Once down the first and longest flight of stairs, without any signs of a Dore dragon raising its huge body by heavy claws to a resting place among the rocks, awe divides more evenly with admiration; and being already well besmeared with mud, we climbed over the clay-covered bowlders and crawled through narrow holes with perfect satisfaction, enjoying each novel scene to the utmost.

Off from the Dore Gallery is a small chamber containing the Fountain of Youth, that must be seen, but the way, like that of the transgressor, is hard.  Arrived at the entrance we hesitated a moment, for although getting in looked possible, the way out again seemed not so simple; but finally trusting to Providence, through the direct agency of our careful guardians, of course, we sat down on the edge of the large slippery bowlder on which we stood, and reaching out caught a projection of the wall on one side and a bowlder crag on the other, swung off and dropped into the soft mud below.  This chamber proved to be a little gem; small but high, and beautifully adorned with calcite crystal.  Down a wall of red onyx on one side clear water flows into a basin in the irregular, rocky floor, just behind the bowlder we had used for a hand-rest at the entrance; the perfectly transparent water in the basin appears to be only a few inches deep, but measures three feet, and is several degrees colder than the air, which in this portion of the cave is warm.  The other wall of this room is an almost perpendicular bank of the soft dark red clay, in which small selenite crystals are sprouting like plants in a garden.

Suddenly we heard a heavy, rolling noise like distant thunder, and asking if it were possible to hear a thunder storm so far below the surface, were told it was the protest of angry bats against a further advance on the quarters to which they have retreated from the main body of the cave, and their orders were obeyed:  so of what may be in that direction, we gained no positive knowledge besides bats, and the fact that, small as they are, their great numbers make them dangerous when angry.  Returning to the gallery and continuing the journey down over slippery rock and slender ladders we came at length to the bottom of the Gulf of Doom, into which we had looked from the room now high above us; and we needed no stimulating help to the imagination to pronounce it a fit termination to an artist’s troubled dream.

[Illustration:  The Waterfall.  Page 41.]

Then climbing over an assortment of bowlders of all sizes, going up a little, and swinging or sliding down, we came to a point in the narrow passage where the floor is a flat slab, like a large paving stone, tilted up at a steep angle against one wall and not reaching the other by about fifteen inches, with darkness of unknown depth below:  about three feet above this opening the wall projects in a narrow, shelving ledge, and everything is covered with a thin coating of slippery wet clay.  The only way to cross that