How to Read Caves: From Tennessee's Tuckaleechee Caverns to the Caves of John Keats, Virgil, and Virginia Woolf

By Susan Harlan

When I was a kid, I went on a class trip to Moaning Cavern in the Gold Country of California. Moaning Cavern. The name was horrifying: the sense that this place moaned, that it had a voice. We had to walk down into the earth, down a metal spiral staircase that was enclosed like a cage, and I was sure that the stairs would collapse, and I would fall, just like Alice in the rabbit hole, her pale blue skirt billowing out into a parachute, into nothing. In the cave, we saw bones of prehistoric people and rock formations. I felt trapped, and the only way out was back up the spiral staircase. Now it is called “Moaning Cavern Adventure Park and Zip Line,” which does not sound threatening at all. But the staircase it still there: 235 stairs, 165 feet down. It doesn’t seem like much. The numbers don’t account for it. ... [mehr] http://lithub.com/how-to-read-caves/