The ascending cage, entering the cylinder of the shaft, leaves him in total darkness, but soon, as one passenger comes down after another, a sufficient exploring party is formed, lanterns are lit, and examination begins. It reveals the fact that each shaft communicates with a group of chambers, all similar in design, all originally distinct from one another. Imagine an ash leaf pressed between the pages of a book, but having its middle rib cut off short at the base of the lowest leaflets, and that middle rib seven or eight times broader, in proportion to the leaflets, than in nature. In that you have the ground plan of the chambers, in principle at least, but no object in nature, so far as I am aware, corresponds exactly with the design. So far we have ground plan only. Let us proceed to dimensions. The extreme length of each group of chambers is about 80 ft. Each chamber is vaulted, about 20 ft. high, from 10 to 15 ft. wide, and somewhat wider a few feet above the floor than at the floor level. The whole is beautifully and symmetrically hewn out, the marks of the implements used for the purpose are plainly visible. Of such groups of chambers, all originally distinct, all hewn with the same exact precision, but directed to all sorts of points of the compass, so that there is no suspicion of orientation, there are a large number. If it be asked why learned writers have been so sparing of allusion to subterranean works of such manifest interest, the answer is that until the years 1884 and 1887, when the Essex Field Club made a fairly thorough examination, the materials for learned discussion were not available. Camden knew the "Dane holes," or knew of their existence, and figured one of them with tolerable accuracy in his _Britannia_. Dr. Plot (_History of Oxfordshire, 1705_) talks of "King Cunobeline's Gold Mines in Essex," and a Cambrian Register of "Gold Mines at Orsett." For a long time before 1884 the matter does not seem to have attracted the serious attention of the learned, and it has been neglected since.