Accompanied by the American consul and a single servant, we entered the cave without difficulty, and, lighting our wax tapers, proceeded along carefully for a hundred feet, when we began rapidly to descend. To our surprise, on our right sat an Arab maiden who had become the sibyl of the cavern, surrounded by several natives, to whom she was delivering her sibylline oracles. Rapidly descending toward the southeast, we soon found ourselves in a cave three thousand feet in circumference, more than a thousand feet in length, and more than half that distance in breadth. The air was damp; the darkness that of a rayless night; the ground on which we walked was strewn with the chippings of the quarrier; the walls around us were marred with marks of the chisel, and the ceiling above us adorned with stalactites of a rose-color hue, from which trickled the percolating waters of the city; while, disturbed by our approach, bats screamed their grief and flapped their long black wings against their solid nests. Moving southward, we came to the verge of a precipice a hundred feet across and fifteen feet deep, on the bottom of which the skeleton of some lost explorer had been found. Threading a long gallery on the left, we saw a fountain as deep as it was wide, partially filled with water strongly impregnated with lime. Turning eastward, we entered a second gallery of greater depth, in the sides of which are immense blocks of limestone, in part detached from their native bed, just as they were left by the unknown quarrier thousands of years ago. Here, as elsewhere, were the unmistakable marks of a broad chisel-shaped instrument, evidently used to detach the blocks on either side and at top and bottom, and then by the pressure of a lever the mass was broken off from the rock behind. Occasionally we passed huge pillars supporting the ceiling above, and in several instances saw blocks hewn and squared ready to be hoisted to their destination. On the right and left winding passage-ways led us to noble halls, white as snow, and supported by native piers, on which are engraven the cross of some Christian pilgrim or knight of the Crusades; and on the sides of the chambers are Hebrew and Arabic inscriptions, the memorial of some wandering Jew and some conquering son of the Prophet. Seeking in vain for an entrance other than that on the north, we returned to daylight full of curious thoughts. What tales of woe are written on these walls! and, could we hear their voices, too low for mortal ear, what secrets would they reveal! In the time of sieges this has been the retreat of Jew and Christian, of Saracen and knight; the last refuge of helpless womanhood, of tender children, of infirm old age, and the death-bed of dying heroes wounded in the fight.