y along the track we had previously
traversed, risking no divergence through overhaste, and carefully
examining all landmarks before deciding on any direction. Thus slowly
proceeding, I had the good fortune to come within sound of the cataract
as the sun was sinking behind the mountain ridges to my front; and
presently emerged from the woods at the very spot we had struck in our
former journey together.

A chilly twilight reigned in the ravine, and the noise that came up from
the ruin of the torrent seemed doubly accented by reason of it. The
sound of water moving in darkness has always conveyed to me an impression
of something horrible and deadly, be it nothing of more moment than
the drip and hollow tinkle of a gutter pipe. But the crash in this
echoing gorge was appalling indeed.

For some moments I stood on the brink of the slope, looking across at the
great knife of the fall, with a little shiver of fear. Then I shook
myself, laughed, and without further ado took my courage in hand, and
scrambled down the declivity and up again towards the cleft in the rocks.

Here the chill of heart gripped me again--the watery sliding tunnel
looked so evil in the contracting gloom. A false step in that humid
chamber, and my bones would pound and crackle on the rocks forty feet
below. It must be gone through with now, however; and, taking a long
breath, I set foot in the passage under the curving downpour that seemed
taut as an arched muscle.

Reaching the burnt recess, a few moments sufficed to restore my
self-confidence; and without further hesitation I dived under the inner
little fan-shaped fall--which was there, indeed, as Camille had described
it--and recovered my balance with pulses drumming thicker than I could
have desired.

In a moment I became conscious that some great power was before me.
Across a vast, irregular disc filled with the ashy whiteness of the outer
twilight, strange, unaccountable forms, misty and undefined, passed, and
repassed, and vanished. Cirrus they might have been, or the shadows flung
by homing flights of birds; but of this I could not be certain. As the
dusk deepened they showed no more, and presently I gazed only into a
violet fathomless darkness.

My own excitement now was great; and I found some difficulty in keeping
it under control. But for the moment, it seemed to me, I pined greatly
for free commune with the liberal atmosphere of earth. Therefore, I
dipped under the little fall and m