wed the
red embers of a fire. Here the thread began to rise. It rose as high
as her head and higher still. What should she do if she lost her hold?
She was pulling it down: She might break it! She could see it far up,
glowing as red as her fire-opal in the light of the embers.

But presently she came to a huge heap of stones, piled in a slope
against the wall of the cavern. On these she climbed, and soon
recovered the level of the thread only however to find, the next
moment, that it vanished through the heap of stones, and left her
standing on it, with her face to the solid rock. For one terrible
moment she felt as if her grandmother had forsaken her. The thread
which the spiders had spun far over the seas, which her grandmother had
sat in the moonlight and spun again for her, which she had tempered in
the rose-fire and tied to her opal ring, had left her--had gone where
she could no longer follow it--had brought her into a horrible cavern,
and there left her! She was forsaken indeed!

'When shall I wake?' she said to herself in an agony, but the same
moment knew that it was no dream. She threw herself upon the heap, and
began to cry. It was well she did not know what creatures, one of them
with stone shoes on her feet, were lying in the next cave. But neither
did she know who was on the other side of the slab.

At length the thought struck her that at least she could follow the
thread backwards, and thus get out of the mountain, and home. She rose
at once, and found the thread. But the instant she tried to feel it
backwards, it vanished from her touch. Forwards, it led her hand up to
the heap of stones--backwards it seemed nowhere. Neither could she see
it as before in the light of the fire. She burst into a wailing cry,
and again threw herself down on the stones.

CHAPTER 21

The Escape

As the princess lay and sobbed she kept feeling the thread
mechanically, following it with her finger many times up to the stones
in which it disappeared. By and by she began, still mechanically, to
poke her finger in after it between the stones as far as she could.
All at once it came into her head that she might remove some of the
stones and see where the thread went next. Almost laughing at herself
for never having thought of this before, she jumped to her feet. Her
fear vanished; once more she was certain her grandmother's thread could
not have brought her there just to leave her there; and she began to