of
course, gave but feeble light; we barely saw at first where our feet
must step.

"I looked up, trying in vain to find the ceiling or the walls. All was
darkness. In about an hour we saw more clearly. The chambers are, many
of them, elliptical in shape; the ceiling is of mixed dark and white
color, and looks much like the sky on a cloudy moonlight evening.

"A friend of ours, who has been much in the cave, says, 'If the top were
lifted off, and the whole were exposed to view, no woman would ever
enter it again.'

"We clambered over heaps of rocks, we descended ladders, wound through
narrow passages, passed along chambers so low that we crouched for the
whole length, entered upon lofty halls, ascended ladders, and crossed a
bridge over a yawning abyss.

"Every nightmare scene that I had ever dreamed of seemed to be realized.
I shuddered several times, and was obliged to reason with myself to
assure me of safety. Occasionally we sat down and rested upon some flat
rock.

"Miss S., who has a great taste for costuming, wound her plaid shawl
about her shoulders, turbaned her head with a green veil, swung her lamp
upon a stick which she rested upon her shoulder, and then threw herself
upon a rock in a most picturesque attitude. The guide took a lower seat,
and his dirty tin cup, swung across his breast, looked like an ornament
as the light struck it; his swarthy face was bright, and I wondered what
our friends at home would give for a picture.

"One of these elliptical halls has its ceiling immensely far off, and of
the deepest black, until our feeble little lights strike upon
innumerable points, when it shines forth like a dark starlight night.
The stars are faint, but they look so exceedingly like the heavens that
one easily forgets that it is not reality.

"The guide asked us to be seated, while he went behind down a descent
with the lights, to show us the creeping over of the shadows of the
rocks, as if a dark cloud passed over the starlit vault. The black cloud
crept on and on as the guide descended, until a fear came over us, and
we cried out together to him to come back, not to leave us in total
darkness. He begged that he might go still lower and show us entire
darkness, but we would not permit it.

"Guin's Dome. What the name means I can't say. The guide tells you to
pause in your scrambling over loose stones and muddy soil,--which you
are always willing to do,--and to put your head through a circular
ape