When we last left our hero, he’d found a ravine. After orienting myself, I built a bridge across the ravine and crossed it:
![Crossing the Ravine](http://scenes.malvasiabianca.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Crossing-the-Ravine-435x242.png)
Crossing the Ravine
There was a natural cave on the other side; I wandered through that, dug a corridor through the wall at the end (going straight rather than up or down, I’m not sure why), and then I encountered a second cave:
![Second Cave across Ravine](http://scenes.malvasiabianca.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Second-Cave-across-Ravine-435x245.png)
There are water sounds on the left
I heard water on the left, which kind of scared me: I didn’t have a good feel for the dynamics of water in the game, and I also had no idea whether I was even under land at all. So I went forward some, and found:
![Cave with Chest](http://scenes.malvasiabianca.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Cave-with-Chest-435x244.png)
Glad I'm in peaceful mode
my first monster cave! Or it would have been a monster cave, but I was in peaceful mode. Nice mossy rock. After that, I decided I’d been in caves enough, so I dug some stairs up, and eventually made it out to a desert.
![Stairs to Outside](http://scenes.malvasiabianca.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Stairs-to-Outside-435x244.png)
Heading back up
![Outside, Including Trench](http://scenes.malvasiabianca.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Outside-Including-Trench-435x243.png)
More desert!
As you can see, I stuck with my previous idea of building a trench so I’d be able to find the entrance again if I got lost.
But a funny thing happened as I was digging along in that trench: at one point in my digging, the sand crumbled, and:
![Cave under Desert](http://scenes.malvasiabianca.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Cave-under-Desert-435x244.png)
A Cave!
Gee, what’s this cave doing here? It’s plenty deep, too, and had a lovely waterfall-filled pool once I got down to the bottom.
![Partway Down in Cave](http://scenes.malvasiabianca.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Partway-Down-in-Cave-435x245.png)
Quite a bit further down to go
![Waterfall and Pool in Cave](http://scenes.malvasiabianca.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Waterfall-and-Pool-in-Cave-435x242.png)
I love this waterfall
There was a lot of space down there; in particular, heading a bit to the right, I found a further extension of the cave with underground rivers of lava and water next to each other.
![Lava and Water](http://scenes.malvasiabianca.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Lava-and-Water-435x245.png)
Rivers of Lava and Water
I tunneled around behind the lava to explore some more (that’s how the crafting table got there); I also went in different directions from the earlier room. (Which had a lot of coal and some amount of iron ore, incidentally.) I was a bit afraid of getting lost, though, and the spaces were a bit too open and free-form for me to feel like exploring them just then, so I climbed my way back up to the desert and went back into my original cave complex. Also, at some point I went aboveground back to where I’d first started digging way back when, after first figuring out where I’d made turns underground so I’d be confident I wasn’t heading in the wrong direction. It felt like I’d traveled forever when I was doing this underground, but aboveground the distances proved to be much shorter!
When I got back to the room where I’d heard water, I decided I wasn’t scared of that any more. For whatever reason, rather than digging straight through the wall in question, I dug up a bit, and that turned out to work well: I ended up just above a nice little river.
![Water Near Second Cave across Ravine](http://scenes.malvasiabianca.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Water-Near-Second-Cave-across-Ravine-435x244.png)
Another underground river
![Cave-Dwelling Squid](http://scenes.malvasiabianca.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Cave-Dwelling-Squid-435x245.png)
The latest update has added a squid here!
I didn’t verify it this time, but I’m fairly sure that, eventually, I hopped over that river (via the bridge you can see in that picture) and traveled through a cave system that was on the other side to get back to that lava flow I’d seen earlier. So clearly this whole area is riddled with caves, and I probably haven’t come close to exploring them all. In fact, there were enough that I was feeling a little burned out from the caves; I decided that I’d go back to the original entrance that I’d dug and hollow that out into a real house.