"Who can tell? This place seems to be a wilderness."
"Yes; a forest primeval."
"What," said I, "are we destined to find down there?"
"Things stranger, Bill, in all likelihood, than any explorer ever found anywhere in that strange world above us."
"No gogrugrons, I hope."
Rhodes laughed.
"Gogrugron!" said Drorathusa.
And I saw that horror and fear again in her eyes.
The cavern had come out high up on a broken, jagged wall, which went beetling up for hundreds of feet, up to the roof, which arched away over the landscape before us. We were fully half a thousand feet above the floor, which was a mass of luxuriant forest. Glimpses were caught of a stream down to the left, possibly the one which we had followed for so long. I judged the place to be over a mile wide; Rhodes, however, thought that it was perhaps not quite a mile in the widest part. Down this enormous cavern, the eye could range for three or four miles, at which distance the misty light drew its veil over the forest, the dark walls, and the roof arching across.
At times the light quivered and shook and there were strange flickerings, and dartings of opalescent streaks through it—streaks ineffably beautiful and yet, strangely enough, terrible too, terrible as the blades of plunging swords in hands savage and murderous.