorelei and Eichendorff's song: "In a cold bed there turns a waterwheel", as our boat slides through the underworld in the melancholic silence of the flood. Our beautiful mood of appreciation, however, climbs to tense excitement as our clear, loud calls in the total darkness of the channel of the cave river swell to the dull and wild roars of a dragon. The reply comes as a melodic amplification, deepening and lengthening of the sound from the niches and domes of the river's chamber, and not as a repeated echo.

Never could I tire of, to use the renown of Blumental, a dried out river bed of over an English mile in length, with walls and ceilings glittering and glistening with crystals, some like diamonds and others like snow shimmering in the sun, and then enchanting, shining flowers as large and beautiful as chrysanthemums and sunflowers, here and there it glowed and glittered with a snow of glimmering crystal dust from the dome, produced by the shaking of our steps loosening it, or by it being thrown off by the constant new growth of crystals. The Snowball Room presents a cave chamber with its roof speckled with white, half bell-shaped piles of crystals like thrown lumps of snow, and the Fly Chamber has black coloured plaster crystals hanging from the ceiling, as if hundreds of these pestilent spirits had come to rest upon it. In Martha's Vineyard the walls seem to have been climbed by a grape vine with its stem and shoots, and these are hung heavy with dark grapes made from hard drops of carbon-poor lime under a covering of ferrous oxide, while the water running down the rock fixes the impression of a winding vine onto the wall. The bunches of flowers and bushels of herbs beneath the dome having been formed by the exfusion of alabaster, while the shining discs on rocks and ridges change, at a closer inspection, into the bodies of a snow-white fungal growth. Ever new surprises crowd around us, and ever new appearances grasp our attention as we make our way through this wonderland that is built and filled with gorges and canyons, channels and fissures, shafts and ships, columns and pillars, niches and oysters, roofs and cathedrals, cliffs and balls, pools and puddles, lakes and swamps, arches and bridges, that stand atop of each other up to five storeys. Even in the miles of cave passages that offer nothing particularly worth seeing, the guide knows how to hold our interests awake, by pointing out remarkable rocks forms or stone figures. Mature rock structures with wide bases and rejuvenated pillars that hang down from the cave, must be imagined as the hams in a larder. From the outlines of dark brown stone veneer, that array the walls and ceilings here and there, the imagination conjures up all kinds of adventure story characters. A light effect projects the head and shoulders of Martha Washington, a rock displays the face of Shakespeare. A block of stone, just like hundreds of others lying about within and without, receives its character and meaning from a large man sitting upon it, or who has tripped over it. Every rock seems to have its name and is attached to a long, a very long story. An unremarkable cavern can be made remarkable by an interpretive actor who performs a certain role from a well known play. The brain immediately finds food for thought, and the meaningless is pushed into a fascinating light.

Unfortunately, the Tropfsteine (Additional note: literally 'drop stones' such as stalactites) of the cave are very modest and almost all, excepting for the stalactite in Oliver's Wood, are damage. We find, for example, that a stalactite construction known as the Elephant Head is only preserved as a shapeless lumps, and that the protuberances for tusks, trunk and ears have been beaten off. Even the ranks of smaller stalactites, which are often found like small posts in the galleries on ribs and edges of rocks, have mostly been destroyed. No less rare are the less vulnerable pieces, whereby the downwards directed stalactites have amalgamated with upward growing stalactites that support the dome like pillars. Famous among these is the raised Wedding Altar that embodies a priest blessing a bride and groom. There are more artificial monuments in the cave in the form of stone pyramids, and these have been built by societies, university clubs, associations or members of government groups. We added two stones to the German hill, and left a note remarking on our visit on New Year's Day 1908.-

The erosion caused by water has today ended. The river and stream courses have run dry. It is empty and lonely, silent and deserted beneath the earth. The hard rocks are all that remains with their signs and relicts of the earlier, ceaseless action of millions of years. Every turn and curve of the river is still today recognisable from the bends and angles of the rock walls, each bay from the hollows and niches, each bar from the horns and cusps. Every eddy and whirlpool of the river is marked from the circles, halls and funnels that grew from them, each water level is marked in the stone. Every wave that slipped along the walls of the cave left its undulations in the limestone, ribboned, folded and crimpled the rocks, and the rhythms of the wave course have been preserved until our time. The snaking, narrow and low bed betrays the brook, and widened valleys the damming caused by barriers, the deepened basins of pools and the shafts the waterfalls. Each crevice and narrow, every skid and promontory, reveals the hardness and capacity for resistance of the rock in which each runnel left its tracks in deep grooves and scratches, marks and fissures. And thus has the water been recorded in its various earlier forms as a rapid torrent, as a crashing waterfall, as a driving stream, as a dreaming pool and as a bottomless well, petrified into stone. But these are lifeless mummifications which, in their shape, reflect the cavities, deepenings and hollows in the rock beds of North America. And that which still remains of the water in this cave has become silent and dumb in a lonesome, sad state of desertion. It stands unmoving in the basins of the dead sea, and hardly dares move in the beds of the shrunken rivers. Nobody knows from whence this water comes or where it goes. Consequently, one begins to doubt its existence. Only occasionally does on notice the beat of a water drop, strengthened by the echo from the cave walls, as mysterious and regular as the ticking of the clock of death. Then a well rings with the melody of a music box varyingly on a high-pitched toned mirror or the dull, threatening resonator of the rock floor. But these voices must all go silent when the final drip has been swallowed and turned to stalactite or crystal.

