244 RIVERBY 



in a dead faint. She had accidentally put out her 

 lamp, and was so appalled by the darkness that in- 

 stantly closed around her that she swooned at once. 

 Sometimes it seemed to me as if I were threading 

 the streets of some buried city of the fore-world. 

 With your little lantern in your hand, you follow 

 your guide through those endless and silent avenues, 

 catching glimpses on either hand of what appears to 

 be some strange antique architecture, the hoary and 

 crumbling walls rising high up into the darkness. 

 Now we turn a sharp corner, or turn down a street 

 which crosses our course at right angles; now we 

 come out into a great circle, or spacious court, which 

 the guide lights up with a quick- paper torch, or a 

 colored chemical light. There are streets above you 

 and streets below you. As this was a city where 

 day never entered, no provision for light needed to 

 be made, and it is built one layer above another to 

 the number of four or five, or on the plan of an 

 enormous ant-hill, the lowest avenues being several 

 hundred feet beneath the uppermost. The main 

 avenue leading in from the entrance is called the 

 Broadway, and if Broadway, New York, were arched 

 over and reduced to utter darkness and silence, and 

 its roadway blocked with mounds of earth and frag- 

 ments of rock, it would, perhaps, only lack that gray, 

 cosmic, elemental look, to make it resemble this. 

 A mile or so from the entrance we pass a couple of 

 rude stone houses, built forty or more years ago by 

 some consumptives, who hoped to prolong their lives 

 by a residence in this pure, antiseptic air. Five 



