te and blank as the under-bark
of a poplar. He acted without thinking, without even knowing what he
did. When thought began to creep back into his head again, the three of
them were standing shivering in semidarkness, watching the blurred
shadow of the demon lurching back and forth upon the screen of shining
water.

It had been nothing but luck, not foreplanning, to find that there was a
considerable space between the back of the falls proper and the blind
wall of the canyon. It had been luck, too, which had forced Honath to
skirt the pool in order to reach the falls at all, and thus had taken
them all behind the silver curtain at the point where the weight of the
falling water was too low to hammer them down for good. And it had been
the blindest stroke of all that the demon had charged after them
directly into the pool, where the deep, boiling water had slowed its
thrashing hind legs enough to halt it before it went under the falls, as
it had earlier blundered into the hard wall of the gorge.

Not an iota of all this had been in Honath's mind before he had
discovered it to be true. At the moment that the huge reptile had
screamed for the second time, he had simply grasped Mathild's hand and
broken for the falls, leaping from low tree to shrub to fern faster than
he had ever leapt before. He did not stop to see how well Mathild was
keeping up with him, or whether or not Alaskon was following. He only
ran. He might have screamed, too; he could not remember.

They stood now, all three of them, wet through, behind the curtain until
the shadow of the demon faded and vanished. Finally Honath felt a hand
thumping his shoulder, and turned slowly.

Speech was impossible here, but Alaskon's pointing finger was eloquent
enough. Along the back wall of the falls, where centuries of erosion had
failed to wear away completely the original soft limestone, there was a
sort of serrated chimney, open toward the gorge, which looked as though
it could be climbed. At the top of the falls, the water shot out from
between the basalt pillars in a smooth, almost solid-looking tube,
arching at least six feet before beginning to break into the fan of
spray and rainbows which poured down into the gorge. Once the chimney
had been climbed, it should be possible to climb out from under the
falls without passing through the water again.

And after that--?

Abruptly, Honath grinned. He felt weak all through with reaction, and
the face of the de