A uniform temperature and humidity reign in the cave during winter and summer, and only at the entrance does a cold breeze of air blow into the system to extinguish the lanterns of those who enter this realm of the dead. No sunrays shine in, lightness and colourless, plain and dark it is beneath the earth, monotone grey or impenetrably black as night. Life makes no noise to distinguish day from night, there is no bird song, no bells ring at the morning, noon or evening. No star reflects in the floods of depth, no winds caresses the surfaces, no rain falls in, and no wave circles spread out. The flowers of the cave are stone, no butterfly visits the chalice, no birds come to their stems. Even the owls that sit on the rocks are stiff, stone figures. Blind fish and crustaceans are alone in the opaque pools and sloughs which remain, and live without sight or sound. Even the large, spindly legged, ghost-like crickets, that sit impressively on the walls and lead an impoverished existence in this cave, are not permitted to chirp for their compatriots. Where bread crumbs or fruit peel lie around or fortified wine has been spilt, they come for a feast. As they possess, to a high degree, the ability to change the colouring of their bodies to fit in with that of the surroundings, they look light on white bread and dark on brown bread. Light brown or at least grey are the limestones of this cave, and all its blind beetles and millipedes, its eyeless spiders and leeches. They cannot even see yet still they make themselves invisible. Certainly, one finds rat trails in the sand and racoon tracks in the clear, unmoving puddles that can remain unwiped for years, but searching for the animals is pointless. Only numerous bats hang to the walls and ceilings, with up to twenty together in a tight clump. The uniform temperature and humidity of the cave prompted them to set up their hibernation roost in the autumn. They hang in the passages in their hundreds near to the entrance, and grow ever more numerous as the winter gets colder. The light of our lamps wakes and blinds them, and the begin to chirp with the disturbance and to twitter, tearing open their rusty snouts with their needle sharp teeth should we approach too closely. But even they are helpless and defenceless during their de-energised hibernation, and they allow themselves to be plucked like fruits from the ceiling. Their apathy makes them more like dead beings than live ones. Our stay here grows constantly stranger and more wondrous. We are no longer among the living but in the realm of Hades, and all names remind us of this. Romantic and ghostly, the images pass by like in a dream. We are entirely removed from our own natural environment, caught in these alien, immeasurable depths that have nothing in common with the overworld. With unease, we observe the overhanging rocks that threaten to give way at any moment, and with worry we stare into the chasms that suddenly open up before our feet, as if they wanted to swallow us. Regardless of whether the impenetrable innards of the Earth remain closed and unknown for all time, we feel ourselves incapable of fleeing them. The enclosing rocks on all sides press in against us and compress our chests as in a nightmare. We perceive the nocturnal visions and all the suspense that makes the blood stiffen in the veins, and all this shock that makes breathing harder and lames the limbs. Our fantasy is aroused, and we imagine hearing the roaring, torrenting water crashing down into the chasms, forcing through everything and killing. Our steps sound hollow in the empty, extinct spaces and the returned echoes are dull in the darkness, as if ghosts of the dead were following our trail like vampires. Ghostly, unknowable and immeasurable as eternity is the underworld. With its unceasing quiet, the silence and peace of the night surround the graves of the interred dead here. This impression is at its strongest and most humbling when the guide leaves us and complete, impenetrable darkness surrounds us. We sit completely alone on the rock with the total darkness around us, coal black night. We can perceive the heart beats in our breast but otherwise nothing, and a terrible feeling of loss descends upon us. We want to call out but the sound sticks in our throats until, after a while, it is freed as the wonderment dissolves when the first weak light brightens the space and the grey rocks fly like clouds above us. The high heaven domes over our heads and, one after another, stars begin to shine, white crystals of plaster on the dark background of the dome. We find ourselves to already be beneath the free sky, but we then recognise the illusion, and unwillingly grab our lamps so as to wearisomely search for the way leading us back to the daylight.

The temperature in the Mammoth Cave is always about 10° year in an year out. The purity of the atmosphere is being significantly influenced by the smoke of oil lamps that are carried daily by visitors through the cave. Unfortunately, the Mammoth Cave also represents a place for profit seeking. In previous years, it has been repeatedly plundered for alabaster, plaster crystals and stalactites. As one guide must now accompany over a hundred people, it is impossible for them to keep a full watch, so the hands of vandals often inflict irreparable damage in the cave. They break stalactites and crystals off, or make them black with the soot from their lamps. Names have been written with smoke all over the cave, and this in no way contributes to its beauty. However, efforts are already underway to protect this natural rarity and curiosity, so as to conserve it for humanity and science, and to administer it from aesthetic perspectives. What the cave most urgently requires is electric light. The soot of the oil lamps builds up day by day, and this has already blackened the white crystals and taken their gloss. Thus, mixed in with the pure joy given by viewing this natural wonder, are tears of pain about its decay.

An index of more of my translations of old Kosmos articles can be found at:

Kosmos Translations Archive

A number of Mesozoic (and post-Mesozoic) location summaries can be found at Localities.