I confess that as I go down the second time I feel a little nervous, and my limbs shake. I don’t like this going down, down, down into the shades of eternal night, with no companions but two little children. But at last we stand on level ground again. There is no light anywhere except from the guides’ lamps, the foremost one (who is always spokesman) waves his above his head, and introduces _la grande salle_. I look up and around me, but all is black as pitch. I feel that I am standing on broken flints and a great deal of mud; and as the guide’s lamp throws its faint gleam here and there, I see that the cavern we stand in is very vast and damp, and uncommonly like a huge cellar; but I can’t say I see anything more. In another minute the guide has turned, and leads us through a passage cut in the rock. We are not going up or downstairs now, but picking our way over slippery stones and between places sometimes so narrow and sometimes so low, that our shoulders get various bumps and bruises, and the guide’s warning of ‘_Garde tête!_’ sounds continuously. Every now and then we come upon a larger excavation, which is called a _salle_, and given some name consequent on the likeness assumed by the stalactites contained in it. Thus one is called _salle de Brahma_, because it contains a large stalactite, somewhat resembling the idol of that name. Another _salle du sacrifice_, because its principal attraction is a large flat stone at the foot of which is another, shaped sausage-wise, and entitled _tombeau de la victime_. We pace after the guides through these cavernous passages for what appears to me miles, my mind meanwhile being divided between fear that I should leave my boots behind me in the slushy clay, or that either of my children should tumble down or knock her head. Every cavern is like the other, and I look in vain for stalactites which shall remind me of ‘houris grouped about the sultan,’ or ‘frozen tears.’ The guides occasionally produce a fine effect by burning a little red fire, or letting-off a rocket, or climbing singly up the more perilous places, that we may watch the gradual ascent of their flickering lamps, and judge of the height of the larger _salles_. But I suppose the enthusiastic scribblers in the visitors’ book would consider me the possessor of a very darkened intellect if they heard me affirm that I have seen better effects on the stage, and climbed greater heights with much more convenience. Perhaps I have not a sufficiently appreciative soul for grottoes; but the greater part of the grotto of Rochefort comes up exactly to my idea of a mine, and nothing more.