the darkness, and from my breast it descended, perpendicular as
a plummet line, until it vanished in the gulf below, from which arose a
sound of dripping water. This, my guide informed me, was "Gorin's Dome."
Taking then from his haversack a Bengal light, he ignited it and threw
it into the dark void. The sulphurous light shot up and up into a dome
unlike anything built by human hands, unless it might be the interior of
some tremendous tower, eighty feet in width, and nearly two hundred in
height, which the beholder viewed from without, looking inwards through
a window placed at two thirds of the entire height from the bottom.

The inaccessible floor of this place is nearly level, and the walls
strictly perpendicular from base to summit; the whole cavern having been
hollowed out by the constant dripping of water holding carbonic acid in
solution, which cuts the rock as ordinary water channels the ice of a
glacier or the mural face of an iceberg into a semblance of columns, and
sometimes into the folds of an immense curtain.

The brief light fell upon the distant floor; flashed up once, bringing
into strong relief every salient angle in the wonderful walls, and then
died out; the awful prospect vanishing like a nightmare vision, and
leaving nothing to the sense but the sound of the water dripping into
the depths below. The light had burned only half a minute; but so
strange was the scene, that this glimpse sufficed to photograph it
indelibly in my memory.

Gorin's Dome is not the largest of this class of sub-cavities in the
cave, being smaller than Mammoth Dome; but it is the first of its class
that the tourist sees, and it is viewed from so singular a stand-point
that it makes the most startling impression.

Five minutes' farther walk brought us to a wooden footbridge,--a narrow,
shaky contrivance, with a treacherous footing and a slender hand-rail.
Here the bottom of the cave seemed to have dropped out, and the roof to
have gone in search of it; and but for the dim glimpse of the rock on
the other side one might have suspected that this bridge would launch
him into that ungeographical locality called, in the old Norse
mythology, "Ginnunga Gap,"--a place where there was neither side, edge,
nor bottom to anything.

The vault overhead is called "Minerva's Dome"; the gulf below is called
the "Side-Saddle Pit," though I failed to discover any degree of
appropriateness in the odd name.

Standing in the middle of the br