We must climb up and down some more ladders now, and then we will reach the “Mammoth Dome.”  This is a vast room—­big enough for a gymnasium for giants—­and the roof is so high that no ordinary light will show it.  It is nearly four hundred feet from the floor.  The next room we visit is one of the most beautiful places in the whole cave.  It is called the Starry Chamber.  The roof and walls and floor are covered with little bright bits of stone, which shine and glitter, when a light is brought into the room, like real stars in the sky.  If the guide is used to his business, he can here produce most beautiful effects.  By concealing his lantern behind a rock or pillar, and then gradually bringing it out, throwing more and more light upon the roof, he can create a most lovely star-light scene.

[Illustration]

At first all will be dark, and then a few stars will twinkle out, and then there will be more of them, and each one will be brighter, and at last you will think you are looking up into a dark sky full of glorious shining stars!  And if you look at the walls you will see thousands of stars that seem as if they were dropping from the sky; and if you cast your eyes upon the ground, you will see it covered with other thousands of stars that seem to have already fallen!

This is a lovely place, but we cannot stay here any longer.  We want to reach the underground stream of which we have heard so much—­the “River Styx.”

This is a regular river, running through a great part of the Mammoth Cave.  You may float on it in a boat, and, if you choose, you may fish in it, although you would not be likely to catch anything.  But if you did, the fish would have no eyes!  All the fish in this river are blind.  You can easily perceive that eyes would be of no use in a place where it is always as dark as pitch, except when travellers come along with their lanterns.

There is a rough boat here, and we will get into it and have a row over this dark and gloomy river.  Whenever our guide shouts we hear the wildest kind of echoes, and everything seems solemn and unearthly.  At one time our boat stops for a moment, and the guide goes on shore, and directly we hear the most awful crash imaginable.  It sounds as if a dozen gong-factories had blown up at once, and we nearly jump out of the boat!  But we soon see that it was nothing but the guide striking on a piece of sheet-iron or tin.  The echoes, one after another, from this noise had produced the horrible crashing sounds we had heard.

After sailing along for about half an hour we land, and soon reach an avenue which has its walls ornamented with beautiful flowers—­all formed on the rocky walls by the hand of Nature.