Likely To Be Eaten By A Bottomless Pit

The following texts have not been altered, except that the formatting is entirely my fault and that I've taken the liberty to reduce some quotations of previous posts for brevity.

* Likely To Be Eaten By A Bottomless Pit

I was in DC last week, and in the course of bumming around, I went to a new Imax movie about caves. <http://www.amazingcaves.com/>

Caves are the original IF setting; caves are also darn cool. I've written an IF game set in a cave (Hunter, in Darkness). But I didn't actually have much idea what caves were like, when I wrote it. Most of my description was second-hand Crowther and Woods. So, hey, I thought, I should see good movie footage of real caves.

(It was either that or Michael Jordan To The Max. Not a hard choice actually.)

The movie was filmed in three caves: a "traditional" limestone cave in Arizona, an ice cave in a glacier in Greenland, and an underwater cave in the Yucatan. The actual purpose of the expeditions was microbiological research – taking samples of water from strange and isolated environments, hoping to discover peculiar organisms.
But let me talk about cave environments.

Limestone caves are the ones everyone thinks of. Stalagmites, stalactites, flowstone. Bats and blind fish. You can find a million pictures.

...Remember that the pictures are illuminated by professional photographers with floodlights. The natural state of a cave is sightless, and don't you forget it – I don't want to hear about glowing moss, either. (Mosses and lichens are photosynthetic; they require light to grow, they don't produce it. If you want to introduce a magical ecology, that's another matter, and a more complicated one.)

And caves aren't flat, either. "Twisty passages" and "chasms" and "bottomless pits" are accurate cliches. (Okay, maybe not bottomless.)
The same goes for "low crawls" and "tight squeezes" – the ceiling height wasn't designed for human convenience. Caving is a scramble, not a stroll.

Then there's the ice cave. The one in the movie was basically a vertical crack in a glacier, 500 feet deep. Descent was by rappelling straight down on ropes – there didn't seem to be anywhere to stand.
Not even at the bottom; that was a pool of liquid water, who knows how deep.

The difference between ice and stone is that ice is nearly molten, if you see what I mean. A glacier flows detectably over the course of a year; the interior is constantly under strain. And the farther down you go, the greater the stress. "Boulder-size chunks of ice blowing out of the wall with no warning," was a line from the movie. (Not an event they caught on film, I'm sorry to say.)

If it's warm outdoors – warm enough for ice to get shiny in direct sunlight – that means water flowing down through the glacier. The explorers in the movie had to wait for four cold days in a row before they could safely descend. Otherwise, well, it's rappelling down a vertical ice sheet with a hypothermic waterfall blasting down on your head. Good luck.

The underwater cave was by far the weirdest, visually. First of all, only suicidal lunatics go scuba-diving in caves. (Also my boss. No, wait, ...) Cave-diving is just like normal scuba-diving, except it's pitch black and they took the surface away. Alternatively: it's just like normal spelunking, except that if you get lost, you die. Doesn't this sound like fun?

Descriptive notes: you can tell where you've been, because you know those bubbles that constantly rise from scuba masks? They hit the ceiling and stick there. But you can also tell where you've been because you unreel a rope as you go. So you can follow it out. Be sure to attach plastic arrows to the rope, pointing out. You don't want to mistake the direction.

Swimming stirs up silt, and the water in the cave can turn totally opaque awfully fast. Turning around in a dead end stirs up silt even faster. Don't lose the rope.

But the strangest thing down there was a halocline – a flat, stable boundary between seawater and fresh water. This occurred in a place where an underground river was flowing towards the sea. Seawater had backed up into the cave, and the less-dense fresh water flowed smoothly above it for a distance. You could see the boundary. It looked like... the surface of a lake. Except that people were swimming above it. And then they swam down through it. The surface rippled.

You can do this at home, actually. Fill a glass with very salty water; fill another with fresh water. Put a piece of cardboard or plastic across the fresh glass and turn it upside down. Put it above the brine glass. Pull the cardboard out. The halocline will remain. You can slosh the salt water back and forth, if you're careful.

