It seemed at this point that Mr. Waples shrank away down to the ground, and the Great Dipper loomed up high as the mountain of High Rock.  His drinking glasses were as large as Mr. Waples’ body; he was a mighty giant, clad in colors like those of the overflowing mountain.

“Old chap,” cried Mr. Waples, “methinks your clothing up there is of much age and tarnish.  Tell me its material?”

A voice came down the long ravines of the mountain like rolling thunder.  “It’s calcareous tufa I’m a-wearing, wove on me by exudation and accretion in the past two thousand years.”

At this point the head of the Great Dipper was quite invisible in the clouds, but the tray of glasses he carried, which were now big as barrels or full-sized casks, was set down on Mr. Waples’ toe.  As he sought to get out of the way a torrent of water washed him up and away, and he was spilled into one of the glasses; and then, as it appeared, he was raised an inconceivable distance in the air and plunged down like a bursted balloon from the sky to the sea, and he found himself immersed in mineral water and rapidly descending, against the current, toward the centre of the earth!

Before Mr. Waples could get his breath he was landed in a bar or shoal of mineral salt, which came nearly to the surface of the torrent in which he found himself, and the current of this torrent was ascending toward the surface, as full of mineral substances as a freshet is full of saw-logs.  Explosions of gas, loud and rapid as the guns in a naval battle, took place on every side.  The walls of the inclosure made a large and almost regular cave or tunnel of blue marl, and in the contrary way from the course of the stream.  Mr. Waples sank along the sides of the cave in the swash or backflow, until he arrived at a grand archway of limestone, riven from a mass of slate.  A voice from the roof of the archway, whispering like a sigh of pain, articulated shrilly,

“Who goes back?”

Waples discerned, in the joint or junction of the arch a huge deformed object, whose hands were caught between the masses of stone, and he still desperately pulled to divide them, so that the torrent could escape through.  The eyes of this object rolled in pain, but he gave no sign of relinquishing his hold, and again the painful whisper skipped through the abyss, “Who goes back from the alluvial?” Mr. Waples got a breathful of air from an explosion of bubbles, and boldly replied, “The Great Dipper’s assistant.”

“Tell him,” whispered the hunchback in the roof, “that Priam, the Fault Finder, is holding the strata back, but wants the relief to come on three centuries hence, that I may spit upon my hands.”

Mr. Waples had no time to reply, for a large bubble of carbonic acid gas burst at that moment, and blew him through the gap or “fault” of the rock, into the coldest and clammiest cavern he had ever trodden.  From every part of the walls, ceilings, and floor exuded moisture, which flowed off in rills and large canals, until they formed the torrent that disappeared at the Fault Finder’s Archway.