the time.  Through this opening I saw into another room, large and magnificent.  It brought to mind the White City.  It was snowy white, and thickly studded with stalactites and stalagmites of immense size and in great numbers; some looking like spires of numerous churches, and many connected as with a lattice-work about the bottom.  For a short time I gazed on that lovely scene, and examined the chances to reach it, but a great gulf intervened that we had no means of spanning, and I called to the men to lower me down.  Approaching the bottom one of the walls trended in towards me and I stepped upon solid ground close to the wall, which half way up seemed fifty feet away.  The opening above now looked like a small pale moon, and the next man who came dangling down to join us looked no bigger than a toy soldier.  Gradually our eyes became accustomed to the twilight, and by the time our party was increased to six men, I could see quite distinctly.

“The room runs directly into the mountain and is about ninety feet high, and where we landed it proved to be twenty feet wide.  It extended in both directions, but much the farthest towards the right hand.  The outer room is encrusted in fine white water formations.  It forms a Gothic ceiling from which hang pendant at all places brilliant and sparkling stalactites; some being of immense size and length, from ten to twenty-five feet.  Others are not so large but are brilliant.  We created a flood of artificial light with dozens of candles and lamps; and then and not until then, could we see the slope and contour of the roof.  A few bats were flitting about, disturbed for the first time.  To the left, a vast white pillar extended from floor to roof.  It was pure white and about five feet in diameter all the way up.  It was fluted, fretted, draped and spangled.  I never in my life saw anything more chaste and lovely.  I thought of the countless ages it must have taken to form that monument:  of the streams of clear water that had fallen and left their calcite deposits, while it grew year after year, age after age, century after century, in this profound darkness, disturbed by no noises save the rhythmic sound of the falling drops and the dull flitting of the bats, who alone were the living witnesses of its construction.  To the rear of this great pillar the room is divided into three galleries, one above another.  With great difficulty and much danger we climbed into each of these.  The floors were all like the pillar of pure white onyx, and extended back a distance of thirty or more feet.  The floor of one formed the roof of another.  They were brilliant with hanging pendants and the side walls were all veneered with the same white and crystalline formation.  To entirely describe them is impossible.  A day in each would still leave the observer short of words in which to tell of the wonders.

“Turning towards the right hand from the entrance we advance two hundred feet