Panther Cave is perhaps the greatest of all the prehistoric galleries in the lower Pecos.

It is impossible to visit Panther Cave without hearing its message and being affected by that communication in some way. It is a place that requires one to keep a tight and conscious hold on the spirit and a protective awareness over the physical body. I feel menaced by every shrub and plant. They bristle with spines that can stab, claw or cripple the unwary.

In this part of the world, water is life. It is a bizzare fact of my journey that I approach this site safe inside the low gunwales of a metal boat. I glide into a realm of spirit on a glistening mirror of life in storage named Amistad Reservoir. From the shore, I can see the giant panther in his time-frozen leap. I gaze through a steel fence into a fragment of a world that takes my breath away.

To step into Panther Cave is to enter into remoteness and calm and timelessness that makes the mad scramble of my modern life seem like a pointless dream. This magnificent gallery simply stands and waits inside a fold in the cliff, open to the sky and the wind and weather. Rabbits and rock squirrels breed in its crannies. Herons wheel over it in great blue arcs and the spirits go their secret ways in its dim depths. Once in a while we physical beings invade its private activity, but I'm not sure we make an impression here.

The cave changes me. Each visit is like a dose of some powerful drug, altering my conscious in a fundamental way. The longer I work in the cave, the stronger the change becomes. I know this feeling now and I welcome it. Soon I find that every detail of the day, even the most trivial, falls into exquisite juxtaposition with the next. Commonplace things take on new significance and beauty. I do not know if the cave affects everyone this way. It seems an awfully private thing to ask about.

I have the feeling that the cave benevolently waits for me to leave. The drowned valley, the cliff-side and the silent animals on the hills; the plants that grow down to the water, and the birds that build in cane and rock, the cave itself with all its natural and supernatural life just waits for me to go away.

After each visit, when I am committed to the outbound trail, I find myself turning back, quickly. I an hoping someday to catch a glimpse of the enchanting things that must be taking place there the minute my back is turned. It is that kind of place.

I feel that I walk in sympathetic vibration with the earth herself, that it would be impossible for me to harm or disturb her now. Why these feelings occur, I do not know. How they occur, I do not care.

The message of Panther Cave is felt in the heart, and the message is this: That which is is that which is. It is a message that has echoed across forty centuries so far.