lly filled the cavern,
curling up into the rocky roof and swirling round and out by the
square-cut mouth, to be caught there by the slight wind and illumined
by the sun, which poured down upon the soft coils of the smoke, in so
strange a fashion, as to call forth a cry of wonder from the onlookers.
Standing in the interval of open pathway between the two rock-passages,
and looking back at the fire lit cavern, with its black shadows and
flickering flame-colours, Hadria was bewildered by what appeared to her
a veritable magic vision, beautiful beyond anything that she had ever
met in dream. She stood still to watch, with a real momentary doubt as
to whether she were awake.

The figures, stooping over the burning heap, moved occasionally across
the darkness, looking like a witch and her familiar spirit, who were
conjuring, by uncanny arts, a vision of life, on the strange, white,
clean-cut patch of smoke that was defined by the sunlit entrance to the
tunnel. The witch stirred, and her familiar added fuel, while behind
them the smoke, rising and curdling, formed the mysterious background
of light: opaque, and yet in a state of incessant movement, as of some
white raging fire, thinner and more deadly than any ordinary earthly
element, that seemed to sicken and flicker in the blast of a furnace,
and then rushed upwards, and coiled and rolled across the tunnel's
mouth. Presently, as a puff of wind swept away part of the smoke, a
miraculous tinge of rosy colour appeared, changing, as one caught it,
into gold, and presently to a milky blue, then liquid green, and a
thousand intermediate tints corresponding to the altering density of
the smoke--and then! Hadria caught her breath--the blue and the red
and the gold melted and moved and formed, under the incantation, into
a marvellous vision of distant lands, purple mountains, fair white
cities, and wide kingdoms, so many, so great, that the imagination
staggered at the vastness revealed, and offered, as it seemed, to him
who could grasp and perceive it. Among those blue deeps and faint
innumerable mountain-tops, caught through a soft mist that continually
moved and lifted, thinned and thickened, with changing tints, all the
secrets, all the hopes, all the powers and splendours, of life lay
hidden; and the beauty of the vision was as the essence of poetry and
of music--of all that is lovely in the world of art, and in the world of
the emotions. The question that had been debated so