Now that we are here, we are conscious of excitement. _Mon Amie_ manifests hers by her steady, deliberate tones, a sort of exaltation foreign to her usually vibrating voice, her tremulous cadences; she seems borne along, despite and above herself. For my own part, as my lungs inflate themselves with this pure, dry, bracing air, exquisitely redolent of health, and testifying at once to a total exemption from noxious exhalations or mephitic vapors, I grow _tête-montée_, rattle-brained; my laugh echoes through these stony chambers, wild snatches of song hover on my lips, odd conceits flit through my brain, I joke, I dash forward with haste; my excitement endows me with a superfeminine self-possession. But now we hear an ominous rattle, a clanking of chains, a rumbling as of distant thunder; we are approaching a shaft. The shafts in this mine are not sunk perpendicularly, but are slightly inclined: the huge buckets, lowered and raised by means of powerful machinery, are but ancient caldrons, counterparts of those in which the weird witches in "Macbeth" might have brewed their unholy decoctions, or such as the dreadful giants that formed the nightmare of my childhood might have used in preparing those Brobdignagian repasts among the ingredients of which a plump child held the same rank as a crab in ours. The sounds grow nearer; presently our guide disappears; then I behold the Colonel, in whose steps I follow, faithful as his shadow, crouch sidewise: we must pass behind this inclined plane, which rests on roughly hewn rocks, that protrude till it appears impossible that any living thing, except a lizard, can find a passage. I am sure we must shrink from the original rotundity with which Nature blessed us. I feel as the frog in the fable might have felt, if, after successfully inflating himself to the much-envied dimensions of the ox, he had suddenly found himself reduced to his proper proportions. Edging sidewise, accommodating the inequalities of the damp surfaces to the undulations of our forms, deafened, crazed by the roar of the caldrons that dash madly from side to side, we fairly _ooze_ through. More ladders! This time they are not hung quite perpendicularly, are shorter, and some lean, a little, which affords rest; others have one side higher than the other: to these my already aching palms cling with desperation. So have I seen insects adhere, through sheer force of fear, to a shaken stem, or a perilous branch beaten by a storm-wind. The voices of my companions come to me from above, though I cannot see the soles of _Mon Amie's_ friendly feet, which at first preserved an amiable companionship with my own hands; but, looking far upward, I behold a tiny, star-like spark. When I was a child, I used to think that fire-flies were the crowns of the fairies, which shone despite their wearers' invisibility: this idea was recalled to me.