I saw here and there in the rocky walls. Lotta
observed my perplexity and laughed heartily.

"Well, Dick, where is the treasure?" she banteringly demanded. "Surely
it is not so very difficult to find, now that you have been told of its
existence?"

"Oh, I'll find it, never fear, young woman!" I answered; "but I confess
that it is so ingeniously concealed that I doubt whether anyone ignorant
of its existence would find it, except by the most extraordinary
accident." And therewith I proceeded to grope and feel about in the
various fissures and cavities with which the rocky walls of the small
cavern were honeycombed, but without success. At length, to my great
chagrin, I was obliged to abandon the search and confess myself beaten.

"Yet it is very simple--when you know!" remarked Lotta, in high glee at
my discomfiture. "Follow me!" And, dropping upon her hands and knees,
she proceeded to crawl into one of the cavities that I had been
searching, and which I should have declared was not nearly capacious
enough to receive a full-grown man. Nevertheless Lotta completely
disappeared within it, and I after her. When I had fairly entered the
cavity I found that what had appeared to be its back wall, and which
gave it the appearance of being only about two feet in depth, was really
one of two side walls, a narrow passage turning sharp off to the right,
just wide enough and high enough to travel through comfortably on one's
hands and knees. It wound round in what seemed to me to be about a
half-circle of about fifty yards in diameter, and its inner end gave
access to an enormous cavern, very roughly circular in shape, and about
four hundred feet across in either direction.

It was a most extraordinary place. One of the peculiarities was that,
instead of being pitchy dark, as one would naturally expect it to be in
such a place, the whole interior was suffused with a very soft greenish
twilight, quite strong enough, when one's eyes became accustomed to it,
to permit one to see from one end of the cavern to the other with quite
tolerable distinctness. Where the light came from it was impossible to
say, for the roof of the cavern appeared to be formed, like the walls,
of solid rock; but from the fact that shafts of light were plainly
visible overhead, issuing from the walls and roof, I conjectured that
the light entered the cavern through rifts in the rock, and that its
greenish tinge was imparted to it by the foliage th