At the valley floor, before the entrance to the caves, lies Blue Lake. The road to the caves goes over an old stone bridge crossing the creek that feeds the lake.
The blue colour is due to limestone leached from the mountain rock by the water that carves out and builds up the caves; the lake is also fed by the subterranean river flowing through the caves.
The Grand Arch is a cavernous natural passageway through the mountain to the Caves Village on the other side. It's large enough to drive a tour bus through.
A number of show caves have entrances branching out from the interior of the Grand Arch. From the floor of the Arch, a rocky slope looking like the landscape of some alien moon stretches up to meet the ceiling dozens of metres overhead.
Nettle Cave is adjacent to the Grand Arch. It's an open cave, flooded with light from a gigantic hole in the ceiling where the boulders littering the floor fell in ages ago...
... and by the vast Devil's Coachhouse which opens onto McKeown's Valley.
In a way I was more awestruck by the immense scale and austere grandeur of Nettle Cave and the Devil's Coachhouse, than I was by the decadent splendour of the deep show caves. These open caves are studies in contrast; they are monuments marking the boundary between the familiar bushland beauty and the dark secretive underworld.
But what wonders there are in the dark!
These cave pearls lie now in a pool of light, where once they lay in a pool of water; small pieces of stone tumbled over and over in a subterranean stream like river stones, milled down over millenia to brilliant white spheres.
Flowstone is laid down by water trickling over the surface of the rock, depositing mineral. When flowstone is active it has this wet, waxy sheen.
But when flowstone dries up, these brilliant crystaline jewels are exposed.
Shawls also are built up from minerals deposited by water, but to form a shawl a trickle of water just a single drop wide follows the same path down the ceiling for millenia, gradually building a sheet of mineral hanging from the ceiling. Like core samples, a shawl's delicate layered pattern documents the geological conditions over the course of its formation.
Not all cave formations are entirely natural! This bottlemite has grown over an old bottle left by early workers in the caves to catch drinking water. When the workers finished, they left the bottle behind. The dripping, captured in this photo, is very steady, which explains both why the bottle was placed here, and why the bottlemite has grown so quickly!
This is the Persian Chamber of the Orient Cave. It is said that all of the treasures of the East can be found in this cave: cave jewels to rival any gemstones, shawls to rival finest silks, wide pillars and delicately tapered minarets, and an exquisitely coloured domed ceiling like that of a grand mosque.
This is the Temple of Baal. Where the Orient is tight, cluttered network of treasure chambers, the Temple of Baal is a vast open cavern with tiers of features rising to the ceiling, where Paradise sits one side and Baal on the other.
The White Altar in the Temple of Baal, always wet with "rain".