Do this over a sink.

My perhaps-not-lunatic boss says that you can get a similar visible interface (though not so distinct) at a thermocline, where warm water overlies colder water. Or at a geologically active sea-floor site, where hydrogen sulfide is dissolved in water, again making it denser. (And poisonous. Even to skin contact. Don't stay down there long.)

But enough about cave movies. Two days later I had even more free time, so I drove two hours west, to the tourist cave zone of Virginia.

Now I freely admit that these are wussified caves, with electric lighting, levelled floors, and handrails. But you can definitely get an idea of how caves run. If you leave early from DC, you can take three hour-long cave tours in a day. This I did. I took notes, too.

* Endless Caves:

Very rusty, dull. (That is, the cave walls were brown-red flowstone, colored by iron oxide, and not the sparkling white of pure calcite.)

A few patches of snow-white flowstone, however. Also places where bluish limestone was exposed – a strong contrast to the general redness.

The cave was quite dry; there hadn't been much rain the past season, so water levels were low, and some reflecting pools were entirely dry.

A barrel had been set in place below a drip, to catch the water and divert it off the walkway. I believe that was around the 1920's.
At this point, the barrel is starting to be crusted with limestone, especially around the rim. Gives you an idea how fast the stuff grows.

Shield formations: a roundish horizontal plate sticking straight out from the wall. (Horizontal, or somewhat tilted.) Very strange-looking. They usually have stalactites dripping down to the floor, which support the stone, but in fact a shield grows out from the wall; the stalactites come along later. Water seeps out of a crack, and leaves thin stone lips on the crack's two edges.
Now it's seeping out between the lips. So they grow, straight out. The result is a double plate. Capillary action draws the water out between the plates, so it keeps growing. If it's unsupported, it can break, of course – possibly the plates will separate, leaving a strange tree-ring-like texture on the exposed surfaces.

Pillars and columns with inch-wide gaps in them. If the bottom of the cave is mud, it can settle under the weight of flowstone formations. Pillars crack and separate. The walls of that cave had a horizontal crack running around them, where they'd separated as well.

Three levels to the cave. Stream eats down, irregularly, leaving different levels and chasms between them.

Rimstone: "worm" effect as water flows over a wide, flat, gentle slope. Calcite builds up on irregularities, forming a network of basin-lips.

Calcite rims and shelves where water pooled. (Minerals building up at the waterline.) Lilypad formations inside dried-up pools.

Slab rooms where the roof has fallen down, splitting stone flatly. (This is where the cave walls or ceiling look like rough rock, instead of flowstone fanciness.)

A wide, very low room with many fine stal/pillars. This was the area that's a reflecting pool in times of greater water seepage.
"Very low" means only a foot or two high; but as wide as any chamber in the cave.

Plant roots go surprisingly deep into the ground. Where clay was visible in the cave, sometimes it had little root-tendrils threading through it.

Lots of bats. Clinging to walls, ceilings – not huge cinematic clouds of bats, but they were frequent. Very active in the spring. They only nest in caves; they go outdoors to feed. These bats seemed to be fairly used to people; they would fly within three feet of you.

The sound of bats screwing is sort of a sharp clicking chitter.

Moss growing in the cave – ha! – only where the electric lights are set. Really, a small patch of moss where each light is shining on the wall. Nowhere else. On the other hand, candles and oil lamps leave soot stains on the wall (after a time), so what are you going to do?

The cave system has not been entirely mapped; it goes at least five miles, and new sections are still being discovered. (Most of that isn't on the tour, of course.)

* Shenandoah Caverns:

Gravel floor (laid down by humans, not natural) – but it has developed a film of wet clay. Very slippery. I fell down ten feet from the entrance, and spent the rest of the tour with clay all over my hands.

As in Endless, the walls are rusty-reddish.

White flowstone formations studded with large flat calcite crystals. "Spangles" up to an inch wide. Very nice.

Three levels. The cave has been entirely explored, at least as far as people can pass at all.

