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The prince, instead of listening to the admonition of the old man, resolved to proceed; and having requested his prayers and benedictions, continued his march. In a short time, having entered the passes of the mountains, he discovered vast caverns inhabited by a species of genii, who were employed in working upon masses of iron-stone, which they dug from the rock.

In the recesses of mountains, in caverns, and in morasses, to which these persecuted enthusiasts were so ruthlessly pursued, they conceived they had often to contend with the visible assaults of the Enemy of mankind, as in the cities, and in the cultivated fields, they were exposed to those of the tyrannical government and their soldiery.

He withdrew from them the manna from heaven that had come to them in such abundance, and which they had bestowed in caverns underground, thinking to find there the manna they had set aside, but it was changed by the will of God into efts and adders and worms and vermin, and when they saw that they had done evil, they scattered themselves over strange lands.

"Such phenomena," observes Maltebrun, "are, however, mere eccentricities of nature, and differ from caverns only from the circumstance of having a passage entirely through them. The Pierre-Pertuise in Mount Jura, and Pausilippo, near Naples, are instances of this kind. The Torghat, in, Norway, is pierced by an opening 150 feet high, and 3,000 long.

With that he curved his back; Hilda clasped her arms round his neck as before, and away they went, through the gleaming caverns, and up the sombre passages, and through the cold damp tunnels, until at last out they popped beside the haystack in the field; and after they had come out the little brown creature which had been sitting waiting at the entrance threw a somersault into the great pit and disappeared.

A second shot, followed by a second outcry and an answering discharge from the other caverns, almost darkened the sky. The whirring, rustling and screaming, as the birds circled overhead, or dropped like thick scurries of snow-flakes on the water, was truly awful.

No instinct, no woman's instinct, had stayed her from unwitting sin. The sand-diviner had been wiser than she; Count Anteoni more far-seeing; the priest of Beni-Mora more guided by holiness, by the inner flame that flickers before the wind that blows out of the caverns of evil.

A blind fish swims in its rivers, and Professor Agassiz is of opinion that they, like all other blind animals of the cavern world, have at no time been connected with the world of light. Vegetable life also exists in caverns, but consists of such mushrooms or fungi which, shunning the light, love darkness and damp.

That penetrating fire ran in and roused those primary instincts that make their lair in the dens and caverns of the mind. What is called the great popular heart was awakened, that indefinable something which may be, according to circumstances, the highest reason or the most brutish unreason.

There are no rivers on the surface of the land, but in many parts it is entirely undermined by extensive caverns, in which are basins of water fed by subterranean currents. The caverns are delightfully cool even at midday, and the fantastic forms of some of the stalactites and stalagmites are a never-ending source of interest.