h
was a projection just spacious enough to allow us to stand abreast. From
this spot the chasm widened rapidly like the lower end of a vast funnel,
and I saw distinctly the valley, the road, the lamps which my companion
had described. He had exaggerated nothing. I heard the sounds he had
heard--a mingled indescribable hum as of voices and a dull tramp as of
feet. Straining my eye farther down, I clearly beheld at a distance the
outline of some large building. It could not be mere natural rock, it
was too symmetrical, with huge heavy Egyptian-like columns, and the
whole lighted as from within. I had about me a small pocket-telescope,
and by the aid of this, I could distinguish, near the building I
mention, two forms which seemed human, though I could not be sure. At
least they were living, for they moved, and both vanished within the
building. We now proceeded to attach the end of the rope we had brought
with us to the ledge on which we stood, by the aid of clamps and
grappling hooks, with which, as well as with necessary tools, we were
provided.

We were almost silent in our work. We toiled like men afraid to speak to
each other. One end of the rope being thus apparently made firm to the
ledge, the other, to which we fastened a fragment of the rock, rested on
the ground below, a distance of some fifty feet. I was a younger man and
a more active man than my companion, and having served on board ship in
my boyhood, this mode of transit was more familiar to me than to him. In
a whisper I claimed the precedence, so that when I gained the ground I
might serve to hold the rope more steady for his descent. I got safely
to the ground beneath, and the engineer now began to lower himself.
But he had scarcely accomplished ten feet of the descent, when the
fastenings, which we had fancied so secure, gave way, or rather the
rock itself proved treacherous and crumbled beneath the strain; and the
unhappy man was precipitated to the bottom, falling just at my feet,
and bringing down with his fall splinters of the rock, one of which,
fortunately but a small one, struck and for the time stunned me. When I
recovered my senses I saw my companion an inanimate mass beside me,
life utterly extinct. While I was bending over his corpse in grief and
horror, I heard close at hand a strange sound between a snort and a
hiss; and turning instinctively to the quarter from which it came, I saw
emerging from a dark fissure in the rock a vast and terrib