noon
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 . All the way up we had played the boy 's game of spying for sights , with the honors about even . It was a question if Snake Gulch ever before had such a raking over . Despite its name , however , we discovered no snakes .