beyond which his imagination did not go (I often wondered whether he
pictured Mrs. Bastin as also waiting; if so, he never said anything
about her); Bickley because as a child of the Present and a servant of
knowledge he feared no future, believing it to be for him non-existent,
and was careless as to when his strenuous hour of life should end; and
I because I felt that yonder lay my true future; yes, and my true past,
even though to discover them I must pass through that portal which we
know as Death.

We reached the mouth of the cave. It was a vast place; perhaps the arch
of it was a hundred feet high, and I could see that once all this
arch had been adorned with sculptures. Protected as these were by the
overhanging rock, for the sculptured mouth of the cave was cut deep into
the mountain face, they were still so worn that it was impossible to
discern their details. Time had eaten them away like an acid. But what
length of time? I could not guess, but it must have been stupendous to
have worked thus upon that hard and sheltered rock.

This came home to me with added force when, from subsequent examination,
we learned that the entire mouth of this cave had been sealed up for
unnumbered ages. It will be remembered that Marama told me the mountain
in the lake had risen much during the frightful cyclone in which we were
wrecked and with it the cave mouth which previously had been invisible.
From the markings on the mountain side it was obvious that something of
the sort had happened very recently, at any rate on this eastern face.
That is, either the flat rock had sunk or the volcano had been thrown
upwards.

Once in the far past the cave had been as it was when we found it. Then
it had gone down in such a way that the table-rock entirely sealed the
entrance. Now this entrance was once more open, and although of course
there was a break in them, the grooves of which I have spoken ran on
into the cave at only a slightly different level from that at which they
lay upon the flat rock. And yet, although they had been thus sheltered
by a great stone curtain in front of them, still these sculptures
were worn away by the tooth of Time. Of course, however, this may have
happened to them before they were buried in some ancient cataclysm, to
be thus resurrected at the hour of our arrival upon the island.

Without pausing to make any closer examination of these crumbled
carvings, we entered the yawning mouth of that great plac