We arrived at last at a wide cavern with an arched domelike roof An aperture in the midst let in the light of heaven but this was overgrown with brambles and underwood which acted as a veil obscuring the day and giving a solemn religious hue to the apartment It was spacious and nearly circular with a raised seat of stone about the size of a Grecian couch at one end The only sign that life had been here was the perfect snowwhite skeleton of a goat which had probably not perceived the opening as it grazed on the hill above and had fallen headlong Ages perhaps had elapsed since this catastrophe and the ruin it had made above had been repaired by the growth of vegetation during many hundred summers The rest of the furniture of the cavern consisted of piles of leaves fragments of bark and a white filmy substance resembling the inner part of the green hood which shelters the grain of the unripe Indian corn We were fatigued by our struggles to attain this point and seated ourselves on the rocky couch while the sounds of tinkling sheepbells and shout of shepherdboy reached us from above At length my friend who had taken up some of the leaves strewed about exclaimed quotThis IS the Sibyls cave these are Sibylline leavesquot On examination we found that all the leaves bark and other substances were traced with written characters What appeared to us more astonishing was that these writings were expressed in various languages some unknown to my companion ancient Chaldee and Egyptian...
