ted me. Explain it as
you will, several times during that descent I felt my brain slip away
from my control, and suggest a desire to fling myself over backwards.
The twigs of the bushes, growing a little below the outer edge of the
path, swished at my calves. Castro stopped. The cornice ended as a
broken stairway hangs upon nothing. A tall, narrow arch stood back in
the rock, with a sill three feet high at least. Castro clambered over;
his head and torso, when he turned about, were lighted up blindingly
between the inner walls at every flash. Seeing me lay hold of Seraphina,
he yelled:

"Senor, mind! It's death if you stagger back."

I lifted her up, and put her over like a child; and, no sooner in
myself, felt my strength leave all my limbs as water runs out of an
overturned vessel. I could not have lifted up a child's doll then.
Directly, with a wild little laugh, she said to me:

"Juan--I shall never dare come out."

I hugged her silently to my breast.

Castro went ahead. It was a narrow passage; our elbows touched the sides
all the way. He struck at his flint regularly, sparks streamed down from
his hand; we felt a freshness, a sense of space, as though we had come
into another world. His voice directed us to turn to the left, then
cried in the dark, "Stand still." A blue gleam darted after us, and
retired without having done anything against the tenebrous body of
gloom, and the thunder rolled far in, unobstructed, in leisurely,
organ-like peals, as if through an amazingly vast emptiness of a temple.
But where was Castro? We heard snappings, rustlings, mutters; sparks
streamed, now here, now there. We dared not move. There might have been
steep ridges--deep holes in that cavern. And suddenly we discovered him
on all-fours, puffing out his cheeks above a small flame kindled in a
heap of dry sticks and leaves.

It was an abode of darkness, enormous, without sonority. Feeble currents
of air, passing on our faces, gave us a feeling of being in the open air
on a night more black than any known night had been before. One's voice
lost itself in there without resonance, as if on a plain; the smoke of
our blaze drove aslant, scintillating with red sparks, and went trailing
afar, as if under the clouds of a starless sky. Ultimately, it must have
escaped through some imperceptible crevices in the roof of rock. In
one place, only, the light of the fire illuminated a small part of the
rugged wall, where the shadows of our