In his “Observations on Several Parts of America” (written summer 1928) Lovecraft gives a vivid account of his summer excursion… “westward to the Endless Caverns.” He ventured out to these famous caves on a very long train journey of around four hours…
“But the climax of the whole Odyssey was my excursion, by train, to the Endless Caverns in the exquisite Shenandoah Valley. Despite all the fantasy I have written concerning the nether world, I had never beheld a real cave before in all my life…”
S.T. Joshi states in I Am Providence that this was a bus excursion, but Lovecraft clearly states “train” in the above quote. A further Lovecraft quote reveals that a motor coach was used for only a short part(s) of the journey…
New Market was reacht after a four-hour [scenic train] ride, and a coach took the sightseers to the mouth of the actual caverns, some six miles away.
Lovecraft had been lured out there by the rather cheap $2.50 fare, the prospect of a scenic ride during lovely summer weather, and most probably also by the travel brochure leaflets he picked up in Washington. The following samples were obtained in 1931, and have a number of pages that detail the tour Lovecraft must have experienced. His account is to be found in the Travels volume of Collected Essays, where it forms part of “Observations”. Also a slightly different 1929 article form, which is printed at the back of the Travels volume and titled ‘Descent…’.
One can see how such a grand guignol brochure design might have immediately appealed to his sense of the macabre. Nor was not disappointed in what he later called this “subterrene world of wonder!”, stating that the advance publicity contained not the slightest lie.
Possibly these free brochures, or ones very like them, were what he called “the booklets to which I have given such wide circulation” to his friends in the mail, which are mentioned in the essay. One imagines they were freely given out in bundles at the caves, for visitors to distribute to friends and family and thus draw in more tourists (the cave owners conveniently also owned the Eastern Printing Corporation). Lovecraft thus appears to have used these in place of sending postcards of the caverns to his friends. At that time there was no Post Office at the caves, and presumably the tour did not delay at the railway halt, so it seems unlikely he was able to send any postcards from the caves or their visitor centre.
Though Lovecraft did not visit the other nearby attractions pictured in the paper brochure seen above…
I wished that I might visit the Luray and Shenandoah Caverns, not far from New Market; but the schedule of the excursion did not permit of it.
He had been fascinated by caves since childhood and one of his earliest boyhood attempts at a story, “The Beast of the cave”, was set in the real Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. On which he had presumably ‘read up’ and seen pictures.
In 1928 his first ever underground tour of an actual deep cave lasted “over an hour”. While it’s true that Lovecraft had previously and rather trepidaciously entered a cave-like cleft, for a few yards only, in the Bear’s Den in July 1927, that hardly counted as a cave compared to what he now encountered. Lovecraft hung back from his Endless Caverns tour-party as much as the rear guide would let him, which is understandable on such tours. Since one uniquely sensitive to sublime vistas and eerie shadows would naturally wish to be somewhat away from from the bright lighting, the lecturing voice of the tour guide, and the inane comments and chatter of his fellow visitors.
The best photography of the caves from the period looks like it might be found in this 1925 history/geology booklet, though the title is not on Archive.org…
He might have been rather scared. It is difficult to imagine Lovecraft, master of fear, feeling it for real. Yet he admitted that…
Of the celebrated “phobias” of the modern psychologists (or of things like them) I have only one; & that, amusingly enough, is one I have never seen cited or named. Probably it has a name & record, but my very superficial knowledge of psychology (a subject which fails to fascinate me greatly, despite its grotesque fictional possibilities) does not include any glimpse of it. I know about claustrophobia & agoraphobia, but I have neither. I have, however, a cross betwixt the two — in the form of a distinct fear of very large enclosed spaces. The dark carriage-room of a stable — the shadowy interior of a deserted gas-house — an empty assembly-room or theatre-auditorium — a large cave — you can probably get the idea. Not that such things throw me into visible & uncontrollable jittery spasms, but that they give me a profound & crawling sense of the sinister — even at my age. I’m not sure of the source of this fear, but I believe it must link up somehow with the black abysses of my infant nightmares.
I would imagine that something of Lovecraft’s experience later emerged in a filtered fictional form, in the exploration depicted by Lovecraft in “At the Mountains of Madness”. The caves also appear to the reader in more recognisable form in “The Shadow Out of Time”…
I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole wisely, in travel and in study at various centres of learning. My travels, however, were singular in the extreme, involving long visits to remote and desolate places.
In 1909 I spent a month in the Himalayas, and in 1911 roused much attention through a camel trip into the unknown deserts of Arabia. What happened on those journeys I have never been able to learn.
During the summer of 1912 I chartered a ship and sailed in the Arctic, north of Spitzbergen, afterward showing signs of disappointment.
Later in that year I spent weeks — alone beyond the limits of previous or subsequent exploration in the vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia — black labyrinths so complex that no retracing of my steps could even be considered.
It was only in 1922 that part of the Endless Caverns had been equipped for safety, with miles of electric cables and bright lighting, and opened to public tours. Thus in 1913, as Lovecraft has it, they would indeed have been “black labyrinths”. Lovecraft’s “no retracing of my steps could even be considered” implies that these labyrinthine caves were escaped, and thus that an ‘end’ had been found in some far and secret exit to the outside world.
Yet in reality this vast cave complex has apparently still not been fully mapped even today, and at present is known to extend for five and a half miles. While the Endless Caverns cannot geologically be quite endless, nevertheless their labyrinthine nature means that they are in effect an endless experience for those who descend and foolishly seek to explore off the tourist trails.
