"Is there not a cataract yonder?" asked Horace; it was the first time that he had addressed his jailer.
"Sheer two hundred feet over the rocks," was the reply; "we call it 'Cascata della Morte (the death fall),' for a miserable wretch was once whirled over the edge."
"And perished?" inquired Horace.
"As surely," answered Enrico, "as if he had flung himself from the top of St. Peter's or down into the crater of Vesuvius. The remains, when recovered from the stream in the valley yonder, scarcely retained semblance of the human form."
Horace hardly paid attention to the concluding words, he was so carefully surveying the path before him. He had left the thick wood behind him, and had now to pass along a ledge of rock, which seemed like a shelf jutting out of the mountain, and which overhung a precipice of whose depth there was not sufficient light to enable him to judge. To Horace a vast chasm of darkness appeared to spread to the right.
Here Enrico and his prisoner were challenged by a robber who had been left as a sentinel to guard this dangerous post.
"Chi va là?" (Who goes there?) cried the man.
Enrico gave the word "Morte," and passed on with his captive.
"I think that I might possibly find my way back from hence to the high road," thought Horace, "with the sound of the water to guide me, were I only freed from these shackles. But if a sentinel be always placed here on the watch, it would render escape well-nigh impossible. One blow would send one reeling over that rock into depths that it makes the brain dizzy to think of!"
Enrico now again struck into the forest, and here the path became so very intricate that Horace soon lost all idea even of the direction in which he was going, all clue by which he might find his way back. The path was so much tangled with thicket, that the progress of Enrico and his prisoner became necessarily very slow, and Horace soon became not only exhausted, but despairing. It was some time since a word had been exchanged, but as they toiled on through the brushwood, Enrico said abruptly to his companion: