would not only have marred our hopes, but would, besides, have caused a great disaster. The vault of rocks suspended over our heads might bury us all alive, and, as will be seen by the sequel, the precautions we had taken were not fruitless. At the very moment when our hopes were about to be realised,--the aperture being now wide enough to admit of us passing through it--suddenly, and above our heads, we heard a hollow prolonged rustling noise that froze us to death; the vault had been shaken, and we dreaded its falling upon us. For a moment, which seemed to us, however, very long, we were all terrified; the Indian himself was standing as motionless as a statue, with his hands upon the handle of his pick-axe, just in the same position as he was when he gave his last blow. After a moment's solemn silence, when our fright had a little subsided, we began to examine the nature of the danger we had just escaped. Above our heads a long and wide split ran along the vault to a distance of several yards, and, at the place where it stopped, an enormous rock, detached from the dome, had been most providentially impeded in its fall downwards by one of the columns, which, acting as a sort of buttress, kept it suspended over the opening we had just made. Having, after mature examination, ascertained that the column and the rock were pretty solid, like rash men, accustomed to daunt all danger and surmount any sort of obstacle and difficulty, we resolved upon gliding one by one into the dangerous yawning. Dr. Genu, who till then had kept a profound silence, on hearing of our resolution was suddenly seized with such a panic fear that he recovered his voice, imploring and begging of us to take him out of the cavern; and, as if he had been suddenly seized with a sort of vertigo, he told us, with interrupted accents, that he could not breathe--that he felt himself as if he were smothering--that his heart was beating so violently, were he to stay any longer amidst the dangers we were running he was certain of dying from the effects of a rupture of the heart. He offered all he possessed on earth to him who would save his life, and with clasped hands he supplicated our Indians not to forsake him, but to guide him out of the place. We therefore took compassion upon his state of mind, and allowed the Indian to guide him out; but as soon as the latter returned, and having ascertained during his absence that neither the rocky fragment nor the column had stirred, but which had been the momentary cause of our alarm, we put our project into execution, and like serpents, one after the other, we crawled into the dangerous opening, which was scarcely large enough for our passing through. We soon ceased thinking of our past dangers, nor did our present imprudence much pre-occupy our minds, all our attention being entirely absorbed by what presented itself to our ravished eyes. Here we were in the midst of a saloon wearing a most