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In a moment the cavern had lost its funereal
gloom, and shone upon Merry's imagination
a palace of light and loveliness, fit for the residence
of the gnome-king. The trunk of a mountain
pine, shivered by a tempest, had fallen into
the ravine, where it still lay, a magazine of
ready-made torches provided for any one willing
to enter the mystic abyss.

With the hatchet, which always formed a
part of his equipments, Merry easily succeeded
in riving off a bundle of resinous
splinters. A flint and steel afforded the
means of striking a light; and, flambeau in
hand, his gun left, as an encumbrance, in the
ravine, Merry immediately crept through the
tall, narrow fissure, into the cave; though his
dog Snapper, daunted by its repulsive

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appearance, refused to follow him. He remained at
its entrance, filling the air with doleful howlings,
as his master vanished in the gloom;
and with these ominous sounds in his ears,
multiplied, and variously uttered, as they were,
by the echoes of the cave, Merry bade farewell
to his companion and the world of light.

Even with the torch flaming in his hand,
Merry's eyes failed to reach the boundaries of
the cave, its walls being no where visible except
immediately behind him, where they parted
away, right and left, from the entrance—itself
a blind, twisted gap, perceptible only at the
distance of a few feet—to be almost immediately
lost in darkness. Nothing, indeed,
could be well said to be visible except a few
rugged pillars rising here and there among
rocks and spars of all imaginable sizes, piled
and tumbled together in inconceivable confusion,
and presenting such fantastic shapes as
both kindled the imagination and struck the
spirit with awe. To Merry, who paused for
a moment aghast, it seemed as if each rock
was composed of animals, or parts of animals,
each a congeries of limbs, heads, trunks,
skeletons, cemented or incrusted together in
one hideous organic mass. Here glared
the head of a panther from among the ribs

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of an elephant; there an alligator peeped from
the back of a horse; here a boa-constrictor
writhed under the shattered body of an ox;
and there a great sea-fish opened her yawning
jaws, in which bears and monkeys made
their den. Nay, Merry even fancied that, imbedded
in these frightful concretions, he could
behold the limbs and heads of human beings,
the former crushed and sprawling, the latter
staring ghastfully out with eyes of stone.

While Merry paused a moment, confounded
by these strange appearances, and doubtful
whither to proceed in search of the golden
stream, which was now lost among the rocky
apparitions, he heard it faintly murmuring in
the distance, at a point to which he did not
hesitate to direct his steps, and where he had
soon the satisfaction to discover it flowing
down a broad stair-case of rock, as regular
almost as if cut by the hands of man.

Here Merry again paused, nay, recoiled a
moment in consternation; for upon that staircase
stood the gigantic figure of a man,
grim, shadowy, terrible, his countenance, as
far as a countenance could be seen that was,
like his whole body, incrusted over with stone,
convulsed with some nameless agony, and his
attitude, which was that of flight, of flight

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arrested by a sudden spell, that had bound
his limbs as with fetters of iron, expressive
of a deep but majestic despair. A tunic, sustained
by a broad baldrick; sandals, or what
seemed sandals, upon his feet; and in his
hand the massive hilts of a sword, whose
blade had long since rotted away, were the
only accoutrements on a shape, in whose very
nakedness there was something august and
commanding.

Merry's hair bristled as he surveyed the
stony phantom; but by and by, convinced it
was no living creature, and moved by curiosity,
he approached, and even mustered
courage to touch the unconscious frame. It
was, as it seemed, a figure of stone, but how
formed Merry the Miner was not learned
enough to tell; but as he felt the vast limbs,
foully sheeted over with spar, a rough and
rigid coat formed by the drippings and deposits
of centuries, he could not but fancy a
human body was sepulchred within.

Merry the Miner forgot his gold, and his
hopes of gold. Wonder and curiosity absorbed
his spirit. He thought now only of
investigating a mystery so strange and so
new, of prosecuting still further a discovery
whose first fruits were so astonishing. He

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ascended the wet and mouldering stair-case.
Twenty steps brought him to its summit,
where stood another colossal figure struggling
in the grasp of a third that lay upon
its face, half buried under a mound of stalagmite
that had grown around it, its arms
twined round his legs, its hair, long and flowing
like the locks of a woman, trodden under
his feet, with which he seemed endeavouring
to spurn the prostrate shape away. It was
a ghastly picture of terror overpowering the
feeble and unmanning the strong, of selfishness
converting woman's love and man's
devotion into frenzied contention and brutal
hate.