Spot where two underground rivers joined – turbulence caused deep "whirlpool" weathering in the walls and ceiling. Swirls and round depressions – looked like a tidal sinkhole, not a cave wall. The weathering extended quite a ways down the passage, as the current was swift for some distance.

Large blocks fallen, forming flat-surface caves, long after the river-passage formed. (Possibly fell during an earthquake.) Now flowstone is covering up the broken surfaces.

A very large, tall wall of flowstone formations.

* Skyline Caverns:

Not much flowstone.

Three levels, but the lowest is entirely submerged. (It has not been explored, as the entrances are too narrow for divers.) Three different streams flow through the cave, one falling down a thirty-foot waterfall.

The stream level varies with weather – surface water seeping down. When I was there, one stream was nearly dry.

Seepage pools: not fed by a stream or watercourse. The water enters only through seepage from walls and ceiling. Form shallow reflecting pools.

Original exit is still visible, a narrow vertical shaft.

Anthodites: calcite needles in small sprays on the walls and ceiling. Look like sea urchins. A wide range of sizes.

These formed in small air pockets above a passage that had filled in with mud. (The air in the pockets was sealed off from the outside atmosphere.) When the cave was dug out and the anthodites exposed, they stopped growing.

* Conclusion

Observation is good. If you want to write about caves, go look in one.
If you're actually an adventurer, and not a wimp like me, go caving.
Report back. We're curious what it's like beyond the handrails.

–Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* The right to vote includes the right to have that vote counted.

On 3 Apr 2001 22:47:00 GMT, Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@eblong.com> wrote:

Use a battery-powered brass lantern, of course.
–
Matthew W. Miller – mwmiller@columbus.rr.com

Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@eblong.com> wrote:

Verily.

The Mammoth Cave National Park tour guides always turn out the lights on you at some point during the tour.  (They warn you first.)  The first time, it takes at least thirty very long-seeming seconds, maybe longer, before you get used to the idea that your eyes will NOT adjust.  Then after another minute or so it sinks in that if the tour guide doesn't turn on the lights, you will die before you find your way to the exit.  (This is an especially effective thought when the exit is a mere hundred yards away, although on the Historical Tour it's much further than that.)

BTW, the caves you described seemed fairly heavy on the limestone formations.  If you ever get the chance, go on one of the tours of the caves under the sandstone cap, such as the Historical Cave Tour that the park service conducts.  With no flowing limestone to cover things up, you can better see the patterns the water carves in the rock, and it's fascinating.  Big scallops, little scallops, and all sorts of other oddities.

Also, parts of the Mammoth Caves are a lot more vertical than most of what you described.  Sure, you may walk on what seems like a level floor, but after a few minutes of meandering you can look up a shaft and see where you were.  (You can't tell by looking, of course, but the guide may point it out.)  Climbing the many stairs at the end of the Historical Tour will wear you out, and it will really bring home exactly how nonlevel the floor was during your apparently-level descent.

- jonadab

jonadab@bright.net (Jonadab the Unsightly One) writes:

This is true. Adventure gets this right, but lots of underground games only go up and down at well-defined stairs or pits. People are thinking of buildings or dungeons when they write these things.
Still, Kentucky caves are awfully horizontal. In much of the rest of the world, caving is about big pits, which is why it's called "potholing" in England. (The second longest cave in the world, Hoelloch in Switzerland, is very much like Flint Ridge turned at a forty-five-degree vertical angle.)
Vertical caving is tricky – like mountain-climbing underground – but it doesn't lend itself to great wandering explorations.
I wonder if Adventure would have been invented anywhere else but in the land of horizontal caving?

- David Librik

Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@eblong.com> writes:

Caves and caving.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was The Longest Cave, by Roger Brucker and Richard Watson.  This is the story of the exploration of the Flint Ridge and Mammoth Cave systems, and how they were linked together to form the longest cave in the world. It's full of exciting adventure and rich description of cave rooms, passages, and formations.  (If you like adventure stories and you like Adventure, I think you'd like reading this book at least half as much as I did.)  In my boring suburban bedroom, I dreamed of caving in Flint Ridge.

