I think we all hung fire for an instant—a natural enough qualm. It was not the adventure in itself, but—merciful God! what, after all these years, were we expecting to find? One’s imagination, drifted to the very threshold at last, sickened as in the emanations from a charnel vault. Twenty years! and lying in what abnormal atmosphere—subject to what unspeakable transformation! It could have wrought of him surely nothing “rich and strange” like drowned Alonso? It——
I felt Valombroso pushing by me, and I held him back instantly, and took the leap—and almost struck against an upright slab of stone. Then I saw that behind this veiling slab there was a low-down aperture in the rock face, narrow and uninviting enough to one of my bulk. But Geoletti’s hand came through, and, with difficulty, guided me in—and instantly the thunder of the waters fell to a murmur.
“Stand up, signore,” he said whisperingly. “There is plenty room in here.”
I straightened myself nervously; but there was indeed no necessity for precaution. The narrow rent or gully in which we stood was just a disparted fracture in the mass of rock, extending from crown to base and from verge to verge. A man, though a Titan in height, might have walked its length unhurt.
“Animo!” whispered my guide. “You follow me down, sir, and we reach it ver’ soon.”
I felt him, as I thought, sinking from me, and caught at him like a frightened child.
“Si, si,” he said. “You shall see the light com’ at once.”
It appeared even with his words—an odd globing radiance, that throbbed and flickered on the walls of rock, like the glimmer of a distant torch to one lost in the labyrinths of a catacomb. But with our every downward step it dilated—broadened—drew nearer and steadier—and lo! at one stride its source was revealed—a square of green casement lit as it were by a rising dawn.
I halted, stupefied, as Geoletti halted. It was minutes before I could realise that we had reached, were actually standing in, the sleeping-room of death. But gradually understanding came to me, and I saw.
It was the oddest chamber—a sort of cave or embrasure (it might have been sixteen feet in width by a dozen in depth), opening upon the under-sweep of the cataract some two yards beneath its leap, and lit by the strangest window, it appeared, of green agitated spun glass. That ran for ever, as it seemed, off an invisible reel, and shook and fluctuated in its descent. I could hear the swish of its going like the tear of rain—it “droned like a hive”—my God! “And all you can see is the trees and the hills pulled crooked, like we saw ourselves in that looking-glass”—I saw them, warped eccentric demons of things, reaching and clawing and shrinking, as my father had seen them and described them to his friend twenty years ago—I saw them, and——