But a new spectacle drew Merry's eyes
from this unnatural group. The last step
of the staircase was ascended, and there
yawned upon him a new cave, vaster than
that he had left below, and filled with spectres
more wonderful and appalling; rank upon
rank, crowd upon crowd, multitude upon multitude,
they burst upon his view, the stony
effigies and relics of pre-Adamitic ages, the
remains and representatives of all races that
had lived and perished. It was a world of
stone—a petrified world; and Merry felt, as
the clang of his footsteps awoke the funeral

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echoes of the place, and one after one the
fearful shapes started into view, that he trod
upon accursed ground, among the doomed
inhabitants of a demolished sphere.

Were these, then, things of flesh? things
that had lived, and breathed, and walked the
earth? these things of bulk so enormous, of
shapes so strange and fearful? Ay, here they
were—creatures that had lived, and breathed,
and walked the earth—all in their general
sepulchre, not clad alone in the ordinary
vestures of decay, in bones and ashes, but in
form as when they lived, in body and, it seemed,
almost in substance, but grown over each
with a mantle of stone, a rime of rock, that
converted all into monumental statuary.
Here they were, all in wild confusion, all
flying in terror from a destiny which had,
nevertheless, overtaken them, and all expressing,
in their positions, the agony of annihilation.
It was a fearful picture of fate, a
grand and terrible, yet mournful, revealment
of the last moment of a world's perdition.

Merry's flesh again crept on his bones;
but he remembered all was stone around him,
and advanced, looking with mingled fear and
admiration upon the varied figures occupying
this subterraneous world, where all was left

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as in the moment of destruction, save that
the rocks which had fallen and covered all
with a new firmament, had here and there
dropped to the floor, forming piles and mounds
that crushed hundreds of animals beneath
them, and in other places had poured floods
of petrifying moisture that converted groups
of bodies into mountains of spar. Here,
among strange plants and trees of the primeval
forests, whose trunks formed stalactitic
pillars supporting the roof, Merry beheld the
magnificent monsters first revealed to human
eye by the labours of the geologist, though revealed
only in fragments—the Mastodon,
with his mighty tusks, huge and strong
enough to toss a mountain into the air; the
Megatherium, with claws to tear up trees,
and armour upon his back to sustain them in
the fall; the tremendous Dinotherium, with
teeth that dredged the bottoms of lakes and
rivers, and, hooked to some overhanging
rock or tree, supported the watery sluggard
in his sleep; the great Saurians,—huge and
hideously formed reptiles, to which the crocodiles
and anacondas of our own day were as
earthworms and lizards; with the primordial
horse, ox, rhinoceros, and other animals without
number and without name; all huddled

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together, and man, their enemy and master,
with them, in a confusion of terror that reduced
all to equality and fellowship in
misery.

Through this vast hall, following the course
of the brook, on which he relied to guide him
back to the realms of day, Merry pursued
his discovery, examining with interest the
various shapes on either side. But by and
by they ceased to appear: he had reached
the end of the Hall of Flight.

A few steps conducted him into another
chamber, where his eyes fell upon a sweeter
scene. It was a shepherd watching his
flocks, all, shepherd and flocks alike, of stone,
and all seeming to have passed to death in a
dreamy unconsciousness of their fate. Here
terror and anguish were no longer seen; and
Merry fancied he was about to behold the inhabitants
of the ancient world in a better aspect,
in their natural state and appearance
as when they lived. “Yes,” quoth he, well
pleased at the prospect—for the universal
agony he had passed through chilled him to
the heart—“I have seen how they died; I shall
now see, perhaps, how they lived.”

