spoke in his most cold and decided
tone of voice.

"Calm yourself, my dear boy, and endeavor to use your reason. This
weapon, upon which we have fallen so unexpectedly, is a true <i>dague</i>,
one of those worn by gentlemen in their belts during the sixteenth
century. Its use was to give the <i>coup de grace</i>, the final blow, to the
foe who would not surrender. It is clearly of Spanish workmanship. It
belongs neither to you, nor to me, nor the eider-down hunter, nor to any
of the living beings who may still exist so marvelously in the interior
of the earth."

"What can you mean, Uncle?" I said, now lost in a host of surmises.

"Look closely at it," he continued; "these jagged edges were never made
by the resistance of human blood and bone. The blade is covered with a
regular coating of iron mold and rust, which is not a day old, not a
year old, not a century old, but much more--"

The Professor began to get quite excited, according to custom, and was
allowing himself to be carried away by his fertile imagination. I could
have said something. He stopped me.

"Harry," he cried, "we are now on the verge of a great discovery. This
blade of a dagger you have so marvelously discovered, after being
abandoned upon the sand for more than a hundred, two hundred, even three
hundred years, has been indented by someone endeavoring to carve an
inscription on these rocks."

"But this poniard never got here of itself," I exclaimed, "it could not
have twisted itself. Someone, therefore, must have preceded us upon the
shores of this extraordinary sea."

"Yes, a man."

"But what man has been sufficiently desperate to do such a thing?"

"A man who has somewhere written his name with this very dagger--a man
who has endeavored once more to indicate the right road to the interior
of the earth. Let us look around, my boy. You know not the importance of
your singular and happy discovery."

Prodigiously interested, we walked along the wall of rock, examining the
smallest fissures, which might finally expand into the much wished--for
gully or shaft.

We at last reached a spot where the shore became extremely narrow. The
sea almost bathed the foot of the rocks, which were here very lofty and
steep. There was scarcely a path wider than two yards at any point. At
last, under a huge over-hanging rock, we discovered the entrance of a
dark and gloomy tunnel.

There, on a square tablet of granite, which had been smoothed by rubbing
it