THE WHITE WATERFALL
We found the rope exceedingly useful now that we had decided to explore the place in search of a way out. It was reasonable to think that the floor of the cavern would contain innumerable fissures into which we might fall, and to guard against this we decided to make a life line out of the thirty yards of manilla we had luckily obtained. Allowing about five yards of rope between each two persons, I tied it in turn around the waist of Holman, Barbara, the Professor, Edith, and myself, and being thus prepared against a precipice in our path, Holman took the lead and we followed in single file as the tightening of the rope informed each one that the immediate leader was a safe distance in front.
"Is there any choice of direction?" asked Holman, pausing after he had taken half a dozen steps.
"I don't think so," I said. "Unless some one has an intuition regarding the path to liberty."
"Please let me pick the route," murmured Edith. "I am stretching out my arm, Mr. Holman; will you come here to me and feel the direction I am pointing in?"
We clustered round the girl, each one feeling her outstretched arm and then turning quickly toward the point indicated. I was glad that no one could see my own face at that moment. It was pathetic to think of any one choosing a route in that abyss of horror, and the trouble which the girl took to make sure that Holman would move off in the direction she pointed brought tears to my eyes.
"I—I might be silly in thinking it," she stammered, "but I believe—oh, please, Mr. Holman, try and walk in the direction I pointed in!"
"I certainly will try," said the youngster. "If I go wrong, you put me right, will you? I believe somehow that we're going to find a way out. I don't know the right path to it, but I've got a premonition we'll find it. Now we're off again."
We moved forward with anxious footsteps. Imagination furrowed the floor of that place with bottomless crevices, and the cold hand of fear gripped our hearts. It required a mental effort to move one foot past the other, and whenever one of the girls stumbled, her little cry of alarm brought untold agony to Holman and myself as we took a grip of the rope and braced ourselves against the happening which our excited minds expected any moment. We were walking hand in hand with dread—a dread that became greater when we thought that a false step of ours might drag to death the two women that we loved.
On, and on, and on, we bored into the horrible night. With blind footsteps we walked fearfully through the Stygian waves that rolled around us. The place seemed to be of enormous size, and in the dead silence that surrounded us our footsteps woke clattering echoes that appeared to mock our efforts to escape.
The air in places had a strange odour that reminded us of camphor. This peculiar smell seemed to be in certain stratas of the atmosphere through which we passed, and whenever our passage through these scented layers was unduly prolonged, we experienced a sensation that I can only liken to the near approach of seasickness. It made the girls sick and faint, but they walked on without complaining.
We struck the wall of the place after we had been walking for a period that we judged to be about three hours, and we decided to rest for a while. We sat close together upon the cold floor and endeavoured to cheer each other's spirits by constantly asserting that the air of the place made it reasonable to suppose that there must be some other entrance besides the hole through which Leith had lowered the three, and the fissure through which Holman and I had rolled down the gigantic ash pile. And the assertions seemed logical. The two entrances that we knew of opened into Leith's retreat, and it was hard to think that the air supply of the enormous cavern in which we were wandering could come through those two openings. We combatted our fears with this argument as we ate a morsel of the food we had received that morning, and feeling that he who has the biggest stock of hope has the biggest grip upon life, we endeavoured to make light of our misfortunes as we stumbled on again after a short rest.
But that impenetrable night produced a depression that we could not shake off. Imagination sprang ahead of the moment and pictured our final struggles. We fought with the nightmares that entered our minds, and conversation languished. We couldn't speak while the mental canvases were being rapidly coloured with scenes depicting our end in the darkness and the silence, where a grim fate would even deny one a last look at a dearly loved face. A silence came upon us that had the same effect as intense cold. Each in his own frozen husk of despair plodded forward with the idea that the others were so engrossed in their own thoughts that they were not inclined to answer when addressed. The darkness so completely isolated each person that after some hours of silence it required a tremendous effort to thoroughly convince the mind that one was walking with living people and not with phantoms.
It was after one of these intervals of silence that Barbara Herndon made a discovery that chilled our blood. She made some commonplace remark to her sister and received no reply. She repeated the observation, but it brought no comment. The happening seemed to drag the rest of us from the strange torpor, and we stopped. We sensed that Barbara Herndon was feeling her way toward her sister, and presently the younger girl gave a shriek of alarm that stirred a million echoes in that place of terror.
"Edith!" she shrieked. "Edith! Edith! Where are you?"
Holman and I clawed fiercely upon the rope, moving toward each other in an effort to find a quick solution for the mystery. We collided violently as we reached the spot where the rope had circled Edith Herndon's waist, and we stood, stunned and speechless, as we fingered the cord. In some manner, probably severed by a knifelike projection of rock, the loop which I had knotted around her body had been cut through, and the rope had fallen unnoticed from the waist of the weary girl!
"Great God!" I cried. "Where did we lose her? What way did we come?"
The questions were ridiculous. The numbing influence of the place had made us walk for an hour or so in complete silence, and it was impossible to say when she had lost her position in the line. And now, as we moved round and round, endeavouring to peer into the blackness, we lost all sense of direction. Each had a different notion about the way we had come. While we were moving forward, our combined efforts to walk straight ahead made it impossible for one to turn and go in an opposite direction, but in the few moments of our excitement as we turned and twisted in clawing for the loop where Edith had been tied, we became bewildered. We didn't know in which direction to turn in searching for the lost one!
"What'll we do?" cried the Professor. "Do something! Quick! Find her! Find her!"
I took a great breath and yelled her name into the darkness. The sound thundered through the place like the noise made by a freight train. Again and again I screamed it, and the million devils in the place shrieked the name in mockery. I exhausted myself in my mad efforts to send my voice to her ears.
Holman gripped my arm when I had worked myself into an insane frenzy, and he begged me to be quiet.
"Barbara thought she heard an answer," he cried. "Listen! There it is again!"
It was Edith! Her voice came to us like a thread of silver, and with no thought of the bottomless crevices that might be in our path, we charged blindly toward the spot from which her cry had come.
It seemed ages before we met her. The sounds puzzled us, but at last we gripped her hands, and the Professor and Barbara, hysterical with joy, sobbed their thanks into the gloom.
"I don't know how the rope became undone," cried Edith. "I didn't find out that I had become separated from the rest of you till I attempted to draw your attention to the waterfall."
"To the what?" I questioned.
"To the waterfall," repeated the girl. "Did you pass it? It is a beautiful little waterfall, and the water flows over a white limestone rock that makes it sparkle like so many fireflies in the dark."
I cannot explain what happened to me at that moment. Some veil within my mind was torn away by the few words that the girl had uttered. I was back upon Levuka wharf, lying under the copra bag where Holman had found me, and for a moment I could not speak as the subconscious mind flung a score of half-forgotten incidents into my conscious area.
"It is the White Waterfall!" I yelled. "It is the White Waterfall that the Maori sang of on the wharf at Levuka! He was warning Toni, and Toni was killed by Soma because he knew! It is the way out! We're saved! We're saved! It is on the road to heaven out of Black Fernando's hell!"
