rocks and icy ledges with here and there a little patch
of sand on a cornice, and far below, five hundred feet or so, a good
big spread of gravel an acre or two in extent close by where the river
plunged out of sight into the nethermost cavern mouth.

It was so hopeless up above it, it could not possibly be worse further
down, and there was the ugly black flood running into the hole to trust
myself to as a last resource; so slipping and sliding I began the
descent.

Had I been a schoolboy with a good breakfast ahead the incident might
have been amusing enough. The travelling was mostly done on the seat
of my trousers, which consequently became caked with mud and glacial
loam. Some was accomplished on hands and knees, with now and then a bit
down a snow slope, in good, honest head-over-heels fashion. The result
was a fine appetite for the next meal when it should please providence
to send it, and an abrupt arrival on the bottom beach about five
minutes after leaving the upper circles.

I came to behind a cluster of breast-high rocks, and before moving took
a look round. Judge then of my astonishment and delight at the second
glance to perceive about a hundred yards away a brown object, looking
like an ape in the half light, meandering slowly up the margin of the
water towards me. Every now and then it stopped, stooping down to pick
up something or other from the scum along the torrent, and it was the
fact that these trifles, whatever they were, were put into a wallet by
the vision's side--not into his mouth--which first made me understand
with a joyful thrill that it was a MAN before me--a real, living man in
this huge chamber of dead horrors! Then again it flashed across my
mind in a luminous moment that where one man could come, or go, or
live, another could do likewise, and never did cat watch mouse with
more concentrated eagerness than I that quaint, bent-shouldered thing
hobbling about in the blue morning shadows where all else was silence.

Nearer and nearer he came, till so close face and garb were
discernible, and then there could no longer be any doubt, it was a
woodman, an old man, with grizzled monkey-face, stooping gait, and a
shaggy fur cloak, utterly unlike the airy garments of my Hither folk,
who now stood before me. It gave me quite a start to recognise him
there, for it showed I was in a new land, and since he was going so
cheerfully about his business, whatever it might chance to be, there
must