The first lake approached is called the Dead Sea. Here you gaze
upward at vast cliffs sixty feet high and one hundred feet long,
above which you go with cautious tread, then up a stone stairway
that leads to the river Styx, a body of water forty feet wide
and four hundred feet long, which is crossed by a natural
bridge. A beach of finest yellow sand extends for five hundred
yards to Echo river, the largest of all, being from twenty to
two hundred feet wide, ten to forty feet deep, and about three
miles long.
You never can forget your trip on this river of Stygian
darkness. With oil lanterns that emit but a feeble flickering
flame you see ghostlike figures, goblins and grim cave monsters
that loom before you; your imagination peoples these
subterranean halls and their titanic masonry with fantastic
forms of its own creation. At this place these lines from Poe
will perhaps flash through your mind:
By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where the Eidalon, named night
On a black throne reigns upright;
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule,
From a wild, weird chink sublime,
Out of space and out of time.
When you speak loudly your words have a weird sepulchral tone
that echoes far and near through the spacious halls and avenues
that makes the black pall of mystery all the more uncanny.
