or north end is the opening that leads to the largest and most interesting series of the Caves of Cheops. The Gorge itself is a striking feature of the landscape, and several places are accessible where the visitor may see straight into its depths. The opening is a dome-shaped break in the wall, 30 feet by 30 feet, through which the stream pours furiously down over a confusion of heaped rock, its scattered crystal-spray appearing from below like luminous mist. At this point is the visitors' ingress called "Entrance No. 3."
At the foot of the falls, the channel resumes its normal direction a little south of east. Here it is necessary to cross the stream which Hows north descending into lower depths; and from this on the passages are, though moist from the atmosphere, free from water. This first passage from the turn of the channel is a dimly illuminated chamber, 150 feet long, 25 feet wide and grading from 10 to 30 feet high. It is in a bad state of ruin, its floor heaped with debris from ceiling and sides. Its roof is one immense slab of rock sloping with the strata. Through its north-east Avail the stream breaks, descending into the blackness with a dull reverberating roar; and fifty feet beyond this the passage turns north again where you must descend a rock-face of some twelve feet. On it are natural footholds as if cut with a chisel, but persons unaccustomed to climbing are advised to use a rope to steady the descent. Here the brook is heard far down rushing through some rock-cut with a dull intermittent pounding like the blows of a giant sledge-hammer. Forty feet to the right through a passage about 2 feet high, you creep into the Dropping Cave, so named from the water dropping everywhere from the roof. The floor is composed of rock-fragments and the walls and ceilings of dark blue limestone streaked with white calcite.
At the eastern end of the Dropping Cave is a narrow passage between fallen rock affording squeezing room, 20 feet long, 1½ to 2 feet wide and 3 to 4 feet high. It leads to the Witch's Ball Room, a cavern roughly triangular in shape with sides of about 60 feet and an estimated height of 50 feet. On the floor is an enormous fallen rock with a generally level surface. On all sides except that of the passage are deep cracks choked with rocks but exposing pitchblack holes leading down to where the underground stream roars threateningly. The place is weird and uncanny in the extreme. Goethe had some such vision for the scene of his Witch's Kitchen in "Faust," and it might so have been appropriately named. For Shakespeare's immortal witches danced upon a desolate heath.
Leaving the Witch's Ballroom, the passage leads south-easterly for 125 feet where the ways part. Its upper end is a vaulted chamber from 15 to 20 feet wide and about 20 feet high, whose floor is composed of broken blocks of crystallized limestone, dark-blue veined with white calcite. Its lower end is between limestone strata from 3 to 7 feet apart with irregular floor of broken boulders and slabs. Both roof and floor are water-worn. They descend until they meet some 20 feet below. The muffled roar of the stream is heard on the left. On the right side of the long passage we have been describing, three separate smaller passages lead to a common goal, two funnel-shaped chambers the farthest one known as the Pit.
It is now necessary to return to the surface and seek ingress through Entrance No. 3, just east of the Gorge and close by Lookout
