eit; and its atmosphere is
perfectly uniform, dry, and of most extraordinary salubrity.

Our lamps being relighted, we soon reached a narrow passage faced on
the left side by a wall, built by the miners to confine the loose
stone thrown up in the course of their operations, when gradually
descending a short distance, we entered the great vestibule or
ante-chamber of the Cave. What do we now see? Midnight!--the
blackness of darkness!--Nothing! Where is the wall we were lately
elbowing out of the way? It has vanished!--It is lost! We are walled
in by darkness, and darkness canopies us above. Look again;--Swing
your torches aloft! Aye, now you can see it; far up, a hundred feet
above your head, a grey ceiling rolling dimly away like a cloud, and
heavy buttresses, bending under the weight, curling and toppling over
their base, begin to project their enormous masses from the shadowy
wall. How vast! How solemn! How awful! The little bells of the brain
are ringing in your ears; you hear nothing else--not even a sigh of
air--not even the echo of a drop of water falling from the roof. The
guide triumphs in your look of amazement and awe; he falls to work on
certain old wooden ruins, to you, yet invisible, and builds a brace or
two of fires, by the aid of which you begin to have a better
conception of the scene around you. You are in the vestibule or
ante-chamber, to which the spacious entrance of the Cave, and the
narrow passage that succeeds it, should be considered the mere
gate-way and covered approach. It is a basilica of an oval
figure--two-hundred feet in length by one-hundred and fifty wide, with
a roof which is as flat and level as if finished by the trowel of the
plasterer, of fifty or sixty or even more feet in height. Two
passages, each a hundred feet in width, open into it at its opposite
extremities, but at right angles to each other; and as they preserve a
straight course for five or six-hundred feet, with the same flat roof
common to each, the appearance to the eye, is that of a vast hall in
the shape of the letter L expanded at the angle, both branches being
five-hundred feet long by one-hundred wide. The passage to the right
hand is the "Great Bat Room;" (Audubon Avenue.) That in the front, the
beginning of the Grand Gallery, or the Main Cavern itself. The whole
of this prodigious space is covered by a single rock, in which the eye
can detect no break or interruption, save at its borders, where is a
broad, swee