Pandemonium 



that flashed phosphorically, like the foam before the prow of 

 a great ship plunging through a midnight sea ; only that the 

 thousand sparkles scattered from this black surge were as 

 large and bright as Venus in her perigee. 



It was their lustre which made the growing twilight of 

 the cavern, which I could now see arched vaster than before, 

 and made a larger, hollower echo to the roaring stream 

 below. At length, when I was beginning to feel weary and 

 my heart was sinking, I came to a hopeless breadth of chasm, 

 whose further verge rose perpendicular to the top of the 

 cavern. The light of the whirling gulf below showed me, 

 beneath its wall, an arch through which the tide was sucked 

 with a dreadful gurgling tumult. 



I could not pause. I cried. The end is come — now we 

 shall see what lies behind the veil. I did not fear — a mad- 

 ness possessed alike my heels and brain. I sprang — a 

 hissing plunge — a bubbling tumult of waters, and I felt 

 myself washed like a feather through this infernal mill-race, 

 expecting every moment (though with an unaccountable 

 complacency) to have my head split on some jutting rock. 



Before my breath was quite exhausted (for from habit I 

 had filled my lungs before plunging in), I was rolled out 

 into the bosom of a broad, calm river, where I could swim 

 at leisure. It was twilight still ; but I was now beneath a 

 broad, calm, starlit heaven — but it was not the same heaven, 

 nor the stars I knew. It seemed as vast, but not trans- 

 parent — a solid dome, in which greater stars were swung 

 like lamps, for their beams were reflected as it were on a 

 polished vault of lapis lazuli. 



This great vault's rim, like that of an inverted bowl, 

 seemed to rest on the brow of that lofty mountain- barrier, 

 beneath whose precipitous wall the placid river wound, and 

 from whose base spouted — through a round aperture, like a 



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