On my way back to camp I burrowed and hid the crawl holes which led towards the wall; the cave may have entrances which Slavek does not know of, and some chance discoverer may start blasting "for treasure" before a scientific team can get there. I was in camp after 3 pm, and about 5 pm all three Slavek’s arrived, bringing some hard-boiled eggs. Jurek asked permission to talk privately with Slavek, and then Hanka was carefully sounded out by her father whether she would accept Jurek as her husband. She cried and laughed, Jurek gave her his photograph and golden watch which his father had brought from America; Jurek is a well-to-do carpenter in Bratislava; I am invited to the wedding and will try to come. To make sure, I gave Hanka a letter to a befriended jeweler and commanded her to get the nicest set of Bohemian garnets as a wedding present. The Slavek’s had brought their family Bible, and I made some entries.

With the hardy Slovak handshakes and "Mhoho atiastia, Pan Buh posehnaj Yas, Duh a tabou," we shouldered our weapons and packs and went. When we entered the pines and turned we saw Slavek concealing his cave and the girls sweeping away our tracks. The moon was bright and the snow glittered.

OCTOBER 30, 1944 --- We moved during the dark hours only and along the timber line. During daylight, camping snugly below a fine pine-tree, we were alarmed by the sound of infantry fire; approaching to investigate we observed a strong group of insurgents skirmishing with a ski party of Wehrmacht and Polish Blue Police (fascists). The fascists went soon, and, joining the insurgents (who were fighting the fascists) we were their guests for a whole day. They were a mixed group of Hechaluts, ZOB and DROR, from the Rseazow region in adjacent Poland, who had helped in our Uprising and were now on their way back - through immense snow - to their usual sectors between Cracow and Przemyal. Their physician was Rachel W., the widow of a murdered Jewish doctor; she knew and told us about the exploits of the famous Jesia Fryman Bands against the Nazists; and fed us two fine, hot meals. When these valiant Jewish fighters (against the Nazi invaders of Poland) were marching on northward, we had to go southward, towards Kosica, which we reached on our 6th day; and there receiving directions we could proceed to join our battalion which was waiting the next offensive of the Red Army, to join it until the end of the war.

-------

In the very last days of World War II, on my way towards Bohemia, I revisited the place. The Slaveks lived temporarily at Zdar. I visited Martin's grave and looked at the cave entrance. I had taken the animal teeth I had collected to the curator of paleontology at Uzhorod, and he classified them as adult cave bear - Ursus spaeleus. Thereupon I speculated; the crack is too small, the lump of limestone and stalagmites in front of the crack would not let any debris through; this bear seems to have fallen into the moonshaft, which may have had a connection to the surface.

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 chart. I was skeptical. All the inner surfaces of the moonshaft are composed of the same material. Also, such a 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 about the cave and found no sinkholes or pits, the assumed connections toward the moonshaft. But on there very steep slopes in the Tatra Mountains, rock-slides could have obliterated or filled in any such connections."

*******

#21 --- The following story appeared on pages 14-19 of Riley H. Crabb's book, "THE REALITY OF THE CAVERN WORLD" -- published by the 'Borderland Sciences Research Foundation' - B.S.R.F. - of (at the time) P.0. Box 548., Vista, Cal. 92083 USA:

"...As we headed eastward across Texas after Carlsbad I toyed with the idea of putting this Underground talk together. Three weeks later, in New York City, I heard a personal experience of contact with Cavern dwellers. It made the lecture seem very much worth putting together.

"In the big-city on the Hudson we stayed overnight with Constance Lois Jessop, secretary of the New York Saucer Information Bureau. Miss Jessop is English and back in the 1930's worked for the British government on the Island of Malta, Britain's great naval base in the middle of the Mediterranean, only sixty miles south of Sicily.

Malta's soft limestone is riddled with caves, some natural, some carved by hand. Whether or not the carving was done by human hands is hard to say at this date. The 17 ½ mile long island, situated strategically in the center of the Mediterranean, has been the prized possession of every (Mediterranean occupying) naval power for the past six thousand years! The Phoenicians owned it then. Consequently it has been fought over many, many times; and each defender has dug into that limestone to store water, food, weapons and men. The organized priesthoods of the island, whether pagan or Christian, also dug in. The crypt below the church of the Knights of Malta is world-famous. The suspected catacombs below the neolithic temples on the surface have so far escaped discovery, with the exception of the Hypogaeum of Hal Saflini in the village of Paula on the inland plateau behind the capital city of Valetta.

When Richard Walter visited Malta in 1939 he was told that a person could walk from one end of Malta to the other through caves, until the British government walled some of them up, including portions of Hal Saflini. This neolithic marvel, duplicating the style of the surface temples, was dated at 3,000 B.C. by Zammit, curator of the Valetta Museum. The temple which undoubtedly stood above it was probably razed in some ancient and long-forgotten siege which ravaged the island. Or more probably the temple and its hapless priesthood was destroyed by an enraged and long-suffering populace, in desperate revolt against insatiable earth gods who had been devouring virgin maids and youths for hundreds of years.

