The sounds grow nearer; presently our guide disappears; then I behold the Colonel, in whose steps I follow, faithful as his shadow, crouch sidewise:  we must pass behind this inclined plane, which rests on roughly hewn rocks, that protrude till it appears impossible that any living thing, except a lizard, can find a passage.  I am sure we must shrink from the original rotundity with which Nature blessed us.  I feel as the frog in the fable might have felt, if, after successfully inflating himself to the much-envied dimensions of the ox, he had suddenly found himself reduced to his proper proportions.  Edging sidewise, accommodating the inequalities of the damp surfaces to the undulations of our forms, deafened, crazed by the roar of the caldrons that dash madly from side to side, we fairly ooze through.

More ladders!  This time they are not hung quite perpendicularly, are shorter, and some lean, a little, which affords rest; others have one side higher than the other:  to these my already aching palms cling with desperation.  So have I seen insects adhere, through sheer force of fear, to a shaken stem, or a perilous branch beaten by a storm-wind.

The voices of my companions come to me from above, though I cannot see the soles of Mon Amie’s friendly feet, which at first preserved an amiable companionship with my own hands; but, looking far upward, I behold a tiny, star-like spark.  When I was a child, I used to think that fire-flies were the crowns of the fairies, which shone despite their wearers’ invisibility:  this idea was recalled to me.

Hark! booming from unthought-of depths, a roar rolls up in majestic waves of echoing thunder.  At this resonant burst, I tremble,—­I think a prayer.

“They are blasting below us,” cries the Colonel, de profundis.

Then up rushes a volume of thick, white smoke, and we are enveloped as in shrouds.  I have no more fear,—­but the odor, ah! that sulphureous, sickening, deathly odor!  Faintness seizes me,—­the ladder swims before my eyes,—­I am paralyzed,—­Death has me, I think!

But the very excess of the danger has in it something of reviving power.  I remember, that, just as I left my room,—­whose quiet safety never before appeared so heavenly,—­prompted by some instinctive impulse, I had placed a small vial of ammonia in the breast-pocket of my coat.

I have wellnigh swooned with ecstasy, as I have inhaled the overcoming odors of some rare bouquet, love-bestowed and prized beyond gems; my senses have reeled in the intoxication of those wondrous extracts whose Oriental, tangible richness of fragrance holds me in a spell almost mystical in its enthralment; but I dare aver that no blossom’s breath, no pungent perfume distilled by the erudite inspiration of Science, ever possessed a tithe of the delicious agony of that whiff of unromantic ammonia, which, powerful as the touch of magic, and thrilling as the kiss of love, snatched me back to life, arrested my tottering senses, as they blindly staggered on the very brink of certain death.