Véronique listened, desperately expectant of what was coming, trying to guess, seeking to find some clue in Stéphane's eyes. He stood in front of her, looking at her as a man, in the hour of danger, looks at the woman he loves.
And suddenly she staggered and had to press her hand against the wall. It was as though the cave and indeed the whole cliff were bodily moving from its place.
"Oh," she murmured, "is it I who am trembling like this? Is it from fear that I am shaking from head to foot?"
Seizing Stéphane's hands, she said:
"Tell me! I want to know! . . ."
He did not answer. There was no fear in his eyes bedewed with tears, there was nothing but immense love and unbounded despair. He was thinking only of her.
Besides, was it necessary for him to explain what was happening? Did not the reality itself become more and more apparent as the seconds passed? A strange reality indeed, having no connection with commonplace facts, a reality quite beyond anything that the imagination might invent in the domain of evil, a strange reality which Véronique, who was beginning to grasp its indication, still refused to believe.
Acting like a trap-door, but like a trap-door working the reverse way, the square of enormous joists which was set in the middle of the cave rose, pivoting on the fixed axis by which it was hinged parallel with the cliff. The almost imperceptible movement was that of an enormous lid opening; and the thing already formed a sort of spring-board reaching from the edge to the back of the cave, a spring-board with as yet a very slight slope, on which it was easy enough to keep one's balance.
At the first moment, Véronique thought that the enemy's object was to crush them between the implacable floor and the granite of the ceiling. But, almost immediately afterwards, she understood that the hateful mechanism, by standing erect like a draw-bridge when hoisted up, was intended to hurl them over the precipice. And it would carry out that intention inexorably. The result was fatal and inevitable. Whatever they might try, whatever efforts they might make to hold on, a minute would come when the floor of that draw-bridge would be absolutely vertical, forming an integral part of the perpendicular cliff.
"It's horrible, it's horrible," she muttered.