Proceeding on the journey the next chamber is the A.O.U.W.  Hall, a large, irregular room, by the rise of which a return to the seventh level is accomplished; and the next entered is the Tabernacle, not at all resembling the last, although a similar description would be correct.

Now is reached what many consider the cave’s greatest charm, The Pearly Gates.  And marvelously beautiful it certainly is.

Approaching by a slightly lower level, we see a gateway opening between large rocks that light up with the soft lustre and varied tints of mammoth pearls.  A wonderful effect is produced by the white calcite crystal spread in unequal thickness over the dark surface of the encrusted rocks.  Just without the gate is a short but not golden stairway leading to it, and immediately within is the Saint’s Rest, a chamber of moderate size beautified by another great rock on which are combined the warm, pearly glow of calcite and the cold glitter of frost by the later addition of lime carbonate vapor-crystals to the calcium carbonate aragonite.

Next beyond is the chamber containing the Standing Rock behind which Mr. Johnstone made his famous discovery of the concealed pin-head.  It is an immense great fallen rock on whose dark surface are scattered transparent flake-like crystals of satin spar, resembling the congealed drops of a summer shower.  The mind-reader entered the chamber by the way we shall leave it.

Returning to the spot from which the Pearly Gates were first viewed, we stand facing the most beautiful of this imposing group of brilliant scenes, The Mermaid’s Resort.  This is a small cove with wave marks in the white beach sand, above which rises a projecting, sheltering cliff as purely white as freshly fallen snow, with a fine deposit of frost work in thick moss-like patterns two and three inches deep.

This crystalline mass, so white and fragile, has to perfection the appearance of hoar-frost about a steam-vent in extremely cold weather, and was, no doubt, formed in a somewhat similar manner.  It is crystallized carbonate of lime, and could have been deposited in such extremely delicate forms only by the heavily charged vapors rising from hot water.  No one needs to be told that hot water will take and hold in solution a much larger quantity of solid matter than is possible to cold water, with all other conditions the same; nor is it news that a portion of the solid substance is carried off in the rising steam.  Now the geyser cones, so recently visited on the next lower level, prove both the heat of the water and its heavy charge of solids, which gave it a far more intense heat than pure water could have equaled, and this in turn drove the steam to greater distances than otherwise it would have reached.  When cooled to such a point as to be reduced to a light vapor, its movement was checked by various walls, projections, and ceiling as were in its upward path, and these received the minute particles of burden, while the somewhat brisk motion of the atmosphere, occasioned at these points by the mixing of that of higher temperature from below with the lower from above, is responsible for the dainty and varied forms assumed by the fragile structure.