When I first read the transcripts for a game of Adventure (the original one), before I ever got to play it, I found them extremely exciting.  I couldn't put my finger on why it was the earlier parts of the game that affected me even more than the later fantasy ones.
The reason is that Will Crowther, the author of the first half of Adventure, was the same Will Crowther whose exploits are described in The Longest Cave – and the descriptions he writes for rooms are the same kind you read about in real-life caving adventure.

  You are in a splendid chamber thirty feet high.  The walls are frozen rivers of orange stone.  An awkward canyon and a good passage exit from East and West sides of the chamber.

  You are in a jumble of rock, with cracks everywhere.

  You are at a wide place in a very tight N/S canyon.

  You are at a complex junction.  A low hands and knees passage from the north joins a higher crawl from the east to make a walking passage going west.  There is also a large room above.  The air is damp here.

That stuff is realistic.

No other game captures this feeling.  Even the Don Woods parts of Adventure don't do it; they feel like Tolkien, not spelunking.
I don't think Don Woods was a caver.  (I suppose I could ask him, as he is still active on the net.  I don't know what became of Crowther;
his name is all over the early Internet RFCs but he's nowhere to be seen nowadays.)  Many of the features decried by later gamers – most notably, the passages that don't run straight, so you can't go south and then get back by going north – make sense in Flint Ridge caves.  (Typing "S" from an Adventure room doesn't mean "take me to the room South of here"; it means "take the passage leaving from the South wall of this room, follow its twists and turns until I emerge in another room somewhere.")

It would be nice to see a cave-crawl that is actually a cave-crawl.
In adventure games, the tradition has gone from Crowther to Woods to Zork to Unkuulia to John's Fire Witch, on and on, each game becoming more and more of a gridlike Dungeons-and-Dragons "underground environment," with connected rooms full of fantasy adventure.
Going back to the original can reveal paths not taken, even if those paths don't lead to anything much.

I have caved but I don't do that anymore.  If you are a wimp, read caving books, such as Brucker & Watson's The Longest Cave, and Herb & Jan Conn's Jewel Cave Adventure.  You may find you want to write an old-fashioned cave game after all.

- David Librik

David Librik <librik@panix.com> wrote:

Just a quick footnote: I don't believe anybody here has ever played the Crowther-only version of Adventure, and I don't know whether we know accurately which parts are Woods' and which are Crowther's, but we have quotes attributed to Crowther that he was playing D&D before he wrote Adventure and was trying to capture the feeling of playing D&D when he wrote it; thus it seems questionable to attribute the Tolkein to Woods, although although I do not disagree with your primary point (which was Zarf's implicit point as well, I think) that the weird twists and turns of Adventure's caves are realistic and that realism can be attributed to Crowther's caving experiences.

SeanB

Actually that may attribute for most IF games up through the INFOCOM games.

They all seemed to have aspects of exploration and role playing combined. Slowly variations came... and then wild changes like "Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Heads or Tails of it".

Ever since IF has gotten into more writers hands (such as the annual competition) have we seen more branching of style (the extreme being "freefall", and other z-machine abuses.)

Games like Phototopia that have raised both positive praise as art and comments like "that's not a REAL text adventure".

It makes one take pause and ask yourself again "what is a text adventure?".  I feel that the term Interactive Fiction is certainly more appropriate to encompass what I hope will be a ever-expanding range of style.

If anyone remembers their first "choose your own adventure" book and the feeling of "wow, how different", remember that the same can and will be achieved again and again in IF.

-John

buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett) writes:

True - but I think we can make some very good guesses, actually.
We know two facts:

1. Crowther began the game and Woods added onto it. This puts the earliest portions of the game (the forest, grate, crawl and dome) safely in Crowther territory. I have never heard that the two worked together – Crowther was at BBN in Boston and Woods at SAIL in Palo Alto, and Woods got the sources off of ARPANet.

