jecting chambers, and it was hidden so cunningly away that it was
visible from this side of the lake only from the point of the rocky
precipice above on which I stood.

The _chateau_ stood under the overhanging precipice in such a way that
half the building was invisible even from here. It seemed to be set
back into a hollow of the mountainside, which appeared every moment
about to overwhelm it.

And now I perceived that the smooth slope on which I stood was a
snow-covered glacier, a million tons of ice, pressing ever by its own
weight toward the precipice, and carrying its debris of rocks and
stones toward the waterfall that issued from it and poured in deafening
clamour into the lake below.

Where the precipice projected the waterfall was split in two, and
rushed down in twin streams, bubbling, tumbling, hissing, plunging into
the lake, which whirled furiously around the spit of land on which the
castle stood, clear of ice for a distance of a hundred feet from the
shore, a foaming maelstrom in which no boat that was ever built could
have endured an instant, but must have been twisted and flung back like
the fantastically shaped ice pinnacles along the marge.

On each side of the _chateau_ a cataract plunged, veiling itself in an
opacity of mist, tinted with all the spectral hues by the rays of the
westering sun. I could have flung a stone down, not on the _chateau_,
but over it, into the boiling lake.

Why, that position was impregnable! Behind it the sheer precipice, up
which not even a bird could walk; the impassable lake before it, and
the torrent on either side!

But--how had M. Charles Duchaine gained entrance there?

There seemed to be no entrance. And yet the _chateau_ stood before my
eyes, no dream, but very real indeed. There was a small piece of
enclosed land between its front and the lake, and within this I thought
I could see dogs lying.

That might have been my fancy, for the mountain was too high for me to
be able to distinguish anything readily, and the sublime grandeur of
the scene and the roar of the water made me incapable of clear
discernment.

Before I reached the hut again I had formulated my plan. I would start
at dawn, or earlier, and work around these mountains, a circuit of
perhaps twenty miles, approaching the _chateau_ by the edge of the
lake. I concluded that there must exist a ridge of narrow beach
between the whirlpool and the castle, though it was invisible from
above,