t I was working farther into the
mountain, and that I would have to stop or die here like a rat in a
hole. But you just wait. You'll be surprised in a minute."

Then Harry laughed, and the laugh, unexpected to himself, woke him
from the trancelike feeling that possessed him, and he walked more
steadily. "I've been being more surprised each minute. Am I in
Aladdin's cave--or whose is it?"

"Only mine. Just one more turn here and then--! It was not in the
night I came here, and it was not all at once, as you are coming--hold
on! Let me go in front of you. The hole was made gradually, until, one
morning about ten o'clock, a great mass of rock--gold bearing, I tell
you--rich in nuggets--I was crazed to lose it--fell out into space,
and there I stood on the very verge of eternity."

They rounded the turn as he talked, and Larry Kildene stood forward
under the stars and waved the torch over his head and held Harry back
from the edge with his other hand. The air over their heads was sweet
and pure and cold, and full of the roar of falling water. They could
see it in a long, vast ribbon of luminous whiteness against the black
abyss--moving--and waving--coming out from nothingness far above them,
and reaching down to the nethermost depths--in that weird gloom of
night--into nothingness again.

Harry stepped back, and back, into the hole from which they had
emerged, and watched his companion stand holding the torch, which lit
his features with a deep red light until he looked as if he might be
the very alchemist of gold--red gold--and turning all he looked upon
into the metal which closes around men's hearts. The red light flashed
on the white ribbon of water, and this way and that, as he waved it
around, on the sides of the passage behind him, turning each point of
projecting rock into red gold.

"Do you know where we are? No. We're right under the fall--right
behind it. No one can ever see this hole from the outside. It is as
completely hidden as if the hand of the Almighty were stretched over
it. The rush of this body of water always in front of it keeps the air
in the passage always pure. It's wonderful--wonderful!"

He turned to look at Harry, and saw a wild man crouched in the
darkness of the passage, glaring, and preparing to leap. He seized and
shook him. "What ails you, man? Hold on. Hold on. Keep your head, I
say. There! I've got you. Turn about. Now! It's over now. That's
enough. It won't come again."

Harry m