Cave

There's no sign, and no line. Just a small black awning that indicates the entrance of Fluid, atop the Latest Dish restaurant on Fourth Street near South Street. On Thursday nights from 10 o'clock on, it's the "Platinum" party attended by young heads - a crowd of slackers and ravers in their early 20s, wearing baggy khakis and cargo pants, T-shirts and tank tops, and baseball caps and hooded sweatshirts. Plus urban grungers and the fashion plates (including women in go-go dresses, outlandish fur coats and feather boas)

Most good museums have a nice selection of old masters, but there's only one place in the world to see the finest work of the oldest masters, prehistoric painters who worked about 14,000 B.C. The place is a cave region: In the French Pyrenees, it's Lascaux I, and in northern Spain, it's Altamira. Because the works on their walls are so precious, they have been closed to the public, but International Art and Anthropological Tours has been given access to both of them. Its trip begins May 19, in Santander, Spain, and ends two weeks later in Bordeaux, France.

French commandos backed by helicopter gunships yesterday stormed an oceanside cave where Melanesian separatists held 23 French hostages, freeing the captives in a nearly eight-hour battle that left 17 dead. The hostages, 22 French gendarmes and a state prosecutor, all managed to escape unharmed during the fighting at the coral grotto on the island of Ouvea, part of the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia. Two police agents and 15 kidnappers were killed, and three other gendarmes were wounded in the operation.

Dave Josh Weisman, 21, of East Windsor, was fatally injured yesterday afternoon when the wall of a dirt trench collapsed and partly buried him, police said. Weisman, an employee of the Garden State Land Group, an landscaping company, was working at the new Lake Pointe development in Burlington Township when the cave-in occurred at 1:07 p.m. "They were having a problem with the sewer pipe, and they were clearing the pipe with a snake when it got hung up," said Burlington Township patrolman Michael G. Millhollin.

My wife, Shirley, and I had always been fascinated watching television shows of archaeological explorations of ancient civilizations and their mysterious cities. We were planning a two-week vacation, and our travel agent recommended the Hacienda Uxmal in the Yucatan Peninsula, situated within the hub of the ancient Mayan civilization. Our plane ride to the capital city of Merida was uneventful. We rented a car and drove the 50 miles south to our hotel. The next day, we hired a local guide.

During the 12 years that Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo spent alone seeking enlightenment in a Himalayan cave, the British-born aesthete says she wasn't bored and was never lonely. She came close to perishing during a weeklong blizzard. But she says she was ready and happy to die. Her mother did indeed pass away while Palmo sought perfection in the stony retreat, and the nun says she has few regrets that she wasn't there. "My mother told people that they were not to let me know she was ill, because if she died what use would it be for me to be there and if she recovered what use for me to be there," Palmo said.

A contractor today will begin rebuilding a Camden street that collapsed during Tuesday's heavy rains, leaving a 10-foot-deep hole wide enough to swallow an automobile. Frederick H. Martin Jr., Camden's director of utilities, said Ivymont Construction Inc. of Audubon, which the city keeps on retainer for emergency repairs, would complete the work at Sixth and Washington Streets by Tuesday. Martin said a 19th-century brick sewer caved in during the heavy rains, causing a four-inch water main to rupture.

When Juan Cave first went out for the St. Joseph's Prep track and field team during the spring of 2002, he strongly felt that every Friday should be a day of relaxation. That meant no high jumping, no speed drills. And yoga? What did yoga have to do with track and field, Cave wondered. At first, Cave never saw a correlation between yoga and the high jump. And really, how could you blame him? But twisting his body in awkward positions while learning various breathing techniques is exactly what Cave, a junior and one of the Catholic League's most gifted high jumpers, has done every Friday afternoon since his freshman year.

William A. Cave, 85, a soft-spoken animal rights advocate who was president of the American Anti-Vivisection Society in Jenkintown for the last 12 years, died Friday at his home in Gladwyne. Mr. Cave, a silver-haired former salesman, wasn't the type of animal rights activist who broke into laboratories. "His focus was on education," said Bill Kelley, another society member. "He wanted to educate people as to what was going on. He wasn't a man to go around raiding laboratories and spray-painting walls.

It's the Cave of Kelpius, and it's probably the most obscure, hard-to- locate historic site in Philadelphia. Johannes Kelpius is probably the most obscure, elusive figure in local history. So, of course, his cave is hard to find. The man was seeking an isolated place in the wilderness to meditate. Three hundred years ago, Kelpius and his crew were waiting in the hills above Wissahickon Creek for the Second Coming, the end of world. So, it's timely to consider Kelpius and "the Hermits of the Wissahickon" now because every time a new century approaches, a group appears in Philadelphia predicting the apocalypse.