2. Crowther actually explored the real Colossal/Bedquilt cave. (Colossal Cave and Bedquilt Cave were found to be connected in 1896.) Parts that match that would be his work. This would mean everything on the "main line" at least up to Bedquilt itself, including the Twopit room, Slab Room, Complex Junction, and Y2. (Probably the main hall with the stone staircase is an addition...)

   An article about Colossal Cave and ADVENT:
      http://people.delphi.com/rickadams/adventure/b_cave.html
   quotes Flint Ridge caver Mel Parks as saying:

   Bedquilt was Willie's favorite part of the cave system.

   I still have a copy of his map of it.  Computer types who grew up exploring ADVENTURE don't realize how accurately the game represents passages in Bedquilt Cave.
   Yes, there is a Hall of the Mountain King and a Two-Pit Room.
   The entrance is indeed a strong steel grate at the bottom of a twenty-foot depression.
   On a survey trip to Bedquilt, a member of my party mentioned she would one day like to go on a trip to Colossal Cave, where she understood the game ADVENTURE was set.
   No, I said, the game is based on Bedquilt Cave and we are going there now. Excitement!

   Throughout the cave, she kept up a constant narrative, based on her encyclopedic knowledge of the game. In the Complex Room (renamed Swiss Cheese Room in Advent) she scrambled off in a direction I had never been.

   "I just had to see Witt's End," she said upon returning. "It was exactly as I expected."
   When we finished with our work, I let her lead out, which she did flawlessly, again because she had memorized every move in the game. Believe me, the cave is a real maze, and this was an impressive accomplishment for a first-time visitor.

Making that trip myself is one my lifetime goals! Maybe someday I'll be able to tell you which rooms are really in Colossal/Bedquilt (and thus Crowther's work) and which are invention. To be honest, the areas of that game have, to me, a very different feel to them. While some of the magic may be Crowther's (the game started out as a D&D analogue, as you point out), I think most of the really un-cavey stuff (the Troll Bridge, chained bear, volcano, endgame) is easily assigned to Woods.

- David Librik

Hey... take a palm pilot with you with the adventure game on it!  Use it as a map... or maybe just a light.
(so that you are not eaten by a Grue)

On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Sean T Barrett wrote:

I think that the quotation refers to the player-author interaction more than any of the content. Crowther was reportedly (according to Adams?) trying to use the D&D-like medium to convey an accurate representation of the experience of caving. Presumably, his first version just involved exploring the cave, and all of the stuff in there and puzzles were added later, when the medium turned out to be good for that.

-Iabervon
This .sig unintentionally changed

Heh...Oh, great.  Now you've gone and inspired me to collect my friends and check out the New York area caves some weekend.
Just when I was getting used to my sedentary lifestyle, too...
I guess I'll ask, being vaguely on the topic:  Anybody from the general NY area have any pointers?  I believe there's a set of nice caverns in northern Jersey and southwestern New York, but I'm not entirely sure where.

Formerly from NY here - the most well known are: http://www.howecaverns.com/

For those of you in California, there are a number of caves in Calivaras County that have both "wuss" and adventure tours.  (California Caverns and Moaning Cavern being a couple I've been to.)

To do a 150' rappel (about 100 free feet) into the vertical Moaning cavern (fun, especially if you fear heights, like me :) followed by an hour or so of hard muddy crawling was $100.

California Cavern had many more beautiful formations, and the adventure tour was longer, and involved rafting an underground lake.

Adventure tours are expensive, so you might actually like to get involved with a local caving organization (a "grotto") and go with them to some of the more wild caves.  On the plus side, the adventure tours allow you to get a taste of what it's like before you purchase hundreds of dollars worth of caving equipment.

In Northern California, you can hit the improved Lake Shasta Caverns. Or in southern Oregon, Oregon Caves.

I love limestone caves, but I love lava tubes just as well.  There are a couple near Mount Lassen in Northern California, and there are a slew of them at Lava Beds National Monument in California about 15 miles south of the Oregon border.  While these lack the colorful beauty of (many) limestone caves, they are neat in their own way.  One cave at Lava Beds, Catacombs, measures over 6000' in length and was for many years the longest known single entrance cave in California.  Another set of tubes, known as Labyrinth Loop, provides a great twisty passages all alike experience.

