Entering the Stone : On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark

by HURD BARBARA

• ISBN13: 9780618492299
• ISBN10: 0618492291
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-02-17
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

In this exhilarating work, Barbara Hurd explores some of the most extraordinary places on earth, from sacred caves in India to secret caves in Arizona. With passionately informed prose, Hurd makes these strange dark spaces -- with their stalactites and blind cave fish and ancient galleries of white flowstone -- come to light, illuminating the natural history and spiritual territory of caves as powerfully as Kathleen Norris portrayed the Dakotas. Entering the Stone provides an awe-inducing tour through a fragile and beautiful subterranean world.

Author Biography

Barbara Hurd teaches at Frostburg State University and in the Stonecoast Program in Creative Writing. She is an editor of the literary annual Nightsun. Her essays and poems have appeared in numerous publications, including the 1999 and 2001 volumes of The Best American Essays, the Yale Review, the Georgia Review, Audubon, and Sierra. She lives in Frostburg, Maryland.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	ix
1 The Squeeze	1	(20)
2 Begin Here	21	(14)
3 The Twilight Zone	35	(14)
4 Impurities	49	(14)
5 Moonmilk	63	(14)
6 The Solace of Beauty	77	(12)
7 Elephanta Cave and the Eros of Mystery	89	(14)
8 Desert Cave	103	(12)
9 Derichment	115
10 Rescue	111	(34)
11 Dark Wings to Zero	145	(10)
12 In the Hollow That Remains	155