"Now, madam," said Captain Lingo, "I will help you under."
Toby and Mr. Punch, feeling that the pirate knew the way better than they did, resigned Aunt Amanda to his care, not without some fear that the villain might deliberately drown her on the way through. He made her kneel in the water, and then lie flat; and with a strong arm he pulled her under the water-fall and out of sight.
"You're next," said a deep voice to Freddie, and Ketch the Practitioner seized him and plunged with him under the water; and in an instant they had disappeared beyond the fall.
One after another the miserable, shivering victims were assisted by the pirates under the water, and one by one disappeared. The Old Codger with the Wooden Leg was the last, and one of the pirates returned for him. When he had followed the others, the great half-dark chamber remained as it had been before, in its empty solitude and gloom, without an ear to hear the steady rush of water pouring incessantly down its fall.
On the outer side of that rushing fall was a scene very different indeed. The pirates and their captives stood under a blazing sun, looking across a wide and beautiful landscape. Behind them, in the side of a high hill overgrown with bushes, was the hole by which they
had come forth, and across the inside of this hole was the curtain of falling water. Freddie wondered how anyone had ever had the courage to plunge for the first time through that curtain into the unknown dark. The heat of the sun was very grateful, and the clothing of the soaked travellers began to dry perceptibly at once. The pirates took off their rubber suits.
Beneath the observers the ground sloped down into a broad valley, chequered with grass meadows and dotted with trees. To their left, as they gazed out across the landscape, the ground rose from the valley by easy stages to a great height, no doubt forming the landward side of the black cliff which bordered the ocean.
To the right, the country rolled gently away from the valley in a vast unbroken forest, a shimmering green ocean of tree-tops as far as the eye could see. Far, far off where the forest rose in a kind of mound, Freddie thought he could see what looked like the top of a round tower, just emerging above the haze of trees.
The pirates and their captives were standing on a little grassy plateau, on which were great boulders here and there, and a few wide leafy trees. Two or three fallen logs were lying near the edge of the plateau, where it began to slope downward.
Captain Lingo stepped out of his rubber suit, spread out his fine white handkerchief on a boulder to dry, and twiddled his moist fingers daintily in the air, after which he blew on his finger-nails and polished them on his shirt-sleeves.