of man, because of its irregular and
contorted shape and course, which gave it the appearance of having been
blown bodily in the mountain by some frightful eruption of gas following
the line of the least resistance. All the caves hollowed by the ancients
of Kor, on the contrary, were cut out with the most perfect regularity
and symmetry. At the mouth of this cave Ayesha halted, and bade us light
the two lamps, which I did, giving one to her and keeping the other
myself. Then, taking the lead, she advanced down the cavern, picking her
way with great care, as indeed it was necessary to do, for the floor was
most irregular--strewn with boulders like the bed of a stream, and in
some places pitted with deep holes, in which it would have been easy to
break one's leg.

This cavern we pursued for twenty minutes or more, it being, so far as
I could form a judgment--owing to its numerous twists and turns no easy
task--about a quarter of a mile long.

At last, however, we halted at its farther end, and whilst I was still
trying to pierce the gloom a great gust of air came tearing down it, and
extinguished both the lamps.

Ayesha called to us, and we crept up to her, for she was a little in
front, and were rewarded with a view that was positively appalling in
its gloom and grandeur. Before us was a mighty chasm in the black rock,
jagged and torn and splintered through it in a far past age by some
awful convulsion of Nature, as though it had been cleft by stroke upon
stroke of the lightning. This chasm, which was bounded by a precipice on
the hither, and presumably, though we could not see it, on the farther
side also, may have measured any width across, but from its darkness I
do not think it can have been very broad. It was impossible to make out
much of its outline, or how far it ran, for the simple reason that the
point where we were standing was so far from the upper surface of the
cliff, at least fifteen hundred or two thousand feet, that only a very
dim light struggled down to us from above. The mouth of the cavern that
we had been following gave on to a most curious and tremendous spur
of rock, which jutted out in mid air into the gulf before us, for
a distance of some fifty yards, coming to a sharp point at its
termination, and resembling nothing that I can think of so much as the
spur upon the leg of a cock in shape. This huge spur was attached only
to the parent precipice at its base, which was, of course, enormous,
j