the main body
of the cave, and their orders were obeyed: so of what may be in that
direction, we gained no positive knowledge besides bats, and the fact
that, small as they are, their great numbers make them dangerous when
angry. Returning to the gallery and continuing the journey down over
slippery rock and slender ladders we came at length to the bottom of the
Gulf of Doom, into which we had looked from the room now high above us;
and we needed no stimulating help to the imagination to pronounce it a
fit termination to an artist's troubled dream.

[Illustration: The Waterfall. Page 41.]

Then climbing over an assortment of bowlders of all sizes, going up a
little, and swinging or sliding down, we came to a point in the narrow
passage where the floor is a flat slab, like a large paving stone,
tilted up at a steep angle against one wall and not reaching the other
by about fifteen inches, with darkness of unknown depth below: about
three feet above this opening the wall projects in a narrow, shelving
ledge, and everything is covered with a thin coating of slippery wet
clay. The only way to cross that uninviting bridge is to brace the feet
against the slab, and leaning on the ledge, slowly work across. A little
more rough work and the descent of the two short ladders, brought us, at
last, under the beautiful Waterfall, where we stood as in a heavy shower
of rain at the lowest point yet reached in the cave, which according to
the survey of Mr. Prince is four hundred feet below the surface. The
falling water has ornamented the walls, which in this portion of the
cave expose over two hundred feet of Magnesian Limestone, with unique
forms of dripstone; and the steeply sloping floor has received the
over-charge of calcium carbonate until it has become a shining mass of
onyx, retaining pools of cold, transparent water in the depressions. In
the lowest corner there is only mud, and above it rises, to a height of
at least fifteen feet a bank of miry, yellow clay, at the top of which a
hole in the wall is the only known entrance to Blondy's Throne.

[Illustration: Longitudinal and Cross-Sections of Passages in Marble
Cave, Stone Co., Missouri.

Plotted by Fred Prince, 1894.]

CHAPTER III.

MARBLE CAVE CONTINUED.

On account of the long "crawl" through mud and cold water, it was at
first suggested and then strongly advised, that we should not undertake
to make the trip to Blondy's Throne: and yearning to see what is