By the time the task was nearly finished, I was in a state of nerves equal to seeing or hearing anything—no doubt long fasting had shaken a mind usually calm and callous enough—and therefore you will understand how the blood fled from my limbs and the cold perspiration burst out upon my forehead, when, having scarified myself with traditions of ghouls and cave devils, I turned to listen for a moment to the dull rumble of the thunder and the melancholy wave-like sough of the wind in the trees, even here audible, and beheld, twenty paces from me, in the shadows, a vast, shaggy black form, grim and broad as no mortal ever was, and red and wavering in the uncertain light, seven feet high, and possessed of two fiery, gleaming eyes that were bent upon my own with a horrible fixity!

I and that monstrous shadow glared at each other until my breath came back, when, leaning a moment more against the side of the cavern, I suddenly snatched the torch from its cleft with a yell of consternation that was multiplied a thousand times by the echoes until it was like the battle-cry of a legion of bad spirits, and started off in the supposed direction of the entrance. But before ten yards had been covered in that headlong rush, I tripped over a loose stone, and in another moment had fallen prone, plunging thereby the spluttering torch into one of the many little pools of water with which the floor was pitted. With a hiss and a splutter the light went out, and absolute darkness enveloped everything!

Just where I had fallen stood a round boulder, a couple of yards broad, it had seemed, and some five feet high. I sprang to this, instinctively clutching it with my hands, just as those abominable green eyes, brighter than ever in the vortex, got to the other side, and hesitated there in doubt. Then began the most dreadful game I ever played, with a forfeit attaching to it not to be thought of. You will understand the cave was absolute sterile blackness to me, a dim world in which the only animated points were the twin green stars of the cruel ghoul, my unknown enemy. As those glided round to one side of the little rock, I as cautiously edged off to the other. Then back they would come, and back I went, now this way and now that—sometimes only an inch or two, and sometimes making a complete circle—with every nerve at fullest stretch, and every sense on tiptoe.

Why, all this time, it may be asked, did I not run for the entrance? But, in reply, the first frightened turn or two round the boulder had made chaos of my geography, and a start in any direction then might have dashed me into the side of the cave prone, at the mercy of the horrible thing whose hot, coarse breath fanned me quicker and quicker, as the game grew warm and more exciting. So near was it that I could have stretched out my hands, if I had dared, and touched the monstrous being that I knew stood under those baleful planets that glistened in the black firmament, now here and now there.

How long, exactly, we dodged and shuffled and panted round that stone in the darkness cannot be said—it was certainly an hour or more; but it went on so long that even in my panting stress and excitement it grew dull after a time, so monotonous was it, and I found myself speculating on the weather while I danced vis-à-vis to my grim partner in that frightful pastime.

“Yes,” I said, “a very bad storm indeed [once to the left], and nearly overhead now [right]. It is a good thing [twice round and back again] to be so

Well, it could not have lasted forever, and I was nearly spent. The boulder seemed hot and throbbing to my touch, and the floor was undulating gently, as it does when you land from a voyage; already fifty or sixty green eyes seemed circling in fiery orbits before me, when an extraordinary thing befell.

The thunder and lightning had been playing wildly overhead for some minutes, and the rain was coming down in torrents (even the noise of rushing hill streams being quite audible in that clear, resonant space), when, all of a sudden, there came a pause, and then the fall of a Titanian hammer on the dome of the hill, a rending, resounding crash that shook mother earth right down to her innermost ribs.

At the same instant, before we could catch our breath, the whole side of the cave opposite to us, some hundred paces of rugged wall, was deluged with a living, oscillating drapery of blue flame! That magnificent refulgence came down from above, a glowing cascade of light. It overran the rocks like a beautiful gauze, clinging lovingly to their sinuousness, and wrapping their roughness in a tender, palpitating mantle of its own winsome brightness. It ran its nimble, fiery tendrils down the veins and crevices, and leaped in fierce playfulness from point to point, spinning its electric gossamers in that vacuum air like some enchanted tissue spread between the crags; it ran to the ledges and trickled off in ambient, sparkling cascades, it overflowed the sandy bottom in tender sheets of blue and mauve, feeling here and there with a million fingers for the way it sought, and then it found it, and sank, as silent, as ghostly, as wonderful as it had come!

All this was but the work of an instant, but an instant of such concentrated brightness that I saw every detail, as I have told you, of that beautiful thing. More; in that second of glowing visibility, while the blue torch of the storm still shone in the chamber of the underground, I saw the stone by me, and beyond it, towering amazed and stupid, with his bulky strength outlined against the light, a great cave bear in all his native ruggedness! Better still, a bowshot on my right was the narrow approach of the entrance—and as the gleam sank into the nether world, almost as quick as that gleam itself, with a heart of wonder and fear, and a foot like the foot of the night wind overhead, I was gone, and down the sandy floor, and through the gap, and into the outer world and midnight rain I plunged once more, grateful and glad!