Cave

To the Democrats in Congress: You weren't listening. It was the Sandinistas, not you, who were supposed to say "uncle." NORMAN A. HASS Los Angeles

Chunks of dirt mixed with rocks and pieces of concrete buried three sisters digging a hole in the bank of the Kings River, killing one girl and injuring the other two. The cave-in at Laton-Kingston Regional Park completely buried Edith Cabrera, 13, of Laton. She was pronounced dead on arrival Wednesday at a Hanford hospital, authorities said. Witnesses estimated it took between 10 and 15 minutes to uncover the buried girl.

A 9-year-old boy buried when a canal bank collapsed while he was trying to build a play fort says he desperately tried to dig his way out but could barely move. "I was so scared," Stephen McKee said from his hospital bed. "I could only wiggle a finger." He was in fair condition Monday, a nursing supervisor said. The boy spent more than five minutes under to 2 to 3 feet of dirt before two passers-by clawed through and pulled him free.

The Abu Sharq clan is Arab by nationality and Muslim by religion. But in some ways it has a more realistic grasp of the first Christmas than most Christians have. The Abu Sharqs live in caves near here, much like the one in which tradition holds that Jesus was born in Bethlehem about 2,000 years ago.

Ra Paulette can't stop digging. For almost two years now, he has scooped, sanded, brushed and swept away a huge outcropping of sandstone in northern New Mexico, creating a magical, swirling, echoing shrine he calls Windows in the Earth. "It's a living thing. I didn't know what it was going to be when I started. It's almost like being Dr. Frankenstein," he says. The ceilings stretch more than 20 feet high, and the intricate web of small niches and rooms could make up a small house.

Truth Aquatics' one-day adventure to Santa Cruz Island is a great day on the water, with whale watching, a visit to Santa Cruz's Painted Cave, snorkeling, kayaking and just plain relaxing. $90 per person includes breakfast and barbecue lunch; $50 for kids ages 5 to 12. Multiday hiking trips to the island also are available. Truth Aquatics, Santa Barbara; (805) 962-1127, http://www.truthaquatics.com Doris Schaffer Santa Barbara

Archaeologists from UCLA and Ireland have discovered the world's oldest leather shoe, an exquisitely preserved 5,600-year-old woman's size 7 lace-up, in a cave in Armenia. The shoe, 1,000 years older than the great pyramid of Egypt and 400 years older than Stonehenge in England, was in such pristine condition that at first researchers thought it was just a few centuries old. It was stuffed with grass, which may have been used to keep the wearer's foot warm or to preserve the shoe's shape for storage, the researchers reported Wednesday in the online journal PLoS One. Both the grass and shoe were well-preserved, like other organic materials discovered in preliminary excavations of the cave on the border between Armenia and Iran, including a winemaking apparatus complete with grapes and three human heads preserved in jars.

At nightfall, or when the Serbs' heavy guns open up from the valleys below, about 60 survivors of the Racak massacre move to the safest refuge they have left: a mountain cave. One of them is Ismet Emini, an oil refinery worker in Switzerland with British Petroleum, who had the unfortunate fate of being on holiday in the Kosovo village when about 45 residents were shot dead Friday.

It was a mine that gave birth to this "town too tough to die." When the mines played out, tourism kept Tombstone alive. Now an abandoned mine under one of the old town's most popular thoroughfares is threatening that mother lode, though it isn't clear whether the greater danger is from the chance of a cave-in or overblown publicity.

The memories are 64 years old but retold with the clarity of yesterday: a young boy lowered by rope into a deep, dark cave, watching the sky above shrink to a small and distant patch of blue. That hole was home for a month for Gerard Mangnan, his family and dozens of others. And it probably saved their lives. While they huddled underground, Allied and Nazi troops above were waging one of the toughest battles of the D-Day invasion. Now, generations later, the story of how caves and quarries became bomb shelters during the 1944 battle for the Normandy city of Caen is being brought alive by an amateur archaeologist, his photographer colleague and the memories of survivors like Mangnan.