“Magnesia, faugh!” exclaimed Mr. Waples, unconscious that he was in the presence of somebody.

“You don’t like Magnesia, then?” rejoined a large, spongy object on the floor, whose forehead perspired while he looked up through the chalky-white sockets of sightless eyes.  “Why, he’s a sixth part of all that’s drunk at the springs.  Here, I’ll call him up.  Come Magnesia! come Potash! come Lime, Soda, Lithia, and Baryta!  Come ye all to the presence of Prince Saturation.”

There glided to the Sponge’s feet a number of leather-looking beings, of broad, circular faces, and to every face a tail was appended on the other side.

“The gentleman don’t like our laboratory,” exclaimed the Sponge, purring the while like a cat.  “Apply your suckers to him, ye percolating angels, and draw him to the forests of Fernandes!”

Mr. Waples felt a hundred little wafers of suction take hold of his body, and a sense of great compression, as if he was being pulled through a mortar bed.  He opened his eyes on the summit of a stalagmite in a vast thicket or swamp of overthrown and decaying trees.  Birds of buried ages, whose long, bittern-like cries flopped wofully through the silence, made ever and anon a call to each other, like the Nemesis of century calling to century.  One of these birds, having authority and standing on one leg, observed to Mr. Waples, in a very philosophical manner: 

“Stranger, are you of the Fungi family?”

“No, Fernandes,” answered our bold adventurer; “I live nearer the phosphates when at home, and it’s a good article.”

A mournful chorus of croons from the loons went round the solitude.  “Phosphates! phew!  Phosphates! phew!”

“This apartment,” exclaimed the one-legged bird, “is exclusively for fungi of the old families.  Here we rot piecemeal and furnish gas to the nine-thousandth generation after us.  By our decay the springs are fed with bubbles.  Here is the world as it fell in the floral period, and our boughs are budding anew in the Eldorado of the waters above us.”

“Phosphates! phew!” shouted the great birds of this land of Lethe, as Mr. Waples’ stalagmite broke off and dropped him and set him astride of an ancient pterodactyl bird that flew off with its burden to an immense height, and swinging him there by the seat of his breeches, as if he were to be the pendulum of a fundamental and firmamental clock, the griffin-bird finally let go.  Mr. Waples was propelled at least six miles out of gravity, and tossed into a most deep and silent lake.  Nothing affected its loveliness but an oppressive shadow that came from above, and seemed to sink every floating object in the scarcely buoyant waves.  No shores were visible, but distant mountains on one side; nothing lived in the waters but meteoric lights and objects that ran as if on errands for the spirit above.  Broad, submissive, unevaporating, but sinking down; the great inland lonely pool was everywhere the creature of an invisible footprint.  Mr. Waples knew the power it obeyed to be that prostrate, cloud-like, overbrooding presence, far above, with outlines like a mountain range.  The silent sea was the water-trough of Apalachia, the western dyke of the deluge of Noah.  The oppressive spirit, stretching overhead, was Bellydown, or the thing that brooded over the waters of chaos, known to schoolmasters as Atmospheric Pressure.