At that moment a dark figure crawled submissively to our feet. It was old Pellmelli.
His instinct for 'copy' had brought him on our track, and he began—
'As our representative, I am commissioned——'
Jambres (late 'Asher') turned from him, and he fell (still making notes) prone on his face, where we left him, as the pace was too good to inquire.
The mage now reconnoitred carefully the vast façade of the Hall of Egypt, and finally fixed his gaze on a perpendicular leaden column, adorned with strange symbols, through which (for it was a rainy night) raging torrents of water were distinctly heard flowing downwards to who knows what abysmal and unfathomable depths?
In this weird climate it was the familiar yet dreaded waterspout!
Jambres, with the feline agility of a catapult of the mountain, began to climb the perpendicular leaden channel to which he had called our attention, and of course we had to follow him. It was perfectly marvellous to see the ease and grace with which he skipped and hopped up the seemingly naked face of the wall. There were places indeed where our position was perilous enough, and it did not add to our cheerfulness to hear the horrid roaring and gurgling of the unseen and imprisoned waters that poured down the channel with a violence which seemed as if they might at any moment burst their bonds. Helped, however, by certain ledges which projected from the wall beneath square openings filled with some transparent substance, on which ledges from time to time we rested, we arrived at the steep crest, and paused for repose beneath the leafy shade of the roof-tree, Jambres lightly leading the way.
'Now,' said Jambres, 'comes the most delicate part of our journey.'
So indeed it proved, for the mage began rapidly to divest himself of his mysterious swathings. Wrapper by wrapper he undid, cerement on cerement, till both Leonora and I wondered when he would stop.
Stop he did, however, and, with a practised hand, shot his linen into one long rope, which he carefully attached to an erect and smoking pillar, perhaps of basaltic formation, perhaps an ancient altar of St. Simeon Skylitês. When all was taut, Jambres approached a slanting slope, smooth and transparent, perhaps of glacial origin. On this he stamped, and the fragments tinkled as they fell into unknown deeps. Then he seized the rope, let himself down, and from far below we heard his voice calling to us to follow him.