The Cavern of Tears is a crystalline cave in the Crown of the North filled with salt water said to be tears: a creature wept until it filled it. Sixty feet down in its lake stands a small altar where something glows.
| Type | Place |
| Spanish entry | Caverna de Lágrimas |
Description
One climbs (or falls) down a cliff of about forty feet to it. The water is salty: “it is the taste of tears… they are tears”. Bluish lights “begin to dance when the chamber is opened”. It smells of saltpeter, “like an inner water reservoir”. Stalactites and stalagmites join into columns. One chamber measures thirty feet high by twenty-five wide, its floor partly stones and ashes.
It is “partly natural, partly worked”, widened “with blows and cuts” (or, one speculation says, by “a giant worm, better not to know”). Further in, chambers link through clefts.
A water shore is the only firm footing. Wading in, water rises “to the hips, but no further”; beyond, one dives. In the middle, sixty feet down, is “a little altar where something glows”, and from the center a pillar rises toward the surface.
Properties
- Setting fire to “the cavern, which was of salt and water” was judged unlikely without express magic.
- Once “the whole lake turned into rum”.
- It echoes; performers must be “used to reciting with the echo of the cave”.
- “The cavern is electric.”
Caverns of the region
The region and world are riddled with caverns: tubular caves eroded “when the lake was higher”, cliffside grottos, streamside caves that “shine in the moonlight”, a system under Gary with lake, reeds, ducks and a camp entered by a hatch, caves under a barn, overgrown caves, and the access D1. They serve as hideouts and for underground negotiation and ritual, and are targets of campaigns to “clean the caverns taken by evil”. An island cave is a gate to Atlantis; prisoners lie “at the bottom of the deepest caverns”; once the cave to the world of dreams was sealed, entry was by the seventy steps.
In one such cave lies StormJay Idaho, “stiff”, frozen or crystallized by the magic of the Flying Dutchman. Ananta, turned to cloud, entered the cavern of the hill, perhaps this one, and was heard no more.
Conflicting accounts
- One record gives damp walls, “salt water everywhere” and saltpeter; another, little humidity, “no puddles” and a “smell of ancient stone”.
Open questions
- Which creature wept, and when? The faceless mother’s name circulates, unconfirmed.
- What glows on the altar, and what is the pillar made of?
- The exact location is not recorded.
- Which general cavern facts belong here, and do the ashes relate to the attempt to burn it?