IN MAMMOTH CAVE 245 



the 'ground in a dead faint. She had acciden- 

 tally put out her lamp, and was so appalled by 

 the darkness that instantly closed around her 

 that she swooned at once. 



Sometimes it seemed to me as if I was 

 threading the streets of some buried city of the 

 fore-world. With your little lantern in your 

 hand, you follow your guide through those end- 

 less 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 en- 

 tered, 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 sev- 

 eral hundred feet beneath the uppermost. The 

 main avenue leading in from the entrance is 

 called the Broadway, and if Broadway, jSTew 

 York, was arched over and reduced to utter 

 darkness and silence, and its roadway blocked 

 with mounds of earth and fragments 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 



