90 IN AND OUT OF ITHACA. 



layers of harder rock make an excellent flooring for the 

 pathway. A short distance within the defile in the cliff 

 on the right, is a small chamber curiously hollowed out 

 by nature to resemble a huge old-fashioned square fire- 

 place, capable of concealing a half dozen people within 

 its cavernous recess. The water twelve feet below you 

 rippling over the low ledges makes a number of pretty 

 little cascades, whirls around eddying pools in the 

 curious pot-holes, and at last enters a wonderful flume, 

 long, deep, straight and smooth, not more than twenty 

 inches in width, down which it shoots with arrow swift- 

 ness. Twenty feet above this strange channel a bridge 

 spans the gorge, and for the remainder of the distance 

 the path follows the left margin of the stream. A sharp 

 turn and a steep descent bring you into a great basin 

 in whose bottom has been hollowed a mammoth pot- 

 hole, the Bath-tub of L,ucifer, to which the boiling water 

 is brought by the conduit above mentioned. The walls 

 of this amphitheatre are fissured, and partly covered by 

 scanty bushes and stunted trees. 



Another turn and another descent bring you to the 

 brink of a noble flight of rocky stairs down whose ledges 

 the water tumbles in a mass of frothy whiteness into a 

 second grand chamber. The level floor of this vast 

 room is one great sheet of rock, surrounded by vertical 

 walls towering sublimely a hundred feet. This square 

 saloon was thought by some imaginative person to be 

 worthy of the uses of His Satanic Majesty and was ac- 

 cordingly named "Lucifer's Kitchen." 



From this Mephistophelian bake house follow the 

 narrow path around the base of a majestic promontory 



