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The Skeleton’s Cave Chapter I Qual è quella ruina che, nel fianco Di quà da Trento, l’Adige percosse. O per tremuoto, o per sostegno manco, Che, da cima del monte onde si mosse, Al piano è si la rocca discoscesa, Ch’ alcuna via darebbe a chi su fosse— Cotal di quel burrato era la scesa. — dante, Inferno we hold our existence at the mercy of the elements; the life of man is a state of continual vigilance against their warfare. The heats of noon would wither him like the severed herb; the chills and dews of night would fill his bones with pain; the winter frost would extinguish life in an hour; the hail would smite him to death, did he not seek shelter and protection against them. His clothing is the perpetual armour he wears for his defence, and his dwelling the fortress to which he retreats for safety. Yet even there the elements attack him; the winds overthrow his habitation;thewaterssweepitaway.Thefirethatwarmedandbrightened it within seizes upon its walls and consumes it, with his wretched family. The earth, where she seems to spread a paradise for his abode, sends up death in exhalations from her bosom, and the heavens dart down lightnings to destroy him. The drought consumes the harvests on which he relied for sustenance; or the rains cause the green corn to “rot ere its youth attains a beard.” A sudden blast ingulfs him in the waters of the lake or bay from which he seeks his food; a false step or a broken twig precipitates him from the tree which he had climbed for its fruit; oaks falling in the storm, rocks toppling down from the precipices are so many dangers which beset his life. Even his erect attitude is a continual affront to the great law of gravitation, which is sometimes fatally avenged when he loses the balance preserved by the skeleton’s cave 202 constant care and falls on a hard surface. The very arts on which lie relies for protection from the unkindness of the elements betray him to the fate he would avoid, in some moment of negligence or by some misdirection of skill, and he perishes miserably by his own inventions. Amid these various causes of accidental death which thus surround us at every moment, it is only wonderful that their proper effect is not oftener produced – so admirably has the Framer of the universe adapted the faculties by which man provides for his safety to the perils of the condition in which he is placed. Yet there are situations in which all his skill and strength are vain to protect him from a violent death by some unexpected chance which executes upon him a sentence as severe and inflexible as the most pitiless tyranny of human despotism. But I began with the intention of relating a story, and I will not by my reflections anticipate the catastrophe of my narrative. One pleasant summer morning a party of three persons set out from a French settlement in the western region of the United States to visit a remarkable cavern in its vicinity. They had already proceeded for the distance of about three miles through the tall original forest, along a path so rarely trodden that it required all their attention to keep its track. They now perceived through the trees the sunshine at a distance, and as they drew nearer they saw that it came down into a kind of natural opening at the foot of a steep precipice. At every step the vast wall seemed to rise higher and higher; its seams and fissures and inequalities became more and more distinct; and far up, nearly midway from the bottom, appeared a dark opening under an impending crag. The precipice seemed between two and three hundred feet in height, and quite perpendicular. At its base, the earth for several rods around was heaped with loose fragments of rock which had evidently been detached from the principal mass and shivered to pieces in the fall. A few trees, among which were the black walnut and the slipperyelm , and here and there an oak, grew scattered among the rocks and attested by their dwarfish stature the ungrateful soil in which they had taken root. But the wild grape vines which trailed along the ground and sent out their branches to overrun the trees around them showed by their immense size how much they delighted in the warmth of the rocks and the sunshine...

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