A Maltese contractor blundered into Hal Saflini in 1902 when digging a cistern for a new house. Word of the find finally got to Valetta officials and a man named Magri was put in charge of the excavation, not of the catacomb itself which was a beautiful piece of work, but of the garbage! The numberless rooms and corridors of all three levels of Hal Saflini were half full of dirt, broken pottery, and bones!

By the time Hal Saflini was cleaned out and ready for the first eager tourists, enough human bones had been taken out to account for 33,000 people having been killed and eaten(?) in there! And these were the bones of normal sized, modern surface dwellers like you and me. They were not the bones of the little people who must have dug the cave. The passageways between the rooms were only four and a half feet high. Shaver claims the Deros are cannibals and here is one fact that seems to bear him out. The National Geographic has featured Malta many times over the years and Hal Saflini (or, Hal Saflienti) has come in for its share of comment. The best single feature on the marvelous megalithic find is in the National Geographic for May, 1920. This article "Malta, The Halting Place of Nations" by William Arthur Griffith, contains the best pictures on the interior of the cave, as well as a lengthy description.

Here is Griffith's description of the "Oracle" in the cave: "...at about the level of a man's mouth is a hemispherical hole in the wall about two feet in diameter. Here it was noticed only a few months ago that any word spoken into this place was magnified a hundredfold and audible throughout the entire underground structure. A curved projection is specially carved out of the back of the cave near this hole and acts as a sounding board, showing that the designers had a good knowledge of sound-wave motion. The impression upon the credulous can be imagined when the oracle spoke and the words came thundering forth through the dark and mysterious places with terrifying impressiveness."

When Paul Wilstach toured Hal Saflini it left a lingering impression on him which is well described in his book "Islands of the Mediterranean". He remembered the guide pointing out a funnel-shaped pit in one of the lower levels as being "the pit of the sacrificial serpent"; but Griffith writes the most significant description of it:

"...The pit is shaped like a funnel with a curious slipway worn out just below the hole in the opposite wall which communicates with the main hall. After sloping downward and inward the pit widens considerably and is sufficiently deep to prevent even a tall man from climbing out. It has been thought that sacred serpents were kept in this pit, the curving sides of which would prevent their escape. Possibly after the serpent had been lifted up, as was done by Moses in the wilderness, and due worship made, it would be returned to its lair through the hole in the wall. The larger entrance on the opposite side would permit a man or woman being cast among the serpents to be stung (ie. bitten) to death. (See: Hiram Bingham's "Peru" in 'National Geographic' magazine for April, 1913.)..."

Griffith tugs at the fringes of the Shaver Mystery when he says that Hal Saflini is "so complex that one can only speculate as to the use or significance of its many extraordinary features."

Griffith seems to have been the only one of the cave's writer-explorers who suspected lower level to the labyrinth. This was when he was retracing his steps from the (so-called) 'Holy or Holies' through the room which contained a phallic, upright stone... and on into another set of chambers on the left. Here he noticed that "...the rock, instead of sounding solid to the tread, suddenly sounds very hollow, as if there were a well or a room not yet opened. What wonderful store of archaeological wealth is perhaps here awaiting that opening"!

He wouldn't have thought it so wonderful if he had accompanied the school children who disappeared into those lower levels of Hal Saflini about fifteen year later!

This is a mystery I can explain only by saying that the entrances to the Cavern world are camouflaged beyond discovery -- except when some unsuspecting mortal approaches and for some reason is wanted down below -- or to welcome someone "in the know". Ray Palmer says he has been given the location of a genuine Cavern entrance, and has passed the location on the eager underground researchers. In one case, the Spelunker never came back. He must have succeeded in penetrating the mystery. In all other cases no Cavern entrance could be found by the explorers. There is probably some form of hypnosis involved. This blinds the unwanted to the hole in the ground.

In the case of Hal Saflini, thousands of tourists and technicians must have explored all three levels from 1906, when it was officially opened, until the time when Lois Jessop and her five friends toured the place in the mid-thirties. Certainly a few of them, like her, would have refused to accept the guide's laconic statement on the third level that "...this is all there is to see." Even in the last room there are still more openings leading off into the blackness. These are even lower in height than the four-and-a-half foot corridors.

Archaeologist J.D. Evans, is his well-illustrated (book) "MALTA", describes this final, high-ceilinged room "...from which open four small oven-like chambers... these were obviously intended to be used for burials but were found empty when the building we first explored." And we can suppose that the scientist gave these dark cubicles at least a cursory glance to satisfy himself that this was indeed the end of Hal Saflini.

But that wasn't what Joe, the guide, told Lois after she and her friends had completed the regular tour and were asked to retrace their steps back to the surface.

