After a frugal meal, we attempted to enjoy a little slumber; but it proved to be equally frugal in amount and quality. As early as it was possible for cocks to favour each other with their shrill responses, there was a perfect concert of cock-crowing around the house, and, we believe, on the top of it too. The ornithological entertainment began and was kept up with great spirit until our guide knocked at our door to go through the very unnecessary ceremony of calling us. It is true we were supposed to be enjoying our repose in a _posada_, or "place of repose," but the noises that commenced with the first dawn of morning were so numerous and so loud as effectually to murder sleep. We started in the early morning, after a refreshing breakfast of red mud, called chocolate, some black bread, and no butter. After walking across fresh prairie lands, green with sprouting corn, and over sandy tracts interspersed with aloes and the universal olive, we began to ascend the steep pathway at the foot of the mountains covered with dark pine trees, dwarf oak, and arbutus, which led to the mouth of the cave. The cave is hewn out of a vast mass of limestone, of which the hills in this neighbourhood are composed. We toiled upwards, following the steps of our guide, who, as well as a little boy whom he had pressed into his service by the way, was laden with a perfect fagot of port-fires, blue lights, and other combustibles. Before us was a magnificent natural arch, the vaulted roof of which rose to the height of a hundred and forty feet. By this vestibule of nature we approached the darkening galleries tunnelled in the rock, and leading to those mysterious caverns which concealed so much that was beautiful in the deep bowels of the mountains. As we advanced, the obscurity deepened, and we had to light our torches. Happening to look back, we perceived the bright archway of light at the entrance diminished into a luminous speck in the distance. Upon reaching a level space, at the foot of a rude hewn staircase, we found ourselves in the middle of a splendid hall or vaulted chamber, in which the uncertain gleam of the torch fell faintly upon tall uncouth objects, apparently white, though rather dim in hue, standing at intervals. Without any extravagant exercise of the imagination, one might have pictured to himself this chamber as the Pit of Acheron, and these gaunt shapes as the petrified forms of those doomed to imprisonment in its gloomy recesses.