im. Red dabs and splashes that were living
beings, having a strange phosphoric light of their own, glowed upon the
floor. The livid encrustations of a hundred years of humidity slipped
from off the walls and painfully heaved their mushroom surfaces to the
blaze. The red glow of the unwonted fire, crimsoning the wet sides
of the cavern, seemed to attract countless blisterous and transparent
shapelessnesses, which elongated themselves towards him. Bloodless and
bladdery things ran hither and thither noiselessly. Strange carapaces
crawled from out of the rocks. All the horrible unseen life of the ocean
seemed to be rising up and surrounding him. He retreated to the brink of
the gulf, and the glare of the upheld brand fell upon a rounded hummock,
whose coronal of silky weed out-floating in the water looked like the
head of a drowned man. He rushed to the entrance of the gallery, and his
shadow, thrown into the opening, took the shape of an avenging phantom,
with arms upraised to warn him back. The naturalist, the explorer,
or the shipwrecked seaman would have found nothing frightful in this
exhibition of the harmless life of the Australian ocean. But the
convict's guilty conscience, long suppressed and derided, asserted
itself in this hour when it was alone with Nature and Night. The bitter
intellectual power which had so long supported him succumbed beneath
imagination--the unconscious religion of the soul. If ever he was nigh
repentance it was then. Phantoms of his past crimes gibbered at him, and
covering his eyes with his hands, he fell shuddering upon his knees.
The brand, loosening from his grasp, dropped into the gulf, and was
extinguished with a hissing noise. As if the sound had called up some
spirit that lurked below, a whisper ran through the cavern.

"John Rex!" The hair on the convict's flesh stood up, and he cowered to
the earth.

"John Rex?"

It was a human voice! Whether of friend or enemy he did not pause to
think. His terror over-mastered all other considerations.

"Here! here!" he cried, and sprang to the opening of the vault.

Arrived at the foot of the cliff, Blunt and Staples found themselves in
almost complete darkness, for the light of the mysterious fire, which
had hitherto guided them, had necessarily disappeared. Calm as was
the night, and still as was the ocean, the sea yet ran with silent but
dangerous strength through the channel which led to the Blow-hole; and
Blunt, instinctively feeling