rock on which he had so slipped and floundered before.
The foolish nymphs, though they see his approach, are still far
from understanding. They still believe it is themselves he seeks to
seize. They now not only laugh--they laugh, as the stage-directions
have it, "_im tollsten Uebermuth_," the craziest towering insolence
of high spirits. "Save yourselves, the gnome is raving! He has
gone mad with love!"

He has reached the summit of the rock, he has laid hands on the
gold. He cries, "You shall make love in the dark!... I quench your
light, I tear your gold from the reef. I shall forge me the ring
of vengeance, for, let the flood hear me declare it: I here curse
love!" Tearing from its socket their splendid lamp, which utters
just once its golden cry, all distorted and lamentable, he plunges
with it into the depths, leaving sudden night over the scene in
which the wild sisters, shocked at last into sobriety, with cries
of Help and Woe start in pursuit of the robber. His harsh laugh
of triumph drifts back from the caves of Nibelheim.

Then occurs a gradual transformation-scene both to the eye and
the ear. The rocks disappear, black waves flow past, the whole
all the while appearing to sink. Clouds succeed the water, mist
the clouds. This finally clears, revealing a calm and lovely scene
on the mountain-heights. The music has during this been painting
the change, too: Sounds of running water, above which hovers a
moment, a memory of the scene just past and a foreboding of its
sorrowful consequences, the strain signifying the renunciation
of love; when this dies away, the motif of the ring, to be heard
so many times after, its fateful character plainly conveyed by the
notes, which also literally describe its circular form. By what
magic of modulation the uninitiated cannot discern, the ring-motif,
as the water by degrees is translated into mist, slides by subtle
changes into a motif which seems, when it is reached, conspicuously
different from it, the motif of the Gods' Abode.

There in the distance it stands, when the mists have perfectly
cleared, bathed in fresh morning light, the tall just-completed
castle, with shimmering battlements, crowning a high rocky mountain,
at whose base, far down out of sight, flows the Rhine. For the
Rhine is the centre of the world we are occupied with: under it,
the Nibelungs; above it, the Gods; beside it, the giants and the
insignificant human race. The music itself here, while the dw