Even now the darkness began to shimmer with vague transient white gleams suggestive of apparitions, of gigantic human forms. At a word from the guide, Frank strode ahead down a steep declivity, and, pausing at last, stood in the centre of an oval-shaped apartment, glimmering white, with here and there a sudden crystalline sparkle. The lofty ceiling rose above like the interior of a dome.
The mountaineer waited with the other two, as if he felt that since Frank had usurped the lantern he might also assume the functions of a cicerone and exhibit the wonders of the cave. Lucia began to realise with a sinking heart that the mountaineer having decoyed Lloyd here for the purpose of wreaking now his frustrated vengeance, would not for one moment permit himself to be separated from his prospective victim. She once more grew anxious lest it would be impossible to speak to Lloyd apart, and began to scheme, to devise, rather than await, an opportunity to warn him.
Young Laniston, placed at a disadvantage which he had not anticipated, although he did not regret his manœuvre to keep possession of the precious light on which all their lives depended, hesitated for a moment—then he addressed himself to the methods by which the mountaineer had earlier displayed to the explorers the beauties of the sequestered place.
He took up from the ground a long pole with a short prong or fork at its end. He lifted the lantern high on this, and like a miracle the splendours of the underground scene burst forth. The walls were white and sparkled with calc-spar. The wondrous forces of nature, tirelessly building through the ages these unseen, unimagined, weird splendours, were still at work, and though great stalactites hung down from the lofty roof like a hundred chandeliers, the continual drip from these ponderous pendants, of the waters charged with lime, had not yet built up from the floor the stalagmites to form the columns in which they would one day meet. These stalagmites, now in process of development, had taken on strange, fantastic shapes. At the distance it was like a hall of glittering statuary. Lloyd pointed out, with all the zest of discovery, the similitudes which his keen imagination had discerned in the rugged rock. Now he discriminated a statesman-like figure, erect upon a column, gigantic, majestic, a scroll in his hand; here a great, rugged pedestal, where the waters had been received in a wide depression, supported an equestrian soldier mounted upon a rearing charger; his fancy descried an aboriginal group, a warrior—he was insistent on the distinctness of his plumed crest—with his tomahawk uplifted, his victim a-crouch at his feet; he pointed out Neptune, on the rocks, his trident in his hand, a dolphin sporting at his feet.
Somehow, all the vanished wonders of the world were lurking here, awaiting the magic touch of imagination to give them form and grace and bid them live anew. The mountaineer, impervious to these impressions, walled up in his limitations, seemed to listen stolidly, uncomprehendingly, as Lloyd, discoursing all unsuspicious, all undismayed, gaily discerned poems in the stones, and music in the dropping of the water, for they could discriminate the sound of the ripple of a rill, somewhere in the darkness, from the staccato fall of the drops from the stalactites, building ceaselessly the majestic architecture of the cavern.
"Listen, listen," said Lloyd smilingly, one hand uplifted, "was there ever anything more harmonious than that tinkling interlude with its appoggiatura of drops that comes always a piacere after the solemn, hesitating tones of the tema?"
The foreign phrases suggested a chance to her despair.
"Do you speak Italian or French?" she asked.
"No—nor English, either, I'm afraid. Wish I did," Lloyd replied, looking down at her, his face illumined in some stray shifting gleam of the lantern. "The only consolation is that I have not much to say anyhow. A few words will express my thoughts."
"Say," exclaimed Frank, from the centre of the floor of the Hall of Heroes—"it is as cold as Greenland down here, and as damp as a marsh."