“Here, stop!” I cried, as a sudden feeling of delight shot through me. “I can see daylight yonder.”
“Bravo! Well done, Nat!” cried my uncle. “It’s a long way off, but there’s a faint gleam yonder in the direction from which that sound of falling water comes. Let me lead now, Cross. I think I can manage without a light.”
“Better feel about well, sir, with your stick,” said the carpenter. “That hole I trod in was rather awkward.”
“I’ll mind,” said my uncle; “follow me close,” and he began to wade in the direction of the faint gleam of light.
“Did you get wet, Pete?” I said.
“Wet, sir? He pulled me right under water. It’s buzzing in my ears now.”
“Better than being pulled under by a water-snake, Pete,” I said, and he gave a shivering shudder as we followed on without either coming across the hole, and at the end of a quarter of an hour the light ahead was rapidly growing plainer, while the roar of falling water became louder and echoed through the vast cavern over whose watery floor we progressed.
In another half-hour’s slow wading, we were able to make out our position, one which now became more striking minute by minute, for we could see that we were in a vast chasm whose bottom was the rushing foaming river along which we were wading. It was some fifty feet wide, and the roof overhead nearly as much, while right in front, at the distance of a couple of hundred yards, and facing us as it now sent ever-changing flashes and reflections of light into the cavern, was the great fall whose waters thundered as they dived from somewhere out of sight into a huge basin whose overflowings formed the underground river along which we journeyed.
The scene became more beautiful minute by minute, the noise more deafening; and at last we stopped short, warned by the increasing depth of the water, and the sight of the great pool into which the cascade thundered down.
We were standing in the beautiful green twilight water to the middle, but no one for a time wished to stir, the scene was so grand, made more beautiful as it was from time to time by a gleam of sunshine shooting down across the faint mist of spray which floated upwards, and wherever this bright light fell we had glimpses of what seemed like fragments of a broken rainbow.