he Wind--Lamps Extinguished--Temperature of the Cave--Lamps
Lighted--First Hoppers--Grand Vestibule--Glowing Description--Audubon
Avenue--Little Bat Room--Pit Two-Hundred and Eighty Feet Deep--Main
Cave--Kentucky Cliffs--The Church--Second Hoppers--Extent of the
Saltpetre Manufacture in 1814.

The Mammoth Cave is situated in the County of Edmondson and State of
Kentucky, equidistant from the cities of Louisville and Nashville,
(about ninety miles from each,) and immediately upon the nearest road
between those two places. Green River is within half a mile of the
Cave, and since the improvements in its navigation, by the
construction of locks and dams, steam-boats can, at all seasons,
ascend to Bowling Green, distant but twenty-two miles, and, for the
greater part of the year, to the Cave itself.

In going to the Cave from Munfordsville, you will observe a lofty
range of barren highlands to the North, which approaches nearer and
nearer the Cave as you advance, until it reaches to within a mile of
it. This range of highlands or cliffs, composed of calcareous rock,
pursuing its rectilinear course, is seen the greater part of the way
as you proceed on towards Bowling Green; and, at last, looses itself
in the counties below. Under this extensive range of cliffs it is
conjectured that the great subterranean territory mainly extends
itself.

For a distance of two miles from the Cave, as you approach it from the
South-East, the country is level. It was, until recently, a prairie,
on which, however, the oak, chestnut and hickory are now growing; and
having no underbrush, its smooth, verdant openings present, here and
there, no unapt resemblance to the parks of the English nobility.

Emerging from these beautiful woodlands, you suddenly have a view of
the hotel and adjacent grounds, which is truly lovely and picturesque.
The hotel is a large edifice, two hundred feet long by forty-five
wide, with piazzas, sixteen feet wide, extending the whole length of
the building, both above and below, well furnished, and kept in a
style, by Mr. Miller, that cannot fail to please the most fastidious
epicure.

The Cave is about two-hundred yards from the hotel, and you proceed to
it down a lovely and romantic dell, rendered umbrageous by a forest of
trees and grape vines; and passing by the ruins of saltpetre furnaces
and large mounds of ashes, you turn abruptly to the right and behold
the mouth of the great cavern and as suddenly feel t