Caribbean Islands: The Sleeping Pools, a long lake in an old, horizontal phreatic tube in the Golding River Cave on the southern side of the Central Inlier of Jamaica. (Photo by Tony Waltham)

River cave is the finest of many very active stream-sink caves (Waltham & Smart, 1975), but all routes drop quickly to sumps, where the long phreatic passages beyond remain unexplored. Scattered through the karst are a number of collapse dolines and impressive open shafts 100-200 m deep, but none leads into long cave systems. Fragments of abandoned phreatic trunk caves survive within the karst (Figure 1); many passages are more than 20 m high and wide, and are liberally decorated with secondary calcite deposits. Also notable among the many caves on the island (Fincham, 1997) are Jackson’s Bay Caves, with 3300 m of large and beautiful water passages beneath a dry region of low-lying, cactus-covered karst near the south coast.