"Do you hear her?"
"I heard that voice before and it charmed me wonderfully. Who is the singer?"
Instead of answering, the blind boy stopped and shouted with all the force of his lungs: "Nela! Nela!" and the name was repeated by a hundred echoes, some quite close, others faint and distant. Then, putting his hands to his mouth for a speaking-trumpet, he called out:
"Do not come to me, I am going that way. Wait for me at the forge—at the forge!"
He turned to the doctor again and explained:
"Nela is a girl who goes about with me; she is my guide—my Lazarillo. When it was dusk we were coming home together from the great meadow—it was rather cool, so, as my father forbids my walking out at night without a cloak, I waited in Romolinos' cabin, and Nela ran home to fetch it for me. After staying some little time in the hut, I remembered that I had a friend coming to see me at home and I had not patience to wait for Nela, so I set out with Choto. I was just going down La Terrible when I met you. We shall soon be at the forge now and there we must part, for my father is not pleased when I go home late, and Nela will show you the way to the works."
"Many thanks, my little friend."
The tunnel had brought them out at a spot even more wonderful than that they had left. It was an enormous gulf or chasm in the earth, looking like the result of an earthquake; but it had not been rent by the fierce throbs of planetary fires, but slowly wrought by the laborious pick of the miner. It looked like the interior of a huge shipwrecked vessel, stranded on the shore, and broken across the waist by the breakers, so as to bend it at an obtuse angle. You could fancy you saw its ribs laid bare, and their ends standing up in an irregular file on one side. Within the hollow hull lay huge stones, like the relics of a cargo tossed about by the waves, and the deceptive light of the moon lent so much aid to the fancy that Golfin could have believed that he saw among the relics of a ship's fittings, corpses half devoured by fishes, mummies, skeletons—all dead, silent, half-destroyed and still, as if they had long been lying in the infinite sepulchre of the ocean. And the illusion was perfect when he presently heard a sound of waters, and a regular splash like the dash of ripples in the hollow of a rock, or through the skeleton timbers of a wrecked vessel.