ccount of the Creation? The
Winding Way is one hundred and five feet long, eighteen inches wide,
and from three to seven feet deep, widening out above, sufficiently to
admit the free use of one's arms. It is throughout tortuous, a perfect
_zig-zag_, the terror of the Falstaffs and the ladies of "fat, fair
and forty," who have an instinctive dread of the trials to come, and
are well aware of the merriment that their efforts to _force a
passage_ will excite among their companions of less length of girdle.
Into this winding way, we entered in Indian file, and turning our
right side, then our left, twisting this way, then that, had nearly
made good the passage, when our _fat friend_, who was puffing and
blowing behind us like a high pressure engine, cried out, "Halt, ahead
there! I am stuck as tight as a wedge in a log!" Halt we did, when the
guide, looking at our friend, who was in truth "wedg'd in the rocky
way and sticking fast," cried out, "I told you, when you said at the
Pine Apple Bush, that you felt _especially happy_, to wait till you
got to the Winding Way, to see how you would feel then!" The
imprisoned gentleman soon burst his bonds, not, however, without
damage to his indispensables; and at length forcing his way into
Relief Hall, he cried out, in the joy of his heart, while stretching
himself and wiping the perspiration from his jolly, rubicund face,
"never was a name more appropriate given to any place--Relief. I feel
already the _expansive faculty_ of the atmosphere, I can now breathe
again."

Relief Hall, which you enter from the Winding Way, at a right-angle,
is very wide and lofty but not long; turning to the right, we reached
its termination at River Hall, a distance of perhaps, one hundred
yards. Here two routes present themselves; the one to the left
conducts to the Dead Sea and the Rivers, and that to the right, to the
Bacon Chamber, the Bandit's Hall, the Mammoth Dome and an infinity of
other caves, domes, etc. We will speak of the Bacon Chamber; but
before doing so, let us take our lunch. The air or exercise, or
probably both, acted as powerful appetizers, and we soon gave proof
that we needed not Stoughton's bitters to provoke an appetite. Having
discussed a few glasses of excellent Hock, we left the Bacon Chamber,
which is a pretty fair representation of a low ceiling, thickly hung
with canvassed hams and shoulders; and proceeded to the Bandit's Hall,
up a steep ascent of twenty or thirty feet, r