At a point in one of the great avenues, if you stop and listen, you
hear a slow, solemn ticking like a great clock in a deserted hall; you
hear the slight echo as it fathoms and sets off the silence. It is
called the clock, and is caused by a single large drop of water falling
every second into a little pool. A ghostly kind of clock there in the
darkness, that is never wound up and that never runs down. It seemed
like a mockery where time is not, and change does not come—the clock
of the dead. This sombre and mortuary cast of one's thoughts seems so
natural in the great cave, that I could well understand the emotions of
a lady who visited the cave with a party a few days before I was there.
She went forward very reluctantly from the first; the silence and the
darkness of the huge mausoleum evidently impressed her imagination, so
that when she got to the spot where the guide points out the "Giant's
Coffin," a huge, fallen rock, which in the dim light takes exactly
the form of an enormous coffin, her fear quite overcame her, and she
begged piteously to be taken back. Timid, highly imaginative people,
especially women, are quite sure to have a sense of fear in this
strange underground world. The guide told me of a lady in one of the
parties he was conducting through, who wanted to linger behind a little
all alone; he suffered her to do so, but presently heard a piercing
scream. Rushing back, he found her lying prone upon the ground in a
dead faint. She had accidentally put out her lamp, and was so appalled
by the darkness that instantly closed around her that she swooned at
once.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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