Word: caving
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...Cave Dwellers (by William Saroyan) are broken-down performers camping out in a crumbling, abandoned East Side theater. A done-for boxer, a beat old clown, an ailing old actress are joined by a sweet young girl and a man with a trained bear and a wife who gives birth to a baby. By day they lie abed, or street-beg, or in desperation steal milk. By night they act out their old roles, philosophize, soliloquize, dramatize the day's rebuffs, fall asleep and dream...
...Cave Dwellers, Saroyan is no longer a high-spirited toastmaster to waif-dom, but its long-winded poet laureate. There are the usual variety turns, but not much seems cockeyed or even imaginative. There are sad-eyed little gallantries instead; and even when Saroyan half-mocks at stage doings, he seems half-mawkish. His people are not just too good to be true, but mostly too good to be interesting. Their one message is love, love for one another; all is love, the secret of the theater is love, even hate is love. All this, however devoutly to be wished...
...Sperlonga (pop. 3,000) by the Tyrrhenian Sea. Taking time off from his prosaic work, Amateur Archaeologist Bellante set workmen to digging inside the grotto of Tiberius (who reigned from 14 A.D. to 37 A.D.), 90-ft.-deep cavern hard by the site of Tiberius' famed Villa Spelunca (Cave Villa).* Beneath six inches of limy earth, one of Bellante's men struck a marble fragment shaped like the calf of a human leg, about twice lifesize. The diggers dug on to more than 400 pieces of polished marble...
Only a third of the cave had been excavated by last week, and the torso of Laocoön himself was still among the missing pieces. To complicate matters, the citizens of Sperlonga were trying to keep the fragments in home ground. Thinking of tourist-trade possibilities, they rolled a five-ton rock before the cave entrance, dug a moat to frustrate approaching trucks. Still, having logic, culture and Cops all on his side, Jacopi was determined to get the entire cave excavated and the fragments transported to Rome, where they can be expertly examined and reassembled to determine whether...
...From which comes the contemporary word for cave explorers, spelunkers...