Word: cavernous
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This swaddled image lying in the damp, cramped cavern where Jesus may actually have been born is the center and model of numberless Nativity scenes all over the world. Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox or sectarian, there are crèches today almost everywhere there are Christians. There are Nativities as sumptuous as the presepio (manger) in Rome's 11th century Church of Ara Coeli (Altar of Heaven) on Capitoline Hill, with its Christ child-legendarily carved by St. Luke himself-so bedecked with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls and gold that its form is barely discernible and the surplus treasure...
...Pennine range runs like a spine through the English Midlands. At Peak Cavern, which lies at its southern end, eight experienced "potholers," under the auspices of Britain's Speleological Association, last week began the exploration of a newly discovered underground passage. They first worked their way in by a series of up and down scrambles, then wriggled through a narrow tunnel with a mud floor and a roof that was sometimes no more than 10 in. above their heads. It took them two hours to progress 600 ft. The tunnel suddenly broadened into a fairly large chamber...
Leverett, of course, has long faced an unfortunate lack of popularity partially due to architectural features: it lacks a splendid tower and its dining room is a huge reverberating cavern. By now, Leverett's problem has received due recognition from the Administration, which has provided grants to remodel the dining hall, besides extending the House with the new Leverett "Towers." It seems only just for the Administration to pay similar attention to the perhaps less pressing, but nevertheless important lacunae in the physical plants of other Houses...
...pianists doesn't show up. He is also busy planning the Downstairs evacuation to another, larger catacomb. Selecting the site will not be easy. Says Monk's man Matthews: "People like to think they're discovering us." The problem: finding a new cavern capacious enough for another 50 or so intrepid spelunkers. carefully crummy enough to make them think they have discovered something...
...Erno Bellante, who was building a road past the town of 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...