immense great fallen rock on whose dark surface are scattered
transparent flake-like crystals of satin spar, resembling the congealed
drops of a summer shower. The mind-reader entered the chamber by the way
we shall leave it.

Returning to the spot from which the Pearly Gates were first viewed, we
stand facing the most beautiful of this imposing group of brilliant
scenes, The Mermaid's Resort. This is a small cove with wave marks in
the white beach sand, above which rises a projecting, sheltering cliff
as purely white as freshly fallen snow, with a fine deposit of frost
work in thick moss-like patterns two and three inches deep.

This crystalline mass, so white and fragile, has to perfection the
appearance of hoar-frost about a steam-vent in extremely cold weather,
and was, no doubt, formed in a somewhat similar manner. It is
crystallized carbonate of lime, and could have been deposited in such
extremely delicate forms only by the heavily charged vapors rising from
hot water. No one needs to be told that hot water will take and hold in
solution a much larger quantity of solid matter than is possible to cold
water, with all other conditions the same; nor is it news that a portion
of the solid substance is carried off in the rising steam. Now the
geyser cones, so recently visited on the next lower level, prove both
the heat of the water and its heavy charge of solids, which gave it a
far more intense heat than pure water could have equaled, and this in
turn drove the steam to greater distances than otherwise it would have
reached. When cooled to such a point as to be reduced to a light vapor,
its movement was checked by various walls, projections, and ceiling as
were in its upward path, and these received the minute particles of
burden, while the somewhat brisk motion of the atmosphere, occasioned at
these points by the mixing of that of higher temperature from below with