Having communicated these particulars, the miner next tells us to keep strict silence and listen. We obey him, sitting speechless and motionless. If the reader could only have beheld us now, dressed in our copper-colored garments, huddled close together in a mere cleft of subterranean rock, with flame burning on our heads and darkness enveloping our limbs, he must certainly have imagined, without any violent stretch of fancy, that he was looking down upon a conclave of gnomes. After listening for a few moments, a distant unearthly noise becomes faintly audible,--a long, low, mysterious moaning, that never changes, that is felt on the ear as well as heard by it; a sound that might proceed from some incalculable distance, from some far invisible height; a sound unlike any thing that is heard on the upper ground in the free air of heaven; a sound so sublimely mournful and still, so ghostly and impressive when listened to in the subterranean recesses of the earth, that we continue instinctively to hold our peace, as if enchanted by it, and think not of communicating to each other the strange awe and astonishment which it has inspired in us both from the very first. At last the miner speaks again, and tells us that what we hear is the sound of the surf lashing the rocks a hundred and twenty feet above us, and of the waves that are breaking on the beach beyond. The tide is now at the flow, and the sea is in no extraordinary state of agitation: so the sound is low and distant just at this period. But when storms are at their height, when the ocean hurls mountain after mountain of water on the cliffs, then the noise is terrific; the roaring heard down here in the mine is so inexpressibly fierce and awful that the boldest men at work are afraid to continue their labor; all ascend to the surface to breathe the upper air and stand on the firm earth; dreading, though no such catastrophe has ever happened yet, that the sea will break in on them if they remain in the caverns below. Hearing this, we get up to look at the rock above us. We are able to stand upright in the position we now occupy; and, flaring our candles hither and thither in the darkness, can see the bright pure copper streaking the dark ceiling of the gallery in every direction. Lumps of ooze, of the most lustrous green color, traversed by a natural network of thin red veins of iron, appear here and there in large irregular patches, over which water is dripping slowly and incessantly in certain places. This is the salt water percolating through invisible crannies in the rock. On stormy days it spirts out furiously in thin continuous streams. Just over our heads we observe a wooden plug of the thickness of a man's leg; there is a hole here, and the plug is all that we have to keep out the sea.