The descent was sheer for twenty feet, and so smooth as not to afford a single foothold along its entire face. From the rippling water at its base rose a jagged ledge of black rocks, which Peveril recognized the moment his eyes fell upon them.
"Of all mysteries this is the most inexplicable!" he cried; "and yet it surely is the very place."
As he spoke he turned to look at the curtain which he had let fall behind him, and very nearly tumbled from the ledge in amazement at what he saw. Instead of the sheet of dingy canvas that he expected, he was confronted by a sheer wall of cliff, stained the same rusty red as that extending for miles on either side, and apparently not differing from it in any particular. He was compelled to reach out his hand and touch it before he could dispel the illusion and convince himself that only a sheet of painted canvas separated him from the cavern he had just left.
"It is one of the very cleverest things in the way of a hiding-place I ever heard of," he said, half aloud; "and now I understand the disappearance of that girl. But where on earth did she come from? How did she get here? and where did she go to? Could it have been she whom I heard singing a little while ago? If so, where is she now? Not in the cavern. That I'll swear to."
Peveril might have speculated at much greater length concerning this mystery had not the sight of water that he could not reach so aggravated his thirst that for the moment he could think of little else. All at once he hit upon a plan, and two minutes later had drawn aside the curtain, swung out the little derrick, and was letting himself down towards the ledge by means of its tackle.
Lying flat on the rough rocks, he drank and drank of the delicious water, lifting his head for breath or to gaze ecstatically about him, and then thrusting it again into the cool flood for the pleasure of feeling the water on his hot cheeks.
At length a slight sound caused him to turn quickly and look upward. To his dismay and astonishment the tackle by which he had lowered himself had disappeared. Unless he could make up his mind to swim for miles through water of icy coldness, he was as truly a prisoner on that ledge of rock as ever he had been in the underground depths from which he had so recently escaped.