The yawl glided slowly up between the closing walls of the Red Gap. No one spoke. The two boatmen were indifferent to the place. O'Brien and Paulton were lost in thoughts of diverse kinds, awakened by the spectacle of Mrs. Davenport on the Black Rock. None of the men was paying attention to the Gap.
At last a sudden darkness fell upon the boat. O'Brien and Paulton looked up. The sky was no longer overhead. A gloom of purple brown was above them. The light of day stood like a lofty, luminous pillar in their wake. They had entered the Red Cave.
The boatmen ceased rowing, and Phelan lit a torch.
For a few moments nothing could be seen but the blazing red torch flare against a vast black blank, and round the glowing red boat a narrow pool of glaring orange water.
No one moved. No sound informed the silence but the hiss of the torch and the profound sighs of distant, impenetrable hollows.
The water illumined near the boat looked trustworthy, denser than water, a ruddy platform with shadowy verge. No undulation moved over its face save a dulling ripple caused by the boat's imperceptible motion. The boat and figures in it seemed the golden boss of a fiery brazen shield hung in a night of chaos.
Alfred Paulton put his hand outward and downward. It touched the gleaming surface of the water. He drew his hand back with a start. The cold of the water froze his fingers, his soul. The water shone like solid metal, felt less buoyant than the ruddy air he breathed. Instead of resting on a firm plain of luminous beaten gold, the boat hung on a faint, thin fluid over a sightless abyss.
This was a terrible place. Here was nothing but space for thought--for visions and fears too awful to dwell upon. Nothing was surer than that no loathsome dangers lurked, or swam, or hung pendulous above. Nothing was surer than that the imagination crouched back from dreads which had never affrighted it before.
This water was only phantom water. It was no better than the spume of sea-mists held between invisible crags of blackness, of mute eternity. If one should fall out into that water, he would sink through it swift as lead through air. One would shoot down, and down, and down, giddy, but not stunned. One would sink--whither? Whither? To what fell intimacy with dripping rocks and clammy weeds and slime would one come? What agonising sense of impending gloom reaching infinitely upwards would lie upon one, as one fell! Would the falling ever cease? Never, never. Nor would one live, for to fall thus for a moment of time would serve to fill the infinite of eternity with chimeras of ebon adamant too foul for human eyes.
The oars dipped. The boat moved forward into the immeasurable vagueness of shadow--into this sleeping chamber of night. It glided over the silent floor between hushed arras, which saw neither the gaudy sun that drowns in light the tender whisperings of the sea, nor the silver moon that hearkens forlorn to the faint complainings of the weary waves, arras woven of the flame of earth's primal fire, and limned by night in the smoke of ancient chaos.