progression,
till you arrive at the end. From the Church you pass into what is called
the Gothic Gallery, from its obvious resemblance to that style of
architecture. Here is Mummy Hall; so called because several mummies have
been found seated in recesses of the rock. Without any process of
embalming, they were in as perfect a state of preservation, as the
mummies of Egypt; for the air of the cave is so dry and unchangeable,
and so strongly impregnated with nitre, that decomposition cannot take
place. A mummy found here in 1813, was the body of a woman five feet ten
inches high, wrapped in half-dressed deer skins, on which were rudely
drawn white veins and leaves. At the feet, lay a pair of moccasons, and
a handsome knapsack, made of bark: containing strings of small shining
seeds; necklaces of bears' teeth, eagles' claws, and fawns' red hoofs;
whistles made of cane; two rattlesnakes' skins, one having on it
fourteen rattles; coronets for the head, made of erect feathers of rooks
and eagles; smooth needles of horn and bone, some of them crooked like
sail-needles; deers' sinews, for sewing, and a parcel of three-corded
thread, resembling twine. I believe one of these mummies is now in the
British Museum. From Mummy Hall you pass into Gothic Avenue, where the
resemblance to Gothic architecture very perceptibly increases. The wall
juts out in pointed arches, and pillars, on the sides of which are
various grotesque combinations of rock. One is an elephant's head. The
tusks and sleepy eyes are quite perfect; the trunk, at first very
distinct, gradually recedes, and is lost in the rock. On another pillar
is a lion's head; on another, a human head with a wig, called Lord
Lyndhurst, from its resemblance to that dignitary.

From this gallery you can step into a side cave, in which is an immense
pit, called the Lover's Leap. A huge rock, fourteen or fifteen feet
long, like an elongated sugar-loaf running to a sharp point, projects
half way over this abyss. It makes one shudder to see the guide walk
almost to the end of this projectile bridge, over such an awful chasm.
As you pass along, the Gothic Avenue narrows, until you come to a porch
composed of the first separate columns in the cave. The stalactite and
stalagmite formations unite in these irregular masses of brownish
yellow, which, when the light shines through them, look like transparent
amber. They are sonorous as a clear-toned bell. A pendent mass, called
the Bell, has b