s clothes,
and bite furiously at any attempt to dislodge them.

Still farther on there is a vast vault, upward of eighty feet high,
formed of gypsum with some sort of crystals embedded in it. When you sit
and gaze on it for some time, by the dim light of the lamps, the vault
seems to recede into azure space. A bright sparkling veil hangs over it
like the milky way, seen dimly between the shelving rocks, which bulge
out in round soft layers, of a whitish-gray cast, and look exactly like
petrified clouds. By a judicious movement of the light of the lamps a
most beautiful phenomenon of cloud-scenery is effected, and by their
gradual extinction a Stygian darkness seems to wrap all in perfect
horror. This, the "Star Chamber," is one of the finest effects in the
Mammoth Cave, and it might be enhanced to the wildest magnificence by an
artistic arrangement of variously colored lights. The cave would be a
fine place in which to read Dante's Inferno.

Here and there through the cave there are immense pits or chasms, only
some few yards in circumference, but from two to three hundred feet in
depth. A piece of paper saturated in oil is thrown down and displays the
fearful gulf, the bottom of which appears to have the same formation of
rock and clay as the top. Sometimes we ascended ten or twenty feet by
ladders and occasionally descended. We traversed about a mile of passage
where the ceiling, six feet high, was as smooth and white as plaster
could have made it. It was literally covered with the names of former
visitors. In some places there were hundreds of cards on the floor, left
by guests,--so it is not only English people who have a mania for
inscribing their names. Indeed, as to that, it is common to most
nations, for I had a secretary named Van Kenkle, who wrote his name upon
every article belonging to me.

For eight or nine miles we continued to traverse passages and chambers,
sometimes over rough pieces of rock, sometimes through the thick dust of
ages, sometimes through the tortuous gorges,--mere slits between the
rocks through which we had to creep,--sometimes coming upon a well or
spring of sweet water. At about three or four miles from the mouth we
came to the chamber called "The Church," from its resemblance to the
ancient cathedral vault, frequently to be seen on the European continent
under churches or monasteries, and called the crypt.

This church of the Mammoth Cave is a singular phenomenon. The roof,
which i