eat boulders. And I set forth again down the half-light of
the mighty Gorge, and through eighteen hours I made a strong going, save
when I did pause at the sixth and the twelfth hours to mine eating.

And by the eighteenth hour was come, I was very ready to my food and
slumber; and presently I was asleep in a place of the rocks. And that
day had I past three and twenty of the dancing gas fires; and five been
like a white fire; but the others blue and green. And all did dance and
made a strange and uncertain light within the great Gorge; yet was it a
peaceful thing unto my spirit that there was truly light, as you shall
understand.

And I slept six hours, and waked, and did want more sleep, as you shall
think. But I eat and drunk and put my gear upon me, and went on downward
of the Gorge.

And at the sixth hour, after that I had eat and drunk, I came to a part
where the big gas fires did cease to dance, and there was a certain
darkness upon that place. Yet was it not a proper dark; for there came
the glimmer of a flame here and the glimmer of a flame there, as that
little flames came upward between the stones, and did vanish, and come
upward in another part. And so did light and die out constant and
forever amid the stones and the boulders of that lonesome Gorge; and
made a low-spread light, so that it did seem unto me that strange
shudders of light beat upward through the dark of that place.

And I went onward, and a heavy fume did seem to hang in the air, and
horrid gases to come upward from the earth in odd puffings; and anon a
light would leap upward beyond the next stone, and afterward vanish, and
there would be an hundred thousand such upon every hand, running to and
fore; and afterward for a moment an utter dark, and again the little
flames everywhere; so that it did seem I went one moment amid the heart
of a strange country of fire, and immediately through a country of utter
night. And this was to me strange and a peculiar matter. Yet, as I do
think, the gases did bother me the more; for they did seem as that they
were like to hurt mine health utterly; for, in verity, oft did I seem as
that I should choke and breathe no more, by reason of the poison that
came upward from among the stones and the boulders.

And all that time, as they came or went, did the little flames make
small phlocks of sound in the Gorge as they did flash or die; and the
sounds did seem, to my likening, as stones cast into an utter silent