She paused, while this strange prophecy wrought a sadness very human on her face. Then she placed the circlet upon the head of the image.
Something now prompted me to lead the woman I loved to the man whose face she had seen in her dreams. Acting on this sudden impulse, I emerged from the shadows and said to the one so far above me, “He is there in the inner cave. He is there—my perfect man!”
As I pointed towards the buttress she turned her dark eyes on mine; her lips trembled, and her eyes burned with a light that was not for me. Then with a troubled and sorrowful sigh—yes, that sigh was for me—she said, “Wanaki! he was always mine.”
She moved slowly in the direction of my outstretched hand. She seemed to pause and flutter a moment on the verge of the shadows, then, with the same joyous cry in an unknown tongue that she had uttered in her vision, she flew to him, and, from the darkness, I heard her murmur his name, dwelling upon it as lovingly as her head now dwelt upon his breast.
“Kahikatea! Kahikatea!”
I turned and hastened down the marble steps, leaving Grey and his wife to make what they could of it. I would go out and kill someone—that negro wizard by choice—or be killed by someone, it mattered little. But at the thought of the Destroyer of Women—the Poisoner—I pulled up short in my chaos. Yes, everything mattered. From that evil source danger might still threaten the woman I loved. What meant the prophecy engraven on the talisman, that before the sun shone twice upon it she must withdraw into the sky? The other prophecies had been fulfilled, why not this? It was not fate. It could not be fate. It was a warning. Filled with a dread presentiment as dark as the utter darkness I passed through, I went down through the tunnels and reached the place to which we had climbed from the margin of the lake. The rope was still there, drawn up as I had left it, and the cataract was no longer thundering down from above. By this I knew that the hidden contrivance beneath the water had again been set in motion, and that both Te Makawawa and Ngaraki had passed out by the ‘way of the winged fish.’ For me there was no way but to descend by the rope, and when I stood on the margin of the lake below, I feared to leave the rope hanging there. Accordingly, I swung it over a projection near the recess where the torches were kept, so that no one could find it in the darkness.
When, a minute later, I passed out at the opening in the side of the mountain, the hideous yells of the savages beyond the Lion Rock told me that fierce battle was near, if it had not already begun.
CHAPTER XXIV.
ZUN THE TERRIBLE.
To reconnoitre the position of the two camps I determined to mount the back of the Lion from the valley side. I ran across the open space and climbed half-way up the flank of the great rock, but, finding it was impossible to reach the summit, I selected the tallest pine that grew on the side of the spur and went up it in all haste. When I reached the feathery top I found myself above the level of the Lion’s back, swayed by the wind to and from the topmost ledge. Here I had a clear view of the plain, where the savages of both camps were drawn up in two long lines facing each other. The war-dance was over, and the time had arrived for single warriors of each side to rush out, and, with wild gestures illustrative of the coming slaughter, to hurl taunts at the other.
But my attention was directed more particularly to a scene that was being enacted in the open space of the enclosure on the plateau not twenty yards from me. Ngaraki, who had evidently been unable to quiet the savages on the plain, had found his way into the hostile pa, where he now stood confronting a small band of chiefs, who, by their violent manner and occasional bursts of savage laughter, looked as if they had been drinking waipiro to rouse their utmost ferocity for the coming conflict.