t passion made my hands tremble; he
slipped from me in a moment, bounded from the ground like a ball, and
with a yell of derision escaped, and plunged into the streets and the
clamor of the city from which I had just flown. I felt myself rage after
him, shaking my fists with a consciousness of the ridiculous passion of
impotence that was in me, but no power of restraining it; and there was
not one of the fugitives who passed, however desperate he might be, who
did not make a mock at me as he darted by. The laughing-stock of all
those miserable objects, the sport of fate, afraid to go forwards, unable
to go back, with a fire in my veins urging me on! But presently I grew a
little calmer out of mere exhaustion, which was all the relief that was
possible to me. And by and by, collecting all my faculties, and impelled
by this impulse, which I seemed unable to resist, I got up and went
cautiously on.

Fear can act in two ways: it paralyzes, and it renders cunning. At this
moment I found it inspire me. I made my plans before I started, how to
steal along under the cover of the blighted brushwood which broke the
line of the valley here and there. I set out only after long thought,
seizing the moment when the vaguely perceived band were scouring in the
other direction intercepting the travellers. Thus, with many pauses, I
got near to the pit's mouth in safety. But my curiosity was as great as,
almost greater than my terror. I had kept far from the road, dragging
myself sometimes on hands and feet over broken ground, tearing my clothes
and my flesh upon the thorns; and on that farther side all seemed so
silent and so dark in the shadow cast by some disused machinery, behind
which the glare of the fire from below blazed upon the other side of the
opening, that I could not crawl along in the darkness, and pass, which
would have been the safe way, but with a breathless hot desire to see and
know, dragged myself to the very edge to look down. Though I was in the
shadow, my eyes were nearly put out by the glare on which I gazed. It was
not fire; it was the lurid glow of the gold, glowing like flame, at which
countless miners were working. They were all about like flies,--some on
their knees, some bent double as they stooped over their work, some lying
cramped upon shelves and ledges. The sight was wonderful, and terrible
beyond description. The workmen seemed to consume away with the heat and
the glow, even in the few minutes I gazed.