Diggers

Groups of men, well organized, with sound financial backing, roaming the four corners of the earth to uncover hidden remains of older civilizations, early mammalia, relics, fossils, digging out the traces. . . . In the recent months, the following work has been reported:

Carlsbad Cave. A bright young man prepared last week to probe big, black Carlsbad Cave, the vastest known cavern in the earth, and disturb the millions of bats living therein. Frank Ernest Nicholson, 28, Texas-born journalist-explorer, within the fortnight will take a typewriter, radio transmitter, telephone with lengthy wire, block & tackle, torches, cameras, food, a physician, a mineralogist, an electrician, a representative of the Department of the Interior and four helpers to a cliff of the Guadalupe Mountains 100 miles from El Paso, Tex., and 30 miles south of Carlsbad, N. Mex. Near the cliff's foot is the cave's mouth.

It was discovered 29 years ago when a cowboy, one Jim White, saw what he thought was volcanic smoke. The "smoke" was the effect of flocks of bats emerging for their evening insect hunt. The Government made the cave site a National Monument seven years ago, marking off 720 acres. The underground halls spread farther than that; how far, Explorer Nicholson will try to learn.

Water filtering through overlaid rocks for perhaps 60 million years made Carlsbad Cave by dissolving original beds of rock salt, limestone, gypsum. In the great rooms, dripping water carrying, dissolved minerals has formed great stalagmites and stalactites. In the "King's Room" stalactites hang like the iridescent folds, pleats and ruffles of a canopy. The monstrosity of Carlsbad Cave, however, is the "Big Room," half a mile long, 400 ft. wide, 348 ft. high. Sixteen airships the size of the Los Angeles could be housed therein.

Greater marvels may await the Nicholson probers. Seemingly below these stupendous rooms are other stories, reachable by rope and boldness.

Subterranean Garden. Squeezing through tunnels that nearly balked both forward and backward progress, pausing a minute for a breath of damp air, peering into obscurity ahead, went Leo McGavic and Cecil Cutliff, guides, inching their way through the nether tortuosities of Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. About a mile and a half from where Floyd Collins died (TIME, June 27. 1927), the two guides found a crystal "garden" with an area of 500 square feet, sparkling beneath their flashlights. The crystalline formation is low and level, apparently not formed by mineral-bearing water dripping from above, as is usually the case in limestone caves. It seems an underground erosion phenomenon. The "flowers" roughly resemble cabbages.

Kansas Elephant. Stumbling over furrows of Kansas corn belt near Arkansas City, reaching in with the ploughshare to turn over a deeper layer of rich black loam, a farmer recently encountered an obstruction which did not have the "feel" of a stone. He stopped his team, proceeded, to unearth great chunks of a monster fossil elephant which was judged to have roamed over the prairies of Kansas millenniums before Christ, and constitutes a direct link between the ancient mastodon and the modern elephant. The bones were in a fine state of preservation. University of Kansas students, under the direction of Handel T. Martin, after digging them up carefully, made a cast of them. The reconstructed monster, 16 ft. tall, with tusks 10 in. in diameter and 10 ft. long, will add another magnitude in the halls of the Kansas Museum of Natural History, already replete with massy regional diggings.

Again, Atlantis. Deep in the folk memory of Europe is the legend of a happy land which calamitously sank below the western sea now named the Atlantic. For Plato, the history of Atlantis was over 9,000 years old. He imagined his ideal commonwealth prospering on it. The Phoenicians or other sea rovers who went beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar) may have passed on the story to the Greeks. The Arabian geographers believed in a mid-Atlantic Atlantis. Of similar islands many sagas told--the Celtic Avalon where King Arthur sleeps, the Cornish Lyonnesse where bells toll under the sea, the Breton City of Is. the French Isle Verte, the Portuguese Ilha Verde and Isle of Seven Cities, the Greek Fortunate Islands, the Irish St. Brendan's Island. The last three were actually marked on 14th and 15th Century maps. Men sailed seriously to discover them. St. Brendan's was marked even in the 18th Century, but the rationalists finally laughed them all off the maps. Fifty years ago belief in a lost Atlantis revived when cable-laying ships and geodetic vessels found a high, mountainous table-land under the Atlantic all the way from the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic Circle. There is a ridge from East Greenland to North Scotland, by way of Iceland and the Faeroes, which is little more than 400 yards deep. There may have been mountains topping that long plateau within memorable times.* But later study of the existing Atlantic islands indicated practically no possibility of a mid-sea Atlantis.

Now belief in Atlantis has arisen again. Along the Cumina River (tributary to the Amazon), Brazilian explorers have found reminiscent inscriptions graven on rocks. They resemble certain ancient Phoenician sound and word symbols. And, curiously, the place is called Atlantida.

Kings of Assyria. Sennacherib was a king of Assyria. He liked to wage war with the Israelites. He had considerable success. He built a palace near Khorsabad, Assyria, near the Tigris River. In 701 B.C. he attempted to take Jerusalem. And there was woe among the Children of Israel. And Jahveh said to Isaiah that he would protect Judea, and "it came to pass that the angel of the Lord went out and smote . . . the Assyrians, . . . and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead. . . ." Sennacherib was slain by his sons and 2,600 years later the University of Chicago's Assyrian expedition, directed by Professor Edward Chiera, found the ruins of his palace and the palace of Sargon II. They uncovered 125 tons of relief work. The University of Chicago got the prize item: a 40-ton stone bull which once guarded the entrance to Sargon's palace (TIME, Dec. 16).

At Ur of the Chaldees, in Biblical Mesopotamia, C. Leonard Woolley, director of the University of Pennsylvania and British Museum expedition, has revealed urban civilizations, one layer upon another, which go back 10 the fourth millennium before Christ. He predicts that below the revealed layers he will find records of the civilization that lived before "it came to pass . . . that the waters of the flood were upon the earth."

Further reports on worldwide digging will be given next week.--ED.

*St. Helena, Ascension and Fernando Noronha were formed by volcanos erupting from the sea floor. The Azores, Canaries, Madeira and Cape Verde islands are partly volcanic. Bermuda is coral reef, the most northerly in the world.

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