“I looked up, trying in vain to find the ceiling or the walls.  All was darkness.  In about an hour we saw more clearly.  The chambers are, many of them, elliptical in shape; the ceiling is of mixed dark and white color, and looks much like the sky on a cloudy moonlight evening.

“A friend of ours, who has been much in the cave, says, ’If the top were lifted off, and the whole were exposed to view, no woman would ever enter it again.’

“We clambered over heaps of rocks, we descended ladders, wound through narrow passages, passed along chambers so low that we crouched for the whole length, entered upon lofty halls, ascended ladders, and crossed a bridge over a yawning abyss.

“Every nightmare scene that I had ever dreamed of seemed to be realized.  I shuddered several times, and was obliged to reason with myself to assure me of safety.  Occasionally we sat down and rested upon some flat rock.

“Miss S., who has a great taste for costuming, wound her plaid shawl about her shoulders, turbaned her head with a green veil, swung her lamp upon a stick which she rested upon her shoulder, and then threw herself upon a rock in a most picturesque attitude.  The guide took a lower seat, and his dirty tin cup, swung across his breast, looked like an ornament as the light struck it; his swarthy face was bright, and I wondered what our friends at home would give for a picture.

“One of these elliptical halls has its ceiling immensely far off, and of the deepest black, until our feeble little lights strike upon innumerable points, when it shines forth like a dark starlight night.  The stars are faint, but they look so exceedingly like the heavens that one easily forgets that it is not reality.

“The guide asked us to be seated, while he went behind down a descent with the lights, to show us the creeping over of the shadows of the rocks, as if a dark cloud passed over the starlit vault.  The black cloud crept on and on as the guide descended, until a fear came over us, and we cried out together to him to come back, not to leave us in total darkness.  He begged that he might go still lower and show us entire darkness, but we would not permit it.

“Guin’s Dome.  What the name means I can’t say.  The guide tells you to pause in your scrambling over loose stones and muddy soil,—­which you are always willing to do,—­and to put your head through a circular aperture, and to look up while he lights the Bengal light; you obey, and look up upon columns of fluted, snowy whiteness; he tells you to look down, and you follow the same pillars down—­up to heights which the light cannot climb, down to depths on which it cannot fall.

“You shudder as you look up, and you shudder as you look down.  Indeed, the march of the cave is a series of shudders.  Geologists may enjoy it, a large party may be merry in it; but if the ‘underground railroad’ of the slaves is of that kind, I should rather remain a slave than undertake a runaway trip!