we shall see."

On, and still on, up, further up the mountain, through thick pine
forests and gigantic clumps of rock the demon guide led his unresisting
prey. Breathless, footsore, over the most impassable places the
relentless fiend magnetically dragged me after him; at a rate, too, that
thoroughly surprised me; until, to my horror, I found myself close to a
deep chasm formed in the rock by the late earthquake.

The demon halted, and now speaking for the first time since our walk
together, he asked with a malicious smile if I desired any fossils or
any gold, observing that all sorts of curiosities were to be found down
there. He then made a strange gesture with his hand towards my face, and
I suddenly perceived I was under a spell.

I had no memory of anything that had happened up to that time. I bore no
malice against my guide; on the contrary, he appeared to me my best
friend. He did not even seem any longer ugly in my eyes, and when he
asked me if I would descend into the chasm, I replied cheerfully.

"Yes; but how shall we manage it?"

"I have brought a rope on purpose," said my friend.

"Bravo!" said I.

He then began to unwind a long rope from his waist, and adjusted it
underneath my shoulders.

I then descended gradually, my companion holding the rope and letting it
out by degrees, until I had descended a very considerable distance, when
he fastened the other end to a stump. I then began chipping out various
geological specimens, and experienced an intense delight in my novel
situation.

Soon, however, while busily occupied in extracting a bone of an
ichthyosaurus, I was interrupted by a cry of many voices from below.

"Secure the victim! Down with him, down with him! Our feast of blood is
at hand."

Then followed a hungry roar, as of wild beasts unfed. The charm was
broken in an instant, and I awoke to a sense of my awful position. To
drop my hammer and clamber up the rope as fast as I could was my first
step; but what was my horror, when, on raising my eyes aloft, I descried
the fiend in the act of deliberately cutting the rope. How fortunate I
happened to look upwards just at that moment.

The rope was already half cut through; in another moment I must have
been launched into the abyss, to be devoured by the bloodthirsty
monsters below. There was no time to lose; I was desperate, so thrusting
one foot into a chink in the walls of the chasm, I looked about for
another, then for some projecting