"River Styx."

This is a regular river, running through a great part of the Mammoth
Cave. You may float on it in a boat, and, if you choose, you may fish
in it, although you would not be likely to catch anything. But if you
did, the fish would have no eyes! All the fish in this river are
blind. You can easily perceive that eyes would be of no use in a place
where it is always as dark as pitch, except when travellers come along
with their lanterns.

There is a rough boat here, and we will get into it and have a row
over this dark and gloomy river. Whenever our guide shouts we hear the
wildest kind of echoes, and everything seems solemn and unearthly. At
one time our boat stops for a moment, and the guide goes on shore, and
directly we hear the most awful crash imaginable. It sounds as if a
dozen gong-factories had blown up at once, and we nearly jump out of
the boat! But we soon see that it was nothing but the guide striking
on a piece of sheet-iron or tin. The echoes, one after another, from
this noise had produced the horrible crashing sounds we had heard.

After sailing along for about half an hour we land, and soon reach an
avenue which has its walls ornamented with beautiful flowers--all
formed on the rocky walls by the hand of Nature.

Now we visit the "Ball Room," which is large and handsome, with its
walls as white as snow. Leaving this, we take a difficult and exciting
journey to the "Rocky Mountains." We go down steep paths, which are
narrow, and up steep ones, which are wide; we jump over wide cracks
and step over great stones, and we are getting very tired of
scrambling about in the bowels of the earth; but the guide tells us