And so he did; for having proceeded a few
yards further, he found himself upon a huge

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subterraneous plain, whereon were countless
hosts of men, with sword and spear, arrow,
javelin, and war-club, with horses and chariots,
waging a furious battle; in the very midst
of which their destiny, it seemed, had come
upon them. As they were engaged, so they
had perished, each his sword at his fellow's
throat, trampling under foot and hoof, crushing
with chariot wheels, thrusting with lances,
piercing with darts and arrows, raging and
destroying. Thus it was with them, even
with eternity at their elbow, their world falling
to pieces under their feet. Upon the borders
of death, they were anticipating his
coming; with one foot in the balance of judgment,
they were dragging with them the
blood of rapine and murder, to weigh them
down in condemnation forever.

“Ay!” quoth Merry the Miner, “and so
they do in the world above! all busily engaged
in cutting short for one another the little
moment of life assigned them by nature—all
madly eager adding gall and wormwood to
the little cup of happiness their destiny allows
them—all hot to prove their supremacy
over the beasts of the field, by exceeding them
in violence and enmity.”

Through this midnight battle-field Merry

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made his way among mangled and disfigured
corses, retaining even in stone, with the looks
of the dying and of death, vestiges of the
passions which impelled them to strife and
attended them in slaughter. Here was the
fiery youth urged by the love of glory—that
love called noble and generous, though it
aims at blood, and fills the world with orphans;
there the veteran, to whom use had
made slaughter an exciting pastime. Here
was the soldier fighting for his sixpence; there
the great captain leading up a thousand men
to die in a ditch, that he might go down to
future ages renowned in story. Here was
seen the throttle of hate, the grasp of rage
and desperation; there the wounded besought
quarter which the victor denied, and here the
victor, himself at last perishing, seemed to
entreat of Heaven the mercy he had denied
his fellows; while the contortions of agony
and despair spoke the late but unavailing remorses
of the dying. In short, it was a battle
field, in which Merry the Miner, as he himself
hinted in his half muttered apostrophe,
saw nothing that he might not have seen in
a `foughten field' in the world above.

By and by he had passed it through, glad
to escape its shocking spectacles. He then

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entered a passage looking like the broad
street of a half ruined city, with houses on
either side, some overthrown, some sheeted
over with spar, but all wild, and antique, and
strange-looking, like the buried structures of
Herculaneum, or still more the ancient subterranean
cities of the East.

Here the first sight that struck Merry's
eyes was a knot of ferocious looking men,
sitting round a slab of stone, gambling; at
least, so they appeared to Merry, to whom
the avaricious exultation of one, who held
aloft what seemed a bag of coin just won;
the despairing looks of a second, who clasped
his hands in the frenzy of conscious ruin;
the scowl of a third, who seemed also a loser;
with the villany of a fourth, who, while appearing
to sympathize on one side of his face
with the winner, on the other with the losers,
was slyly abstracting a second bag of money
from the table; were proofs of the nature of
their employment not to be mistaken.

Merry saw and felt the moral of the scene.
He was struck with the brutal triumph of the
winner, whose happiness was the misery of
at least one other; with the humiliating grief
of that other; with the frowning ferocity of
the third man, who looked as if thirsting for

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the blood of the victor; above all, with the
base roguery of the fourth, who made no
difficulty of stealing the treasure he could
not otherwise hope to master.

Merry the Miner saw and felt all this; and
could, had any one been by, have moralized
very prettily on the debasing effects of avarice.
But while he saw and felt, and was
able to moralize, the very passion he saw
thus variously personified, stole into his
bosom; and he longed to possess the bags of
coin, so temptingly displayed. He forgot he
was among the dead of a doomed world, and
was again a gold-hunter. He snatched at the
bag in the winner's hand; but bag and hand
were alike marble. He drew his hammer,
and with a blow shattered the arm of the
gambler; and down it dropped, with dismal
clanging, on the stone floor. Another blow
crushed the hand and bag to pieces, and
Merry's hopes were gratified. Out rolled
upon the floor a nest of antique golden coins,
which Merry, after admiring a moment, clapped
into his sack, among his other treasures.
He then attacked the second bag, and after
a deal of hammering, for it was fast cemented
to the stone table, succeeded in breaking
it also, and seizing its precious contents.

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