y arm, guided my steps and gave me support against the
wind.

There was a distinct lull. Even the thunder had rolled away, dwindling
to a deep mutter. Castro fell on his knees in front of me.

"It is here," I heard him scream.

I set Seraphina down. A hooked dart of fire tore in two the thick canopy
of clouds. I started back from the edge.

"What! Here?" I yelled.

"Senor--_Si!_ There is a cavern below...."

I had seen a ledge clinging to the face of the rock.

It was a cornice inclining downwards upon the wall of the precipice, as
you see, sometimes, a flight of stairs built against the outside wall of
a house. And it resembled a stair roughly, with long, sloping steps, wet
with rain.

"_Por Dios_, Senor, do not let us stay to think here, or we shall perish
in this tempest."

He howled, gesticulated, shrieked with all the strength of his lungs.
He knew these tornadoes. Brute beasts would be found lying dead in the
fields in the morning. This was the beginning only. The lightning
showed his kneeling form, the eager upturned face, and a finger pointing
urgently into the abyss. The wind was nothing! Nothing to what would
come after. As he shrieked these words I was feeling the crust of the
earth vibrate, absolutely vibrate, under the soles of my feet, with the
sound of thunder.

He unfastened his cloak, and was seen to struggle above his head with
the hovering and flapping cloth, as though he had captured a black and
pugnacious bird. We mastered at last a corner each, and then we started
to twist the whole, as if to wring the water out. We produced, thus, a
sort of short rope, the thickness of a cable, and the descent began.

"Do not look behind you. Do not look," Castro screeched.

The first downward steps were terrible, but as soon as our heads had
sunk below the level of the plain it was better, for we had turned about
to the rock, moving sideways, cautiously, one step at a time, as
if inspecting its fractured roughness for traces of a mysterious
inscription. Castro, with one end of the twisted cloak in his hand,
went first; I held the other; and between us, Seraphina, the rope at her
back, imitated our movements, with her loosened hair flying high in
the wind, and her pale, rigid head as if deaf to the crashes. I saw
the drawn stillness of her face, her dilated eyes staring within three
inches of the strata. The strain on our prudence was tremendous. The
knowledge of the precipice behind must have affec