Presently, bearing to the right, we saw a cleft open in the ridge of the hill, and Geoletti, pointing to it, stopped us with a quivering cry:
“Ecco! Lapluietonnante!”
Thenceforth we moved on in a burdened silence. Even Valombroso seemed subdued under the weight of the responsibility approaching him. We neared the cleft, and the murmur of descending waters grew upon our ears. Then in a moment a crease seemed to open in the slope, and we recognised that we were coming to the brow of a falling gully or ravine, which divided the hill into two. The murmur increased, as we advanced, to a roar, tumultuous, astounding; and suddenly, ascending among rocks, we came out upon a little mossy sward, with the curved edge of a cataract whirling beyond it, like a section of a huge half-buried fly-wheel. It poured over a ledge a couple of yards above us, and, as one could see by peering cautiously, plunged in one unbroken fall of fifty feet or more into the sharp corner of a wooded gorge. It came sweeping in the beginning through a great yat or gate in the rocks above—a sluice regulating the overflow of some vast cistern of the mountains—and, after rebounding from that first mad descent, went crashing stair by stair down into the green basements of the world, where it sped itself away in a flurry of foam.
Huge rocks toppled to the lip of the fall, and piled themselves landward in a fantastic jumble. They were cracked, and split, and creviced in a thousand directions, but, among all the fissures, there was none that, to an ordinary soul, seemed potential of revelations. Mr Shapter, looking about him with a very white face, put our common thought into words:
“It must have needed an ingenious as well as an adventurous spirit to discover the clue to this secret.”
“Signore,” said Geoletti proudly, “Milord was not the first.”
The man, exalted to these rocky attics which were his home, was become another being from the hang-dog creature of my knowledge. His eyes had brightened, his step become elastic, he walked like one entitled to the command of the expedition.
“Behold,” he said, “the door!”
In an instant he had sprung upon a ledge—we saw him stoop—and he was gone. But his voice rallied us from a resonant hollow:
“It is here! Com’!”