he most powerful Bengal Lights illuminate it very imperfectly. That
portion of the ceiling which becomes visible, is three hundred feet
above your head, and remarkably resembles the aisles of Westminster
Abbey. It is supposed that the top of this dome is near the surface of
the ground. Another route from the Devil's Council Chamber conducts you
to a smooth, level path, called Pensacola Avenue. Here are numerous
formations of crystallized gypsum, but not as beautiful or as various as
are found farther on. From various slopes and openings, caves above and
below are visible. The Mecca's shrine of this pilgrimage is Angelica's
Grotto, completely lined and covered with the largest and richest dog's
tooth spar. A person who visited the place, a few years since, laid his
sacrilegious hands upon it, while the guide's back was turned towards
whim. He coolly demolished a magnificent mass of spar, sparkling most
conspicuously on the very centre of the arch, and wrote his own
insignificant name in its place. This was _his_ fashion of securing
immortality! It is well that fairies and giants are powerless in the
nineteenth century, else had the indignant genii of the cave crushed his
bones to impalpable powder.

[Illustration: THE BOTTOMLESS PIT.]

If you pass behind Satan's Throne, by a narrow ascending path, you come
into a vast hall where there is nothing but naked rock. This empty
dreary place is appropriately called the Deserted Chamber. Walking along
the verge, you arrive at another avenue, inclosing sulphur springs. Here
the guide warns you of the vicinity of a pit, one hundred and twenty
feet deep, in the shape of a saddle. Stooping over it, and looking
upward, you see an abyss of precisely the same shape over head; a fact
which indicates that it began in the upper region, and was merely
interrupted by this chamber.

From this, you may enter a narrow and very tortuous path, called the
Labyrinth, which leads to an immense split, or chasm, in the rocks. Here
is placed a ladder, down which you descend twenty-five or thirty feet,
and enter a narrow cave below, which brings you to a combination of rock
called the Gothic Window. You stand in this recess, while the guided
ascends huge cliffs overhead, and kindles Bengal Lights, by the help of
which you see, two hundred feet above you, a Gothic dome of one solid
rock, perfectly overawing in its vastness and height. Below, is an abyss
of darkness, which no eye but the Eternal can fa