So that you correctly know what kind of a Lava Beds freak I am, check out these pix:

http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~beej/lavabeds/
http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~beej/lavabeds/photos.html
http://www.geocities.com/wronk/photos/ [broken link]

-Beej
I'm not at all a professional caver.  I'm just some guy that likes to crawl around underground.

 Mmmm, caves. Interesting environments, though remarkably creepy. I'm not usually particularly claustrophobic, but I've found some caves to be very much Fear-Inducing. Particularly the lava tubes in northeastern California. Those are quite strange, since they're quite round in cross-section, conveniently sized for a human (or a Cyberman or a horrible drooling monster!) to walk through comfortably, and twist and turn in strange snake-like mazes. They form when liquid lava flows crust overtop, resulting in subterranean rivers of molten rock. The lava eventually drains out, leaving an empty cave.

 I took a bunch of photos in a couple of those caves for possible use in my Giant Game Currently on Hiatus, and found myself constantly looking nervously over my shoulder. Along with my cameras and flash I think I brought about five flashlights and a cigarette lighter with me. Another lava tube I've photographed, on Hawaii's big island, is the cave entrance I used for the HTML TADS version of the Golden Skull demo game. This is a much shorter tube - you can almost see straight from one end to the other.

 Probably the coolest caves I've been in were in New Zealand. I've been in Oregon's limestone caves and coastal sea cave, France's Gouffre de Padirac and England's Wookey Hole, but they're all touristy caves with staircases and lamps and guided tours. (hell - the sealion cave has an elevator!)

 New Zealand has some caves like that, but also some less domesticated ones. I rappelled into one huge cave called the Lost World - one of the highlights of my trip there last year. It's basically a giant hole in the ground, and you rappel (abseil) down a 100 metre (300 foot) rope to get into it. It's like descending into a massive cylinder in the ground, open to the sky, lined with lush plantlife. This cave is shown briefly during the black and white sequence in Vincent Ward's NZ-made fantasy film The Navigator.

 New Zealand also has an interesting species of fly which spend their larval phases in caves and similar environments. The larvae hang from the roofs of caves and spin little sticky strings which dangle down. The particularly interesting bit is that their asses glow blue-green in order to attract prey to the sticky strings. So when you're inside one of these caves and you look up at the ceiling you'll see a beautiful constellation of tiny blue stars overhead - the glowing glowworms, as they're called. Amazing. Not exactly glowing fungus providing enough light for a subterranean topiary, but nonetheless really cool.

 - Neil K.

Andrew Plotkin posted:

Sometimes it's easier to create a realistic seeming simulation of an unfamiliar thing if you build it with the type of shared preconception and good imagination you must have used to make Hunter. Another classic example of this technique succeeding (as I think Hunter did) is Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The King and I", which many people believe sounds very eastern, but about which Rodgers admitted he did no research: he just wrote music he thought sounded eastern.

–
Neil Cerutti <cerutti@together.net>

Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@eblong.com> wrote in message news:9adjt4$ov4$1@news.panix.com...

There are alternatives, if you're half a wimp.  ^_^

When I went to Carlsbad a few years ago, a friend and I embarked on one of their "Wild Cave" tours.  That is, you're still guided by a park ranger, but you get to go off the main paved walkways and go crawling, climbing, and scrambling in the more natural parts of the caves.  At one point, we found ourselves in a pit looking up at one of the paved trails on the self-guided walking tour, which we'd just been on the day before.  From the railing, looking down into darkness, we wouldn't have guessed that a group of people might be looking back up at us!

Highly recommended, and I know other developed caves offer similar deals.

In three weeks I'm going backpacking at Mammoth Cave National Park.  I think the last day we're supposed to go on a cave tour.  Yeah, the walking kind, though I'm going to petition that we go on the Wild Cave tour instead (I doubt we'll have time though).  I'm tempted to bring along my palmtop loaded with Adventure, as someone suggested earlier, even if Adventure is really based on Bedquilt.

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