Our explorations then began; and very queer it all was, with the perpetual gushing of springs from the rock, and the bubble and splash of the waters as they ran along on either side the narrow tunnels; the meetings at corners with little cars being pushed along by men who looked, as they bent low to their work, like those load-rolling beetles that Egypt abounds in; the machinery for pumping, so massive that it seemed much more likely that it was found where it stood, the vestiges of a long-past subterranean civilization, than that it had been brought down there by the men of these degenerate days; the sudden endings of the tunnels which the miners were driving along the vein, with a man at each ending, his back bent to fit into the curve which he had made in the rock, and reminding one of the frogs that science tells us are found at times fitted into holes in the middle of stones; the climbing up hen-roost ladders from tunnel to tunnel, from one darkness into another; the waiting at different spots till "that charge had been blasted," and the dull, deadened roar of the explosion had died away; the watching the solitary miners at their work picking and thumping at the discoloured strips of dark rock that looked to the uninitiated only like water-stained, mildewy accidents in the general structure, but which, in reality, was silver, and yielding, it might be, $1600 to the ton! "This is all very rich ore," said my guide, kicking a heap that I was standing on. I got off it at once, reverentially.