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The mosque was a plain, square building, with a large dome and two minarets. The door was a rich and curious specimen of the stalactitic style, so frequent in Saracenic buildings. We peeped into the windows, and, although the mosque, which does not appear to be in common use, was darkened, saw enough to show that the interior was quite plain.
The sides and roof sparkled and glistened again and again, but it was only with some stalactitic formation beautiful to the eye, but worthless; and at last I felt that this was labour in vain the treasure was no more here than in the vast chasm where we had hurled the stone; and, shouting to Tom my intentions, we stood and had another look, and then lit upon a mass of rock a large piece of oily oakum which we had brought for the purpose.
It contains much animal matter, and its origin, no doubt, is due to the action of the rain or spray on the birds' dung. Below some small masses of guano at Ascension, and on the Abrolhos Islets, I found certain stalactitic branching bodies, formed apparently in the same manner as the thin white coating on these rocks.
From this point both the landscape and the rocky cauldron are visible, and the latter is seen to be the remainder of a stalactitic cavern, the roof of which has fallen in. In the very hard limestone, which is like marble, I observed traces of bivalves and multitudes of spines of the sea-urchin, but no well-defined remains could be knocked off.
The room was a small square one, shabbily furnished with very few articles of furniture, and these were dimly visible through the snuffy mist which filled the apartment; there was snuff everywhere; there was a snuffy dust on the chairs; there was a precipitate of snuff on the floor, and, if snuff was capable of crystallization, there would undoubtedly have been stalactitic formations of snuff depending from the ceiling; the Madame herself was snuff-colored, as if she had been boiled in a decoction of tobacco.
In one of the passages, I think the last we came to, the roaring of the river in its subterranean bed was distinctly audible below us. Excepting the great cave of Kentucky, I believe there is no stalactitic cavern known so vast and beautiful as this.
That we should have to swim in the dark I knew; for neither of us, I felt, could then have swum with one hand, holding a light above the troubled waters with the other. Just then Tom's oakum blazed up behind me, to light up the vault with its sparkling stalactitic roof, glistening sides, and strangely-agitated water.
I passed the night in a small hut, which was quickly erected for me, and on the following day attempted to pass up the river as far as the limits of the crystalline rock, but in vain. In the afternoon we set out on our return to Basey, which we reached at night. At twenty-five to thirty feet above the sea I found the same recent beds of mussels as in the stalactitic cavern of Sogoton.
In this manner, much as in the case of the growth of stalactitic matter between the blocks of stone in the roofs of a cavern, large fragments of rock, known as "horses," are often pushed out into the body of the vein.
On the 3rd of August I descended to Choongtam, which I reached on the 5th. Below this I passed an extensive stalactitic deposit of lime, and a second occurred lower down, on the opposite side of the valley. Can the limestone, which appears in Tibet, underlie the gneiss of Sikkim?
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