se completely, for I heard the roar of the cataracts
again.

Then we emerged upon a tiny shelf of rock some forty feet up the face
of the wall, and quite invisible from below. It was a little above the
level of the _chateau_ roof, about a hundred yards away. Below me I
could see the main entrance to the tunnel.

We had a foothold of about ten feet on the level platform, which was
slippery with smooth, black ice, and thundering over us, so near that I
could almost have touched it had I stretched out my hand, the whirling
torrent plunged into that hell below.

It was a terrific scene. Above us that stream of white water,
resembling nothing so much as a high-pressure jet from a fireman's hose
magnified a thousand times, curved like a crystal arch, and so compact
by reason of its force that not a drop splashed us. It was as strong
as a steel girder, and I think it would have cut steel.

Pierre caught my arm as I reeled, sick with the shock of the discovery,
and yelled into my ear above the dim.

"_Le Vieil Ange_!" he cried. "This way Simon mean you to go to-morrow.
Lacroix him tell you: 'Get down, we find the road.' He take you up
here and push you--so."

He made a graphic gesture with his arm and pointed. I looked down,
shuddering, into the black, foam-crested water, bubbling and whirling
among the grotesque ice-pillars that stood like sentries upon the brink.

The horror of the plot quite unmanned me. I groped for the shelter of
the tunnel, and clung to the rocky wall to save myself from obeying a
wild impulse to cast myself headlong into the flood below.

I perceived now that the whole face of the wall was honeycombed with
tunnels of natural formation running into the recesses of the
limestone. I wondered that the whole structure, undermined thus and
pressed down by the weight of millions of tons of ice above where the
glacier lay, did not collapse and crumble down in ruin.

Rivulets gushed from the wall everywhere, mingling their contributory
waters with those of the twin torrents. The plateau seemed to be the
watershed in which the drainage of the entire territory had its origin.
Within those connecting caves, if a man knew their secret, he might
hide from a regiment.

Pierre followed me to the mouth of the tunnel and gripped me by both
arms.

"What you do?" he asked. "You go to Pere Antoine to-night? What you
do now?"

I took the pistol from my coat pocket.

"Pierre," I answered, "I have t