ante-chamber, to which the spacious entrance of the Cave, and the
narrow passage that succeeds it, should be considered the mere
gate-way and covered approach. It is a basilica of an oval
figure--two-hundred feet in length by one-hundred and fifty wide, with
a roof which is as flat and level as if finished by the trowel of the
plasterer, of fifty or sixty or even more feet in height. Two
passages, each a hundred feet in width, open into it at its opposite
extremities, but at right angles to each other; and as they preserve a
straight course for five or six-hundred feet, with the same flat roof
common to each, the appearance to the eye, is that of a vast hall in
the shape of the letter L expanded at the angle, both branches being
five-hundred feet long by one-hundred wide. The passage to the right
hand is the "Great Bat Room;" (Audubon Avenue.) That in the front, the
beginning of the Grand Gallery, or the Main Cavern itself. The whole
of this prodigious space is covered by a single rock, in which the eye
can detect no break or interruption, save at its borders, where is a
broad, sweeping cornice, traced in horizontal panel-work, exceedingly
noble and regular; and not a single pier or pillar of any kind
contributes to support it. It needs no support. It is like the arched
and ponderous roof of the poet's mausoleum:

"By its own weight made stedfast and immoveable."

The floor is very irregularly broken, consisting of vast heaps of the
nitrous earth, and of the ruins of the hoppers or vats, composed of
heavy planking, in which the miners were accustomed to leach it. The
hall was, in fact, one of their chief factory rooms. Before their day,
it was a cemetery; and here they disinterred many a mouldering
skeleton, belonging it seems, to that gigantic eight or nine feet race
of men of past days, whose jaw-bones so many vivacious persons have