"What's down there?" she asked the guide, pointing to a small opening off the walls.

"Go then at your own risk, and you won't go far," he replied.

This was a challenge Lois couldn't pass up. She talked it over with her friends. Two of them decided to stay with Joe. The other three summoned enough courage to explore with her.

"I was wearing a dress with a long sash that day and as I decided to lead the group; I asked the fellow behind me to hold on to it. So, with half-burnt candles in our hands the four of us started through that low, narrow passage, groping and laughing our way through.

"I came out first, of course, onto a ledge pathway only two feet wide, with a sheer drop of fifty feet or more on my right and the wall on my left. I took a step forward, keeping close to the rock wall side. The person behind me, still holding on to my sash, was still in the tunnel.

"I held my candle higher and peered down into the abyss, thinking that with this dangerous drop it was better not to go on further without a guide. Then I saw about twenty persons of giant stature emerge from an opening deep below me. They were walking in single file along another narrow ledge down below. Their height I judged to be about twenty to twenty-five feet, since their heads came up about half way on the wall on the opposite side of the cave. They walked very slowly, taking long strides. Then they all stopped, turned and raised their arms and with their hands beckoned to me. The movement was something like snatching or feeling for something, as the palms of their hands were turned down."

By this time her friends back in the passage were becoming impatient of the delay. There was a tug of the sash.

"Go on. We're all getting stuck in here. What's the matter?"

"Well," stammered Lois, "There's nothing much to see."

She took another hesitant step forward, her candle in her right hand, her left hand against the cold rock for support. But it wasn't on a cold rock wall, It was on something damp and wet, AND IT MOVED!

"...Then a strong wind came from nowhere and blew my candle out! Now I really WAS scared in the darkness. I yelled to the others,'GO BACK! Go BACK! Guide me with my sash. I can't see!'

"They pulled me back into the low tunnel and we backed up all the way along the passage into the large room."

Lois was relieved to see her friends and Joe, the guide, again.

"Did you see anything?" one of them asked.

"No, my candle went out," she replied with finality. "There was a strong draft in there."

"Let's go," said Joe, looking at Lois, and she returned his glance eye for eye. She knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that at one time Joe had also seen those giants. There was an expression of caution in his glance which held her to silence.

"Out in the hot Malta sunshine again we thanked our guide and as we tipped him Joe said to me! 'If you really are interested in exploring further it would be wise to join a group. There is a school-teacher who is going to take a party exploring soon,'"

Lois left her address with him, suggesting that he have the school-teacher get in touch with her; but she never heard any more of it. Some few days later one of the friends of the Hal Saflini excursion called her on the phone.

"Remember that tunnel you wanted to explore in the Hypogaeum? Well, it says here in the local paper that a schoolmaster and thirty students went exploring and apparently got as far as we got. They were roped together, with the end of the rope tied to the opening of the cave. As the last student turned the corner where your candle blew out the rope was clean cut. None of the party was found because the walls caved In."

Miss Jessop was shocked by the news, but it only strengthened her own resolve to say nothing of what she had seen and felt, that unforgettable day in Hal Saflini. Some months later her sister came to Malta on a visit, and insisted on touring the famous Hypogaeum. Reluctantly, Lois went along, retracing the same route but this time with a different guide. She awaited that fateful opening with a dreaded expectancy as they worked their way through the corridors and rooms to the lowest level. The entrance to that tunnel was boarded up!

"Isn't this where the schoolteacher and the thirty students got trapped?" she asked the guide.

He nodded his head vaguely, shrugged his shoulders, "perhaps," and refused to answer her question about the tragedy.

"You are new here, aren’t you," she observed, thinking of Joe who had guided her through on her previous trip. "Where's Joe?"

"Joe?" he asked, puzzled, "I don't know any Joe. I, alone, have been showing people around this catacomb for years."

It was then Miss Jessop verified what many another visitor to that strange island has discovered, You cannot get a thing out of the Maltese, when they don't want to talk. After that one brief glimpse into the underworld she was confronted by the impenetrable mystery which has confounded so many researchers -- unless they have somehow broken through the veil and are "in the know".

The Maltese are not a European race. Their peculiar language is closer to Arabic than it is to any European tongue. Outwardly, at least, they are 'Christians', in the iron grip of the Catholic Church!

My third Flying Saucer talk, on American Destiny, contains references to the Cavern world. It was after hearing this presentation to the NYSIB (New York Saucer Information Bureau) that Miss Jessop felt moved to tell me and Mrs. Crabb of her Malta experience. Then in the Communications talk given in New York the second night she saw illustrations which reminded her of the appearance of the twenty-five foot creatures in the Hypogaeum of Hal Saflini. The illustrations are from Max Heindel's "Rosierucian Cosmo-Conception", line drawings of the magnetic field or aura of: the ordinary man, the involuntary clairvoyant, and the voluntary clairvoyant.