Up this well, as I said, we climbed, holding a rope, and fixing our feet in holes cut in the stone; the upper part of the ascent was very difficult, and bats in numbers came tumbling down on us; but at last we landed safely in the grand gallery, a noble nondescript of an apartment, very lofty, narrowing towards the roof, and most beautifully chiselled; it ends towards the south in a staircase, if I may so term an inclined plane, with notches cut in the surface for the feet to hold by; the ascent is perilous, the stone being as polished and slippery as glass; before ascending, however, we proceeded by another beautifully worked passage, cut directly under the staircase to a handsome room called the queen’s chamber. Returning to the gallery, we mounted the inclined plane to the king’s chamber, directly over the queen’s. The passage to leading to it was defended by a portcullis now destroyed, but you see the grooves it fell into. His majesty’s chamber is a noble apartment, cased with enormous slabs of granite, twenty feet high; nine similar ones (seven large and two half-sized) form the ceiling. At the west end stands the sarcophagus, which rings, when struck, like a bell. From the north and south sides respectively of this room branch two small oblong-square passages, like air-holes, cut through the granite slabs, and slanting upwards--the first for eighty feet in a zigzag direction, the other for one hundred and twenty. It is Caviglia’s present object to discover whither these lead. Being unable to pierce the granite, he has begun cutting sideways into the limestone at the point where the granite casing of the chamber ends has reached the northern passage at the point where it is continued through the limestone, and is cutting a large one below it, so that the former runs like a groove in the roof of the latter, and he has only to follow it as a guide, and cut away till he readies the denouement. “Now,” says Caviglia, “I will show you how I hope to find out where the southern passage leads to.” Returning to the landing-place at the top of the grand staircase, we mounted a ricketty ladder to the narrow passage that leads to Davison’s chamber, so named after the English consul at Algiers, who discovered it seventy years ago; it is directly above the king’s chamber, the ceiling of the one forming, it would appear, the floor of the other. The ceiling of Davison’s chamber consists of eight stones, beautifully worked; and this ceiling, which is so low that you can only sit cross-legged under it, Caviglia believes to be the floor of another large room above it, which he is now trying to discover. To this room he concludes the little passage leads that branches from the south side of the king’s chamber. He has accordingly dug down the calcareous stone at the farther end of Davison’s chamber, in hopes of meeting it; once found, it will probably lead him to the place he is in quest of.--_Lord Lindsay’s Letters from the East._