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idge, my guide flung one of his Bengal lights far upward, in the midst of the slow-falling drops that had already carved out this tremendous well and were still making it larger. The light turned them for an instant into a shower of diamonds; then down it fell, down, down! As in its descent it passed the bridge on which we stood, the shadows of our two figures rushed up the opposite wall, like a pair of demons scared out of their abode by the hissing flame; and Nick, the guide, as he leaned over, looking downward after it,--every one of the innumerable wrinkles in his black face made more distinct, with his white beard and mustache, and the whites of his eyes seeming to glow in the blue elfish light,--was a caricature, half grotesque, almost terrible, of Satan himself. Minerva's Dome and Side-Saddle Pit, both being one place and formed by the same dripping water, correspond to Gorin's Dome and the pit beneath it; that part which has been hollowed out above the roof of the cave being called the dome, and the part below the floor of the cave the pit. The only difference between the two is that in the case of Gorin's Dome the dripping waters have bored their huge shaft on one side of the track of the cave, only just piercing the wall of it in one spot, to make the window through which it is viewed; while in the case of the Side-Saddle Pit the vertical shaft cuts directly across the track of the cave, or, to speak more correctly, across the tunnel which was once the bed of a subterranean river, but which is now a broad, smooth, dry path. The topography of this underground realm may be divided into three departments, as follows:-- First,--as being greatest in extent,--the "avenues," or tunnels, which present conclusive evidence of having once been the channels of a subterranean stream, whose waters, having some peculiar solvent property, wore their bed lower and lower in the rock, until they cut through into some lower opening, through which they were drawn off, leaving the old channels dry. Imagine one of the narrow, crooked streets in the old part of Boston, spanned by a continuous stone archway from the summits of the buildings on either hand; then close with solid masonry every window and loop-hole by which a ray of light could struggle in, and you have for proportions and sinuosity not a bad semblance of these tunnels, which constitute four fifths of the extent of the Mammoth Cave. The second and next largest de
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