that the inhabitants who had offended him should be delivered up. This was peremptorily refused. The chieftain thereupon caused his people to divert the course of a rill of water, which, falling over the mouth of the cave, would have prevented his purposed vengeance. He then kindled at the entrance of the cavern a huge fire, and maintained it until all within were destroyed by suffocation.’[22] Footnote 22: Voyages in the Lighthouse Yacht, published in Lockhart’s ‘Life of Sir Walter Scott.’ In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, a no less horrible deed occurred during the campaign of Essex against the Irish rebels. When the English forces entered Antrim, the Scots of that county had sent their wives and children, their aged and their sick, to the island of Rathlin for safety. Sir John Norris was directed by the Earl to cross over and kill all that he could find. The run up the Antrim coast was rapidly and quietly accomplished. Before an alarm could be given the English had landed close to the church which bears Columba’s name. The castle was taken by storm, and every soul in it—about two hundred—put to the sword. It was then discovered that the greater part of the fugitives, chiefly mothers and their little ones, were hidden in the caves about the shores. ‘There was no remorse,’ says Froude, ‘not even the faintest shadow of perception that the occasion called for it. They were hunted out as if they had been seals or otters, and all destroyed.’ When the barbarian Genghis Khan invaded Koondooz in Central Asia, 700 men took refuge, with their wives and families, in the cave of Yeermalik, and defended themselves so valiantly that, after trying in vain to destroy them by fire, the invader built them in with huge natural blocks of stone, and left them to die of hunger. In the year 1840, the cave was visited by Captain Burslem and Lieutenant Sturt, probably the only Europeans that ever entered its sepulchral recesses, as the people in the neighbourhood believe it to be the abode of Sheitan (the devil), and are as reluctant to guide a stranger as to explore it themselves. The entrance is halfway up a hill, and is fifty feet high, with about the same breadth. Not far from the entrance the travellers found a passage between two jagged rocks, possibly the remains of Genghis Khan’s fatal wall, so narrow that they had some difficulty in squeezing through, and then before long came to a drop of sixteen feet, down which they were lowered by ropes. Here they left two men to haul them up on their return, and bade farewell to the light of day. The narrow path, which led by the edge of a black abyss, sometimes over a flooring of smooth ice for a few feet, widened gradually till they reached a damp and dripping hall, so vast in size that the light of their torches did not enable them to form any idea of its size. In this colossal hall, or rather tomb, they found the remains of the victims of Genghis Khan: hundreds of skeletons in a perfectly undisturbed state—