We soon after visited the river “Styx,” which, unlike the Styx of mythology, we can cross without arriving in Erebus. We went over it on a natural bridge of rock, with a single arch through which the dark river flows, and found the other shore about the same as this—either being gloomy enough to represent Erebus, on a small scale. We descended to the water’s edge on the opposite shore, and embarked in a small boat, which the guide propelled with a long pole, and rode a few hundred yards on the bosom of the awful stream. As we went gliding along through those gloomy passages that frown in everlasting silence, our figures barely seen in the dim light of the lamps, and the black walls grumbling at each sound, and echoing it back and forth, I thought that nothing in the depths of the earth could be more like the fabled mythic river over which Charon ferries his passengers to Hades. Certainly, the subterranean stream could not have been more appropriately named. In some places we passed under dark arches that hovered over us so closely that they seemed ready to close upon us and crush us in their dismal grasp; and in other places we passed through narrow passages where there was no path on either shore, and we were hemmed in on both sides by perpendicular walls of sombre rock. The stream is from twenty to fifty feet wide, and is not very deep, except in some noted places. The guide assured us that it is inhabited by fish without eyes. I have heard doubts expressed on this point, but there can be no reasonable doubt about it. In fact, why should they need eyes there? What material eye could penetrate the awful gloom? While gliding leisurely down the dusky river, the guide struck up a song; and whether his voice was sonorous or not, or the words beautiful, I thought I had never heard anything sound so majestically musical. The dim dark walls took up the words and echoed them again and again; and they rolled along the passages, like half-tamed thunder, and returned to us again from remote pits and recesses.