being here dressed with the
thick foliage of the spruce-pine, and the harsh surface adorned with a
beautiful tracery of vines and creepers. At last is seen the entrance of
what appears to be a huge subterraneous cavern or grotto, into which the
stream disappears; a towering rock rising here about two hundred feet
above the surface of the stream, and a rude entrance gouged into it,
varying in width, as far as the eye can reach, from one hundred to one
hundred and fifty feet, and rising in a clear vault from seventy to
eighty feet above the floor. The view here terminates in the very
blackness of darkness; it is broken on the first curve of the tunnel.
The bed of the stream, from which the water has disappeared on account
of the drouth, the reduced currents sinking to lower subterranean
channels, is piled with great irregular rocks, on the sharp points of
which we stumble and cut our hands: there is no foothold but on rocks,
and it is only when we have struggled through the awful, cruel darkness,
holding up some feeble lights in it, and issued into the broad sunshine,
that we find we have travelled nearly two hundred yards (or say, more
exactly, five hundred feet) through one solid rock, in which there is
not an inch of soil, not a seam, not a cleft, and which, even beyond the
debouchure of the tunnel, yet runs away a hundred yards in a wall five
hundred feet high, as clean and whetted as the work of the mason.

But we must not anticipate this majestical scene, "wonderful beyond all
wondrous measure." Happily, in entering the tunnel from the western side
we have adopted the course of exploration which affords a gradual ascent
of the emotions, until at last they tower to the standard of a perfect
sublimity. The course of the tunnel may be described as a continuous
curve: it resembles, indeed, a prostrate S. For a distance of twenty
yards midway of this course we are excluded from a view of either
entrance, and the darkness is about that of a night with one quarter
of the moon. The vault becomes lower here--in some places scarcely
more than thirty feet high--and springs immediately from the floor.
The situation is awful and oppressive: the voice sounds unnatural,
and rumbles strangely and fearfully along the arch of stone. We are
encoffined in the solid rock: there is a strange pang in the beating
heart in its imprisonment, so _impenetrable_, black, hopeless, and we
hurry to meet the light of day. In that light we are disent