Suddenly, the roof came down, the floor went up, and they
seemed to meet before me; but looking, I found a low opening, through
which, drawing myself on the belly over slime for some yards in
repulsive proximity to dead personalities, I came out upon a floor of
sand and pebbles under a long dry tunnel, arched and narrow, grim and
dull, without stalactites, suggestive of monks, and catacomb-vaults, and
the route to the grave; and here the dead were much fewer, proving
either that the general mob had not had time to penetrate so far inward,
or else that those within, if they were numerous, had gone out to
defend, or to harken to, the storm of their citadel. This passage led me
into an open space, the grandest of all, loftily vaulted, full of genie
riches and buried treasures of light, the million-fold _ensemble_ of
lustres dancing schottishe with the eye, as it moved or was still: this
place, I should guess, being quite half a mile from the entrance. My
prying lantern showed me here only nineteen dead, men of various
nations, and at the far end two holes in the floor, large enough to
admit the body, through which from below came up a sound of falling
water.
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