“Tell them,” said the Marquis, “to show us the way and I will give them the papers.”
“He says he wants one now, to do the trick,” I reported.
Solemnly the Marquis pointed to the rising sun.
“It is above the horizon—did he not see that it was not yet cleared of the earth when I enchanted?” he said. “Say that he shall make the spell at tomorrow’s sunrise, but never before again.”
The sorcerer, his eyes starting out of his head, half walked, half crawled to the Marquis’ feet and accepted the cigarette papers, trembling. He stowed them away in his charm bag and then made signs to us to follow. We went after him along the rim of the precipice to the very edge of the waterfall, and saw——
Well, after all!
Only a six-sided column of the black basalt—the sort of thing you see in photographs of the Irish Giant’s Causeway—that lifted out of its place as neatly as a finger out of a glove and left a hole through which a man might squeeze himself. And once squeezed through, a man came out—behind the waterfall.
There it hung in front of us, as we passed, like a gigantic crystal curtain, magnificent beyond all telling. And in the hollow at the back, where the water had worn the hard basalt away, foot by foot through countless æons of years, was the roughest of rough staircases, cut by native hands and leading down the cliff. Slippery wet with spray, perilous to the last degree and scarce passable for a white man’s foot, yet, after all, it was not quite impassable, or so we found. In an hour or less we were down at the bottom of the wall; the secret of the Stone Oven country was told.
More than that, the sorcerer had informed us as we went down that the Government station was a bare two days away, down the valley of the river that we had dimly discerned from the height. And we had potatoes enough to last us all the way. And the diamond was still ours.
“Heaven tempers the wind to the lame dog; we are well out,” said the Marquis, looking up at the top of the ridge as we paused in the river bed below. The sorcerer, far away against the skyline, was faintly visible, feeling his jaw.