THE DOCUMENTARY "No Place on Earth" doesn't seem as if it should work quite as well as it does. A History Channel production, the tale of Ukrainian Jews who survived in underground caves for 511 days while hiding from the Nazis during World War II is structured around lengthy, foreign-language re-enactments of the events featuring costumed performers. Why not just commit to the undeniably thrilling theatricality of the story and make a fictionalized dramatic feature? Instead, Emmy-winning documentarian Janet Tobias ("Life 360")

MUMBAI, India - A residential building being constructed illegally on forest land in a suburb of India's financial capital collapsed into a mound of steel and concrete, killing at least 47 people and injuring 70 others, authorities said Friday. The eight-story building in the Mumbai suburb of Thane caved in Thursday, police said. Rescue workers with sledgehammers, gasoline-powered saws, and hydraulic jacks struggled Friday to break through the tower of rubble in their search for possible survivors.

Nick Cave crouched his 6-foot-2 frame at the edge of the stage of the Keswick Theatre in Glenside on Tuesday night. "I ain't down here for your money," the rail-thin 55-year-old Australian rocker bellowed as his band, the Bad Seeds, roared behind him. "I ain't down here for your love," he emphasized, getting his tailored suit sweaty as he dug deep into his 1988 song "Deanna. " So what was he after? He reached his arm down to smack the floor to make himself clear: "I'm down here for your soul !"

Inquirer staff writer Virginia A. Smith is writing this week from the Philadelphia Flower Show. These posts appeared on her blog, "Kiss the Earth," at philly.com/kisstheearth. Read her stories at philly.com/ginny, and other Flower Show coverage at philly.com/flowershow. Man Cave as BBQ pit I may be the only person in Philadelphia who doesn't like the smell of meat grilling on the BBQ. When I walked into the show's new Man Cave - The Back Yard, my first thought was e wwww . But don't let me stop you. Check out the fake grass.

JERUSALEM - A trove of ancient manuscripts in Hebrew characters rescued from caves in a Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan is providing the first physical evidence of a Jewish community that thrived there a thousand years ago. On Thursday, Israel's National Library unveiled the cache of recently purchased documents that run the gamut of life experiences, including biblical commentaries, personal letters, and financial records. Researchers say the "Afghan Genizah" marks the greatest such archive found since the "Cairo Genizah" was discovered in an Egyptian synagogue more than 100 years ago, a vast depository of medieval manuscripts considered to be among the most valuable collections of historical documents ever found.

Adapted from a recent online discussion. Question: My significant other loves Christmas but I don't. Unfortunately, I have to drive the bus of "Noel's" Annual Holiday Expectations, i.e., do all the decorating, baking, shopping, etc., by myself . If I don't, it won't get done and Noel will sulk and hide until I cave. Noel refuses to celebrate with family without me and maintains that it's only one day a year, I should suck it up, I can handle one church service, etc. (I'm an atheist.)

Pardon me while I check the calendar to make sure I'm not living in the Stone Age. I had to double-check, especially after hearing a bunch of cavemen, I mean, politicians, make a mockery over the one issue that's intensely personal and should be politically untouchable - women's reproductive rights. I mean, hearing these kind of violations on women's health this campaign season, you'd think these guys introduce their wives by hair-dragging them onto the podium. It all started on the campaign trail earlier this year, when GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum, while conceding that pregnancy from rape would be "horrible," counseled: "We have to make the best of a bad situation.

Chillin' Wit' is a regular feature of the Daily News spotlighting a name in the news away from the job. CITY Councilman Curtis Jones Jr. invites Chillin' Wit' for an exclusive visit to his Wynnefield basement Man Cave on one condition: No politics. Just Eagles. "He's not a councilman here," Jones says, nodding at Bill Green. "And I'm not a councilman, just a person. We can scratch and burp down here. I can be a caveman. " Fellow cavemen also include son Curtis Jones III, brother Keith Jones, chief of staff Al Spivey, Democratic ward leader Lou Agre, and friends Brahin Behlin and Scott Bass.

PETRA, Jordan - We knew the night would be a little different than expected when at check-in Mahmoud cheerfully informed us, "I've upgraded you to a cave. " That was our introduction to staying at a Bedouin camp in Jordan. We had visions of dusty tents with Persian rugs underfoot and the odd camel lumbering by. This was true enough, but we were directed to our cave, a hole in the wall (literally) that barely had room for a floor mat, with enough striped pillows to fill a Martha Stewart home furnishings catalog.