"I suggest, Bill, that we go up and take a look-see."
I nodded. So far as I could perceive, one way was just as good—I mean just as bad—as the other.
That shelf was, as a whole, not an easy thing to negotiate, and some spots made my head swim and made me wish mightily that I was somewhere else. Undoubtedly, some thousands of years in the dim and mysterious past, the stream once flowed at this level; at any rate, this is the only theory that, in my opinion, will explain that ledge, and something which we were soon to discover. Not that I ever spent much time in worrying about theories and hypotheses; the facts themselves gave me enough to think about, enough and to spare.
At times the shelf would be twenty or thirty feet in width or even more, and then the going was easy enough; but at other times the space would contract to something like a yard, and then it was quite another story. Indeed, once or twice Milton Rhodes himself, an experienced and fearless mountain-climber, was glad, I believe, that the way was no narrower. As for what those moments meant to me—well, I never posed as a mountaineer or a steeple-jack.
For fifteen minutes or so, I believe, we toiled along that terrible place, and then of a sudden came the end. Nothing before us but the bare precipitous rocky wall and the black profundity of the chasm, and up above a ghostly thing crawling, crawling down, ever down, and filling the place with thunder—the fall itself. Where did the water come from? From one of the glaciers? And, a question more interesting, where did it go?
"We must go back," said Milton Rhodes. "The road to Drome does not lie here."
Scarcely had we turned when I started, and then I cried out sharply.
"Look!" I said, pointing with my alpenstock down the cavern. "Look at that!"
Far down the cave a light was gleaming, where a moment before no light had been. And on the instant another shone beside it. A second or two, however, and they had vanished.
"Moving," was Rhodes' explanation. "The bearers of those lights moved behind something."