THE MOONSHAFT

Antonin T. Horak

5 pages, 3 drawings
Here are some excerpts  from the paper and an illustration.
Full copy of the paper may be ordered from RIAP.

From RB Editor: This article, authored by the late Dr. A. T. Horak, originally appeared in the March, 1965, issue of NSS News, published by the National Speleological Society (2813 Cave Avenue, Huntsville, Alabama 35810-4431, USA). We are especially indebted to Mr. Ray Keeler, NSS Executive Vice President, for granting permission to reprint it in RIAP Bulletin.

[NSS News] Editor's Note: This article is a translation by the author from his own journal. Antonin T. Horak was a captain in the Slovak Uprising during World War II, and he tells of his discovery of a strange "moonshaft" in a cave in Czechoslovakia. Dr. Horak is a linguist who is now a U.S. Citizen living in Pueblo, Colorado, and he hopes to persuade speleologists to study his moonshaft further and to learn its true nature. The illustrations were traced from sketches that he made 20 years ago in the cave, which is located near the villages of Plavince and Lubocna at about 49.2°N, 20.7°E. The journal was written when Dr. Horak and two of his wounded soldiers were found by a peasant and rescued from capture.

<...>

Crawling through and still kneeling, I froze in amazement - there stands something like a large, black silo, framed in white. Regaining breath I thought that this is a bizarre, natural wall or curtain of black salt, or ice, or lava. But I became perplexed, then awestruck when I saw that it is a glass-smooth flank of a seemingly man-made structure which reaches into the rocks on all sides. Beautifully, cylindrically curved it indicates a huge body with a diameter of about 25 meters. Where this structure and the rocks meet, large stalagmites and stalactites form that glittering white frame. The wall is uniformly blue-blackish, its material seems to combine properties of steel, flint, rubber – the pick made no marks and bounced off vigorously. Even the thought of a tower-sized artifact; embedded in rock in the middle of an obscure mountain, in a wild region where not even legend knows about ruins, mining, industry; overgrown with age-old cave deposits, is bewildering – the fact is appalling.

I left the moonshaft to probe the front wall and its surroundings. Next to the stalactites are some enamel-like flecks which, scraped, yield a powder too fine to be collected without glue, which I will try to boil from our "pigeons's" claws. I wished to obtain a sample of the peculiar material of the walls, but even firing two bullets into the crack, upon the protrusions and hitting them, I received only ricochets, a blast of thunder, welts, and the same pungent smell.

<...>

October 28, 1944. Restful night, good breakfast. Cut my name, etc., on a leather strip, and together with the golden back of my watch rolled and inserted both engravings into a glass bottle, plugged it with a pebble and a ball of clay mixed with charcoal , and deposited this record in the moonshaft, on top of the ashes of my torches. It may stay there for a long time, possibly until the structure is completely hidden behind its curtain of stalactites and stalagmites. Slavek has no son to tell him about his cave-mystery; his womenfolk don't know about it, and anyway daughters usually marry to other villages. In a few decades nobody will know, if I do not come back and have the structure explored.

<...>

In correspondence dealing with plans for the publication of this journal, Dr. George W. Moore suggested that the moonshaft might have been dissolved from a steeply-dipping limestone layer between curved parallel sheets of chert. I am skeptical. All the inner surfaces of the moonshaft are composed of the same material. Also, such an hypothesis does not explain the peculiar, exactly parallel, finely grooved pattern on the back surface (or wall) of the left horn.

On my last visit to the place, I examined the mountainside above the cave and found no sinkholes or pits, the assumed connections toward the moonshaft. But on these steep slopes in the Tatra Mountains, rockslides could have obliterated or filled in any such connections.

To download RB, Vol. 6, No. 2-3, containing a full text of this paper, please click here:
http://www.geocities.com/riap777/EPRB-623.pdf (349 KB)

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