Word: caving
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...limestone cave beside the Sea of Galilee, not far from the spot where Jesus performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes, two giant hydraulic pumps hummed into action. The pumps sucked in the sweet water that flows into the sea from the Jordan River, pushed it through nine-foot conduits up an 845-ft. incline to the top of the Galilee Hills, then sent it coursing down an open spillway toward the central plains of Israel and the parched Negev Desert in the south. Thus last week Israel successfully completed the first full-scale test tapping in its critical...
...have been concentrating on the road as he drove along the icy edge of the Lot River in southwestern France. But Astruc is a spelunker, always on the lookout for potholes to pop into. To him, the little frost-free spot he saw in a limestone cliff suggested a cave entrance that had become plugged up. He stopped to probe the spot with a crowbar. Stones and dirt caved in; warm air whooshed out. Suddenly Astruc was staring into a narrow tunnel. "I was alone," he says, "afraid to go in very far, or stay very long...
Next day the young explorers returned with cameras, lights and tracing paper. The more they searched the cave, the more paleolithic art they found. In all, close to 80 drawings were scratched into the rock. Among them were six deer, one complete horse and the heads or bodies of five others, an antelope, three handsome and complete bison, a bull, some mountain goats, and a catlike creature. Cavemen, it is believed, made images of the animals they hunted to gain power over them. There was a triangular fertility symbol, and one clearly visible figure of a man, headless, but obviously...
...first, Aurignacian, is roughly 25,000 to 30,000 years old, the other, Magdalenian, dates from 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. With the drawings fully authenticated (a thick layer of limy deposit, like candle wax, covers many of them, dismissing the possibility of a modern hoax), the cave is rated as a major archaeological find. Many art historians believe that cave art had magical meaning, purposely put in as cramped a space as possible in a sort of protective return to the womb. Though in an area famous for its subterranean paintings, its very magic may keep...
...anticipation of Michael Flaksman's cello solo and Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle, one might have been able to ignore the unrelenting repetition of a simple motif in the opening Hebrides Overture (Fingal's Cave), by Mendelssohn. By attempting deafness, one might not have noticed that for a long time the brass were a measure out of step with the rest of the orchestra, and were playing so loudly that they could not hear their own error. Masochistic charity might have led one to expect the cold woodwind instruments to be out of tune at the beginning of a concert...