walls,
where, on closer inspection, I found these creatures clinging by
thousands, literally blackening the wall, and hanging in festoons a foot
or two in length. The manner of forming these festoons was curious
enough: three or four bats having first taken hold of some sharp
projecting ledge with their hindmost claws, and hanging thereby with
their heads downward, others had seized their leathery wings at the
second joint, and they too, hanging with downward heads, had offered
their wings as holding-places for still others; and so the unsightly
pendent mass had grown, until in some instances it contained as many as
twenty or thirty bats. The wonder seemed that four or five pairs of
little claws not so large as those of a mouse could sustain a weight
that must have been in some instances as much as three pounds.

The mysterious influence of the approaching spring had penetrated even
into these abodes of darkness, and aroused in the bats a little life
after their long hibernation; and their weak, plaintive squeak, which
had something impish in it withal, came from every shadowy recess, and
from the dark vault overhead. This "Rotunda" should have been called the
"Bower of Bats."

As they all hung too high to reach by other means, I flung my stick at
random upward against the wall, and brought down two of the black
masses, that writhed helpless upon the stony floor of the cave. Poor,
palpitating things, unable to loose their clutch upon each other's
wings, it was hard to say whether they were more disgusting or pitiful.
What Eshcol clusters these, to bear back from this Canaan of darkness,
saying, "This is the fruit of it!"

Such an immense number of bats had harbored and died here from time
immemorial, that more than a hundred acres of the earthy floor of the
cave had, from their decomposing remains, become impregnated with nitre;
and during the years 1812 to 1814, a party of saltpetre-makers took up
their residence here. They made great vats in the cave, in which they
lixiviated the impregnated earth, and by wooden pipes conveyed it to a
place where they boiled the water drawn from the vats. Their rude
mechanical contrivances are standing yet, in the same positions in which
they were left so long ago; and so dry and pure is the air of the cave,
that, though more than half a century has passed, these wooden pipes and
vats show no more indication of decay than they did when first put in.
In one place my guide dug up fr