He only held me the closer. Indeed, speech was difficult, since the air was packed with smothering vapors. The desire to breathe was checked by an instinctive fear to inhale.
Christopher cautiously pushed out, and again we drifted free, The pole dipped and clicked and scraped.
But a change had come. The furnace roar had ceased; the waterfall grew louder. Most striking of all was the unearthly luminosity of the steam filling the tunnel. That vapor, rapidly chilling in the cold of the passage, increased in opaqueness, but glowed the more. Before long the light became radiant and faintly illuminating, and the air sweetened. I had known by Beelo’s breath on my cheek that his face was upturned to mine, and near. Thus it was that after long peering I found the light in his eyes. My arms were enclosing him.
“I see my lad!” I said in gladness.
A queer little movement of withdrawal began. I tried to hold him, but found no yielding. Gradually he slipped out of my clasp, and sat alone.
Christopher slowly took body in the haze, a ghostly Charon on the Styx. The color of the glow grew from white to rose, with an occasional effulgence of bluish purple. The surface of the earth knew no such tints in fire; these were royally plutonic. The black rocks overhead and on either hand assumed a vague, grim definition, and to my keyed fancy displayed grotesque suggestions. Blank spaces a shade darker than the grimacing, minatory rocks fell away; these I supposed to be cavernous reaches out of the passage, for from them came echoed multiples of the pole-sounds.
The temperature began to rise as the waterfall grew louder, the light more revealing, the haze weaker. We swung round a wide curve, and all at once a terrifying vision sprang forth in a blood-red light. Our stream opened into a small lake, which was violently churned by a cataract of crimson water brilliantly illuminated and plunging out of the overhead darkness into it. The roar was deafening.
Beelo, scrambling in terror to his feet, his eyes blazing with the red madness that packed the cavern, required a strong hand to subdue him. He struggled in my grasp, pointed frantically backward with implorings that we return, and fought my restraint with sheer animal desperation. Christopher’s conduct, though showing extraordinary exhilaration, betrayed no fear, but only a grimmer hold on our situation. With a rearward glance and the discovery that I was holding Beelo securely, he stood up, a gigantic red figure, and with all his might shot the raft forward into the maelstrom. The frail thing plunged in the surge, but Christopher’s eye and arm were sure. The suck of the water, curving downward where the cataract struck the pool, was cunningly avoided as he circled the rim of the lakelet, having as able work to do in avoiding the dripping rocks there as in keeping out of the breakers.
I thanked God there was light, formidable though it was; it helped me in my control of Beelo, whose struggles were becoming weaker, and enabled me to find a good grip on the raft, for there was danger of slipping off. Through all the wild lurching Christopher kept a sailor’s feet; and, although his back was toward me, I saw by his quick movements that all his shrewd forces were in the fight.
Whence came the light? It appeared to be in the cataract itself, a living flame in the heart of its greatest enemy. The water was joyously, terribly alive.