The door of the lower room was smashed, and one panel hung in splinters.  We entered that, and found a fair amount of rubbish:  sand and gravel that had been sifted in there by the mountain winds; straw, sticks, and stones; a table, a barrel; a plate-rack on the wall; two home-made bootjacks, signs of miners and their boots; and a pair of papers pinned on the boarding, headed respectively “Funnel No. 1,” and “Funnel No. 2,” but with the tails torn away.  The window, sashless of course, was choked with the green and sweetly smelling foliage of a bay; and through a chink in the floor, a spray of poison oak had shot up and was handsomely prospering in the interior.  It was my first care to cut away that poison oak, Fanny standing by at a respectful distance.  That was our first improvement by which we took possession.

The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank propped against the threshold, along which the intruder must foot it gingerly, clutching for support to sprays of poison oak, the proper product of the country.  Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier of beds, where miners had once lain; and the other gable was pierced by a sashless window and a doorless doorway opening on the air of heaven, five feet above the ground.  As for the third room, which entered squarely from the ground level, but higher up the hill and farther up the canyon, it contained only rubbish and the uprights for another triple tier of beds.

The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion-like, red rock.  Poison oak, sweet bay trees, calcanthus, brush, and chaparral, grew freely but sparsely all about it.  In front, in the strong sunshine, the platform lay overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labours of the mine might begin again to-morrow in the morning.

Following back into the canyon, among the mass of rotting plant and through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy staging, with a wry windless on the top; and clambering up, we could look into an open shaft, leading edgeways down into the bowels of the mountain, trickling with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams, whence I know not.  In that quiet place the still, far-away tinkle of the water-drops was loudly audible.  Close by, another shaft led edgeways up into the superincumbent shoulder of the hill.  It lay partly open; and sixty or a hundred feet above our head, we could see the strata propped apart by solid wooden wedges, and a pine, half undermined, precariously nodding on the verge.  Here also a rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned bowels of the rock.  This secure angle in the mountain’s flank was, even on this wild day, as still as my lady’s chamber.  But in the tunnel a cold, wet draught tempestuously blew.  Nor have I ever known that place otherwise than cold and windy.