ombed: we
cast off the confinements of the black space through which we have
passed, and we are instantly introduced to a scene so luminous and
majestic that in a moment our trembling eyes are captivated and our
hearts lifted in unutterable worship of the Creator's works.

It is that sheer wall of rock which we have already mentioned, where the
arch and other side of the tunnel break away into the mountain slope; a
high wall, slightly impending; an amphitheatre, extending one hundred
yards, of awful precipices; a clean battlement, without a joint in it,
five hundred feet high. And this splendid height and breadth of stone,
that a thousand storms have polished, leaving not a cleft of soil in
it,--this huge, unjointed masonry raised against the sky, gray and
weather-stained, with glittering patches of light on it,--is yet part of
the same huge rock which towered at the farther end of the tunnel, and
through whose seamless cavity we have travelled two hundred yards. It is
in this view that the mystery of the scene seizes the mind, and the last
element of sublimity is added to it. It is in this view that the Natural
Tunnel we had come to see as a mere "curiosity" takes rank among the
greatest wonders of the world. What power, what possible imaginable
agency of nature, could have worked out this stupendous scene?...

Turning our eyes away from the battlement of rock to the opposite side
of the ravine, a new revelation of the grand and picturesque awaits us.
Here a gigantic cliff, but one broken with rock and soil, and threaded
to its summit by a sapling growth of the buckeye, the linden, and the
pine, rises almost perpendicularly from the water's edge to a height
almost equal to that of the opposite wall of rock. A natural platform
is seen to project over it, and yet a few yards farther there is an
insulated cliff, a cyclopean _chimney_, so to speak, scarcely more than
a foot square at its top, rising in the form of a turret at least sixty
feet above its basement, which is a portion of the imposing cliff we
have mentioned. It is at once perceived that here are two points of view
that will give us new and perhaps the most imposing aspects of the
scene. To attain these points, however, it is necessary to make a
circuit of half a mile; and the sinking sun admonishes us to defer this
new interest of the scene until to-morrow....

We remounted for the tunnel in the early morning, and were soon to find
that the rising sun was to