Those beds may be covered up, pressed, and, it may be, heated, till they crystallise into white marble: and out of it fairer statues be carved, and grander temples built, than the world has ever yet seen.
And if that is not the reason why the chalk is being sent into the sea, then there is another reason, and probably a far better one.
For, as I told you at first, Lady Why's intentions are far wiser and better than our fancies; and she--like Him whom she obeys--is able to do exceeding abundantly, beyond all that we can ask or think.
But you will say now that we have followed the chalk-cart a long way, without coming to the cave.
You are wrong. We have come to the very mouth of the cave. All we have to do is to say--not "Open Sesame," like Ali Baba in the tale of the Forty Thieves--but some word or two which Madam Why will teach us, and forthwith a hill will open, and we shall walk in, and behold rivers and cascades underground, stalactite pillars and stalagmite statues, and all the wonders of the grottoes of Adelsberg, Antiparos, or Kentucky.
Am I joking? Yes, and yet no; for you know that when I joke I am usually most in earnest. At least, I am now.
But there are no caves in chalk?
No, not that I ever heard of. There are, though, in limestone, which is only a harder kind of chalk. Madam How could turn this chalk into hard limestone, I believe, even now; and in more ways than one: but in ways which would not be very comfortable or profitable for us Southern folk who live on it. I am afraid that--what between squeezing and heating--she would flatten us all out into phosphatic fossils, about an inch thick; and turn Winchester city into a "breccia" which would puzzle geologists a hundred thousand years hence. So we will hope that she will leave our chalk downs for the Itchen to wash gently away, while we talk about caves, and how Madam How scoops them out by water underground, just in the same way, only more roughly, as she melts the chalk.
Suppose, then, that these hills, instead of being soft, spongy chalk, were all hard limestone marble, like that of which the font in the church is made. Then the rainwater, instead of sinking through the chalk as now, would run over the ground down-hill, and if it came to a crack (a fault, as it is called) it would run down between the rock; and as it ran it would eat that hole wider and wider year by year, and make a swallow-hole--such as you may see in plenty if you ever go up Whernside, or any of the high hills in Yorkshire--unfathomable pits in the green turf, in which you may hear the water tinkling and trickling far, far underground.
And now, before we go a step farther, you may understand, why the bones of animals are so often found in limestone caves. Down such swallow-holes how many beasts must fall: either in hurry and fright, when hunted by lions and bears and such cruel beasts; or more often still in time of snow, when the holes are covered with drift; or, again, if they died on the open hill-sides, their bones might be washed in, in floods, along with mud and stones, and buried with them in the cave below; and beside that, lions and bears and hyaenas might live in the caves below, as we know they did in some caves, and drag in bones through the caves' mouths; or, again, savages might live in that cave, and bring in animals to eat, like the wild beasts; and so those bones might be mixed up, as we know they were, with things which the savages had left behind--like flint tools or beads; and then the whole would be hardened, by the dripping of the limestone water, into a paste of breccia just like this in my drawer. But the bones of the savages themselves you would seldom or never find mixed in it--unless some one had fallen in by accident from above. And why? (For there is a Why? to that question: and not merely a How?) Simply because they were men; and because God has put into the hearts of all men, even of the lowest savages, some sort of reverence for those who are gone; and has taught them to bury, or in some other way take care of, their bones.
But how is the swallow-hole sure to end in a cave?
Because it cannot help ****** a cave for itself if it has time.