I could hear the rushing of water, below and to my left. A feeling of exultation filled me almost to bursting; I had at last discovered Duran's secret. I came to a stop, fearing to lose my exit. How I wished for my flashlight! I had come away leaving it aboard the Pearl.
I do not know how long I had tarried in that spot, when a beam of light struck down from above on my right. And then came sounds of some being up there, and the light approached.
I retreated into the narrow passage by which I had come, ready to scramble out if there should be need. But soon the slant of the light beams showed me that the lamp had passed to the left, and I ventured forward again, and peeked around a projection of rock.
There was Duran's blackened face in the light of a lantern, which he was in the act of hanging on some form of hook in the cavern wall. The vault, I saw, was high, and at least fifty feet wide. It was down near the water that Duran was; and I saw him stoop and put his hand into the stream; and he fished out some sort of packet which he laid on the cavern floor. Time after time he reached down into the rushing water, and took out a packet each dive, till he had a pile on the floor that would measure a peck.
At last Duran sat himself on the cavern's floor, and he busied himself with untying knots and separating the objects he dealt with in two piles. And next he rose to his feet and set to transporting one of his piles to some niche that was out of the field of my eye.
Duran's next procedure was to gather the other pile into a sack. And this he took in hand and forthwith began to move back toward my part of the cavern.
I wormed my way down in my passage again, and when I had got a little way from the cascade, I waited and listened. But he must have gone back the way he had come. I ventured in again.
When I poked my head out of the passage into the cavern, there was no sign of Duran. But the lantern still hung where he had fixed it, throwing its light about that space.
I now ventured down to the scene of Duran's labors. There, completely spanning the stream, and reaching down to its bed, was a network of some sort of tough fibre, reinforced with slender bamboo. Near at hand, in a niche, lay, in a pile near a foot high, short sections of bamboo as thick as my arm. I took up one in my hand. Even prepared as I was for the discovery, its weight nevertheless startled me; it might have been solid brass.
"At last this smells of the gold mine!" I thought to myself. He would hardly miss one of these. And after hefting in my hand a half-dozen more, to satisfy myself that all were loaded, I retained that first bamboo cylinder and hurried to my exit.