e built. Not a tree, not a blade of grass to be seen
in all the bare, blank, crumbling congeries of stony chasms; the
pointed, jagged, indented masses of rock tower aloft all round in
wonderful forms, often like monstrous animals turned to stone, often
like colossal human beings. In the abyss itself lie, in wild
confusion--pell-mell stones, slag, and scoria, and an eternal,
stupefying sulphury vapour rises from the depths, as if the hell-broth,
whose reek poisons and kills all the green gladsomeness of nature, were
being brewed down below. One would think this was where Dante went down
and saw the Inferno, with all its horror and immitigable pain.

"As Elis looked down into this monstrous abyss, he remembered what an
old sailor, one of his shipmates, had told him once. This shipmate of
his, at a time when he was down with fever, thought the sea had
suddenly all gone dry, and the boundless depths of the abyss had opened
under him, so that he saw all the horrible creatures of the deep
twining and writhing about amongst thousands of extraordinary shells,
and groves of coral, in dreadful contortions, till they died, and lay
dead, with their mouths all gaping. The old sailor said that to see
such a vision meant death, ere long, in the waves; and in fact he did
very soon after fall overboard, no one knew exactly how, and was
drowned without possibility of rescue. Elis thought of that: for indeed
the abyss seemed to him to be a good deal like the bottom of the sea
run dry; and the black rocks, and the blue and red slag and scoria,
were like horrible monsters shooting out polype-arms at him. Two or
three miners happened, just then, to be coming up from work in the
mine, and in their dark mining clothes, with their black, grimy faces,
they were much like ugly, diabolical creatures of some sort, slowly and
painfully crawling, and forcing their way up to the surface.

"Elis felt a shudder of dread go through him, and--what he had never
experienced in all his career as a sailor--his head got giddy. Unseen
hands seemed to be dragging him down into the abyss.

"He closed his eyes and ran a few steps away from it; and it was not
till he began climbing up the Guffrisberg again, far from the shaft,
and could look up at the bright, sunny sky, that he quite lost the
feeling of terror which had taken possession of him. He breathed freely
once more, and cried, from the depths of his heart:

"'Lord of my Life! what are the dangers of the