Five or six hundred steps from the farmhouse at home, in the middle of open country, scattered over with dwarf juniper trees, where the rocks jutted out of the earth all round, as the bones of a consumptive patient stick out through his skin, an excavation suddenly opens similar to those one meets at every turn in the Campagna of Rome. This excavation looks like a cave of Cume or an air-hole of Avernus. When you bend over its opening you can hear the roar which astonishes one on holding a shell to the ear only this roar is on a greater and more frightful and more gigantic scale; then, if you try for a moment to pierce through the darkness, which increases as the cavern deepens, you can make out a rock, sticking up perpendicularly, about twenty-five or thirty feet below you, and burying its base in the bowels of the earth at a steep angle.
This is the entrance to the quarry.
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