We climbed till we were two hundred feet from the opening, yet we were not half-way to the dome.
Our horses, browsing in the sage far below, looked like ants.

So steep did the ascent become that we desisted; for if one of us had slipped on the smooth incline, the result would have been terrible.

Our voices rang clear and hollow from the walls.

We were so high that the sky was blotted out by the overhanging square, cornice-like top of the door; and the light was weird, dim, shadowy, opaque.

It was a gray tomb.
"Waa-hoo!" yelled Jones with all the power of his wide, leather lungs.
Thousands of devilish voices rushed at us, seemingly on puffs of wind.
Mocking, deep echoes bellowed from the ebon shades at the back of the cave, and the walls, taking them up, hurled them on again in fiendish concatenation.
We did not again break the silence of that tomb, where the spirits of ages lay in dusty shrouds; and we crawled down as if we had invaded a sanctuary and invoked the wrath of the gods.
We all proposed names: Montezuma's Amphitheater being the only rival of Jones's selection, Echo cave, which we finally chose.
Mounting our horses again, we made twenty miles of Snake Gulch by noon, when we rested for lunch.