"Now we will go on our way," said Sange Moarte. "The rock is moist now, and the descent will be all the easier."
After the lapse of half-an-hour, the wanderers found themselves at the mouth of a stream.
A wondrous corridor lay open before them. The brook sprang from a hot spring, which, after racing down the deep valleys, buried itself beneath icebergs and snowdrifts. But the hot water had bored a passage through the ice, constantly melting the frozen mass around it with its warm stream, so that only the thick outermost layer remained, which, constantly renewed by the cold air without, and as constantly dissolved by the hot stream within, grew into a sort of transparent crystal arcade with huge dependent glittering stalactites above the stream.
Through this channel Sange Moarte now led his companions.
Clement could not but call to mind the fabulous fairy palace where spellbound mortals only see the light of day through transparent waters.
Wading thus in the bed of the stream, they reached a point where the bright arcade began to grow dark. Its transparent roof grew thicker and thicker, passing gradually into an ever deeper blue, till at last it became quite black, and the murmuring of the stream was the wanderers' only guide. As they advanced, with their hose tucked up to their knees, into the ever-darkening darkness, they felt the water getting hotter and hotter, till at last they heard a hissing sound and saw once more the daylight streaming through the rocky chasm, through which the brook rushed down into its subterraneous cave.
Here, with the help of some dangling shrubs, they scaled the hillside to avoid the onslaught of the boiling spring, and after a brief exertion found themselves on the other side of the mountain, in a deep, well-like valley.
This is the Gradina Dracului.
It is a perfectly round dell, shut in on every side by a wall of perpendicular cliffs more than six hundred feet high. Whoever wishes to look down from above, must approach the edge of the rock lying on his stomach, and even then must have a good head not to be seized by vertigo. At the bottom of this dell the flowers have an amaranthine bloom. When the snow is falling thickly all around, and the ice is sparkling everywhere else, here in the depths of the hardest winter may then be seen those dark-green flowers with broad, indented petals, and those little round-leaved trees the like of which are to be met with nowhere else in this district. Just at this time too the leather-leaved Nymphaea opens its light-yellow calices here; the grass, both summer and winter, is of the brightest green; and the wild laurel climbs high up into the crevices of the rocks, and casts its red berries down into the valley, when Nature all around is cold and dead.
Throughout the winter this dell is clothed with the rarest flowers. Therefore the Wallach calls it "the Devil's Garden," and fears to approach it.