Cave

Adrian Serrano was wielding demolition tools next to the owner of the West Kensington garage - and trying to warn him that the cinder block wall was caving in. "He said, 'It's not going to fall,' " the agitated Serrano said last night. "I said, run, the wall's coming down. " But it was too late. Manuel Caez was fatally crushed when the 40-foot garage wall crashed down on him as he was attempting to remove a roof cited by the Department of Licenses and Inspections as "imminently dangerous.

More than 90 years ago, the archives of the Historical Society of Montgomery County show, there was an extensive archaeological dig at a sealed cavern at Port Kennedy on the Schuylkill. The dig, which it was hoped would find traces of prehistoric humans, was conducted by the archaeologist Henry Chapman Mercer, curator of American and prehistoric archaeology at the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. Though no traces of early humans were found at the excavation, the dig was notable for what it did unearth.

What is the sound of a Buddhist nun sitting alone for 12 years in a Himalayan cave? "Quiet," Tenzin Palmo recalled last week. "Never boring. And very beautiful. " The phone line from Vancouver fell silent for a moment. "I wasn't planning to do 12 years," she continued. "But it was the ideal place to practice" meditation. "So, I just stayed there. " "There" was a space both tiny and vast, like the self Buddhists seek to know. Palmo's cave near the Tibetan border was so small she slept sitting up, her legs folded beneath her as in meditation.

"Awe" may be an immeasurable term, and therefore unscientific. But that best describes the response of scientists - archaeologists and anthropologists both - to the cache of prehistoric artistry discovered last month in a limestone cave near Vallon-Pont-d'Arc in southwest France, and announced at a news conference last week in Paris. "The cave is in such a wonderful state of preservation. No one has, essentially, walked on the floor since 20,000 years ago. This is one of those situations where everything is basically the way it was dropped," said Randall White, a professor of anthropology at New York University who specializes in prehistoric art. "If you would find one Rembrandt, you would get excited.

Nestled in the woods a few hundred yards off farm-filled Route 40, St. Augustine Prep is a quaint, picturesque campus in Atlantic County. Open the door to the school's basketball gym, however, and the quiet, serene surroundings seem far removed. Open the door, and the stillness is only a memory. Open the door, and there's a party inside. St. Augustine's tiny gym is the rollicking home of the hard-to-beat Hermits. It is where one of the basketball players' fathers climbs up a ladder atop a 20-foot platform and bellows the national anthem in an operalike voice so deep and so loud that he doesn't use a microphone.

It began as a fist-sized pothole back in August. Now there are two of them - one a yard square - spanning the 3100 block of Custer Street in Kensington, forcing cars to drive onto the sidewalk to avoid getting stuck. At 5 a.m. yesterday, water was spilling onto the tiny street from what a police officer called a cave-in, and residents were complaining of an odor of gas. Yesterday afternoon, the street was blocked off while employees of the Philadelphia Gas Works and the city Water Department evaluated the extent of the damage to their lines.

A CAR SITS STRANDED at the edge of a cave-in in the 5000 block of Unruh Avenue in the city's Tacony section as a Philadelphia Gas Works crew reroutes a gas line broken by the collapse. Residents said the cave-in occurred about 1 a.m. yesterday during heavy rain.

CHATTANOOGA TVA LAKE LOWERED TO SAVE DIVER A scuba diver hunting huge catfish was rescued from a fenced-off underwater cave after the Tennessee Vally Authority lowered a lake's water level. Now David Gant faces a possible trespassing charge for entering the cave closed off to protect an endangered bat species, said TVA spokesman Gil Francis. The TVA also is peeved at the expense of rescuing Gant on Sunday, which "will run several thousand dollars - minimum," Francis said.

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.

ROYAL OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS ON SUBURBAN READERS' DOORS Britain's Queen Mother is advertising for a butler in a suburban local newspaper because she wants to give job opportunities to unemployed men living outside London. "Under Butler required for Royal Household in London. Please apply to Comptroller, Clarence House," said the ad in the Reading Evening Post this week. The butler's tasks include serving food, opening the door and answering the telephone at the 95-year-old Queen Mother's London residence.