I have said that there was light above, and on examination we
found that it came from the sky. Our river that was, Sir Henry
said, a literal realization of the wild vision of the poet
{Endnote 10}, was no longer underground, but was running on its
darksome way, not now through 'caverns measureless to man', but
between two frightful cliffs which cannot have been less than
two thousand feet high. So high were they, indeed, that though
the sky was above us, where we were was dense gloom -- not darkness
indeed, but the gloom of a room closely shuttered in the daytime.
Up on either side rose the great straight cliffs, grim and forbidding,
till the eye grew dizzy with trying to measure their sheer height.
The little space of sky that marked where they ended lay like
a thread of blue upon their soaring blackness, which was unrelieved
by any tree or creeper. Here and there, however, grew ghostly
patches of a long grey lichen, hanging motionless to the rock
as the white beard to the chin of a dead man. It seemed as though
only the dregs or heavier part of the light had sunk to the bottom
of this awful place. No bright-winged sunbeam could fall so low:
they died far, far above our heads.
By the river's edge was a little shore formed of round fragments
of rock washed into this shape by the constant action of water,
and giving the place the appearance of being strewn with thousands
of fossil cannon balls.
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