The daughter of the dawn

by William Reginald Hodder

With a great weight of awe and darkness upon me, I rose from the rock resolved to reach that grating at the end of the gulf and there restore myself with the ungarnished daylight. It was not, however, without some recollection of what old Te Makawawa had said about the Vile Tohungas of the Pit that I felt my way along the narrow ledge, which seemed to have been hewn with design as an approach to the grating. I felt I was going the right way to be cooked and eaten by these same Vile Tohungas, wherever they might be in the darkness, but, although naturally of a nervous disposition, I was always careless whether I ran into unknown dangers with the right foot first or the left, so I continued my way, holding on to the jagged points of the wall with my right hand, while choosing every footstep with the utmost care, for I was hardly the fool to risk a fall into the abyss, and look for its ground floor head first without a light.

It took me nearly half an hour to travel that two hundred yards, but once within fifty paces of the huge grating I could see more distinctly. Soon I reached a spot beneath those tremendous bars, and, looking up at them against the clouded sky without, saw clearly that they must have been fashioned by the hand of man at some remote period of the world’s history, concerning which our bravest anthropologists are reticent, or speak only in whispers. Haeckel could show no photographs of his speechless men of Lemuria, and many would have laughed him down. Yet, if Haeckel had been with me on that never-to-be-forgotten day when I explored that colossal place, he would have wept for joy over those mighty stone bars, obviously hewn by the hand of man out of the everlasting granite. There were four of them, each fully thirty feet high. In places the action of air and moisture had worn them very thin, and, as I seated myself on a broad ledge that reminded me of a window sill, I heard the rising wind making strange, weird chords as it swept these vibrating bars like the strings of a gigantic harp.

The music of the wind playing through the bars of the giants’ window reminded me of that ghostly hum of a phantom race which I had heard in my dream. It rose and died away like a voice from the distant past, calling up that peculiar feeling of “long, long ago,” until in my own civilised way I became a veritable Tiki, and admitted that the ancient temple was haunted by the wailing spirits of the giant sorcerers of old. The men who had bound that great spar down with that huge round stone—what else could have done it?—the men who had made the secret way by which Ngaraki had disappeared beneath the lake, who had carved the pathway out of the side of the abyss and fashioned this stupendous window—the men of old who had done all this still haunted that profound darkness down there, in which, perhaps, there were mysteries of a stranger kind. Perhaps! certainly, at least, there was a pathway leading down into the darkness on the opposite side to the one by which I had come. I could see that plainly.

At length I roused myself from my reverie, and passing through the stone bars, stood on a jagged platform without. Below was a great fissure, and, facing me about forty yards beyond, was the rock which formed the further boundary of this fissure. Its crest was just above the horizon of the outer world. The depth of the fissure I could not see, but it stretched some distance away to the left, where its expansion was hidden by a bend in its course. On the left of the rock on which I stood was nothing but a small crag, and beyond that the mountain wall, but on the right was a rugged pathway, shelving fearfully, but still a pathway, leading round the head of the fissure to the other side.

I determined to see what came of this, and taking off my boots to get a better foothold on the shelving rock, I followed it. I never fully realised what a coward I was until I got to the other side and found the cold perspiration rolling off my face. It was a blind pathway—at least it seemed so, for it came to a sudden halt, as if the pre-historic workmen had given it up. I went down on my chest and looked over, but saw nothing but the gloomy bottom of the gulf far below. I even took my little pocket mirror and held it so that I could see beneath the rock below, but could make out nothing except a ledge and a hole in the rock about twenty feet down. If it ever had been a secret way it had long since been abandoned. No man could ascend from below, yet it was possible one might reach that hole by means of a rope. I retraced my steps and re-suffered my cold perspiration till I reached the stone bars again.

A glance at my watch showed me it was now nearly twelve o’clock. I had nothing to eat, so dinner was out of the question. The next best thing was a smoke. There was no use in going back into the cavern, for I had explored everything there except the lake, and candidly I did not feel equal to exploring under water in the pitchy darkness, with a cataract overhead and an outlet into an abyss below. Accordingly, I sought out a little recess where the inner pathway joined the giants’ window sill, and there put on my boots, after which I lighted my pipe and smoked the smoke of the hungry.

The faint roar of the cataract within the cavern fell upon my ears with a reassuring sound, for I knew that in all probability its cessation would mark the time when Ngaraki would come down from his unknown haunts above, perhaps to put up the spar again and leave the exit clear. The hours passed slowly, but there was no change. Six o’clock came, but still the cataract roared on with a dull, muffled sound.

Whether it was the monotonous murmur of the falling water, or the wailing music of the wind in the great stone bars, I do not know, but I fell into a sleep, from which I was awakened some time later by the full moon, which had just risen above the further boundary of the fissure, and was shining full upon me. Its pale, silver light flooded into the far interior of the cavern, and fell upon the crags of the buttress, the sides of the basin, part of the spar, and the lake beyond in the distance.

As I looked at these things and collected my faculties, I suddenly realised that the roar of the cataract had stopped. The wind had fallen; it no longer moaned in the stone bars. All was as silent as the grave of things long dead.

My first thought was to see if the passage out of the mountain was clear. Accordingly I made my way along towards the buttress—part of the pathway was in the moonlight—but when I reached it I found that the great spar was still hanging horizontal above the abyss, while the moon rays flooding on to the surface of the lake showed the water boiling up from below as when I had first seen it.