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It proceeded from a fissure, about half an inch in width, extending entirely around the prison at the base of the walls, which thus appeared, and were, completely separated from the floor. I endeavored, but of course in vain, to look through the aperture. As I arose from the attempt, the mystery of the alteration in the chamber broke at once upon my understanding.

The fissure, continuing narrow, deep, and straight, for a considerable distance above and below the bridge, opens a short but very pleasing view of the north mountain on one side, and blue ridge on the other, at the distance each of them of about five miles.

Though the velvety darkness into which we were steadily ploughing had not perceptibly decreased, it was now cut sharply across, from right to left, by what looked like a tightly stretched wire of glowing silver. Even as I looked this slender fissure of illumination widened, almost imperceptibly at first, then faster, faster, until at one burst came the dawn.

Or a great and dangerous fissure, which we should not be able to cross without going a long way round? We naturally expected something of the sort. This mighty and terrible monster would, of course, offer resistance in some form or other. The mystic Barrier!

At every sweep of her broom the old woman bared the soul of the gutter, that black fissure on which a porter's mind is ever bent.

In truth, there was some foundation for his declaration that he could sleep more soundly on the back of his animal than while wrapped up in his blanket in some fissure among the rocks. Fortunately for him, however, these naps were of short duration, and, while indulging in them, he relied upon his animal, which had acquired a wonderful quickness in detecting danger.

A great fissure in the earth nearly a hundred feet deep, walled up with prodigious fragments of lava, dark and perpendicular, the bases strewn with molten masses, scattered about in the strangest disorder; a valley of the brightest green, over a hundred feet wide, stretching like a river between the fire-blasted cliffs; the trail winding through it in snake-like undulation all now silent as death under the grim leaden sky, yet eloquent of terrible convulsions in by-gone centuries and of the voices of men long since mingled with the dust.

They are a merry set of mortals; a feeble joke sets them off in a fit of laughter. Here, as elsewhere, all petitioned for the magic lantern, and, as it is a good means of conveying instruction, I willingly complied. The falls of Gonye have not been made by wearing back, like those of Niagara, but are of a fissure form.

I crawled the three feet that the little cave afforded and put my hands upon the rock, feeling its surface inch by inch. There was a crevice there, not large enough to have permitted a bird to pass the merest fissure. "Jacqueline! Is that you, dear?" I called. "Where are you, Paul?" she whispered back. "Behind the wall," I answered. "You are not hurt, Jacqueline?"

This pit, a will be seen by the section of the cave given on p. 174, terminates the glacière; and the rock-wall at the farther edge falls away into a sort of open fissure, down which magnificent cascades of ice stream emulously, clothing that side of the pit, which would otherwise be solid rock.