Page:Lieut Gullivar Jones - His Vacation - Edwin Arnold (1905).djvu/177

 providence to send it, and an abrupt arrival on the bottom beach about five minutes after leaving the upper circles.

I came to behind a cluster of breast-high rocks, and before moving took a look round. Judge then of my astonishment and delight at the second glance to perceive about a hundred yards away a brown object, looking like an ape in the half light, meandering slowly up the margin of the water towards me. Every now and then it stopped, stooping down to pick up something or other from the scum along the torrent, and it was the fact that these trifles, whatever they were, were put into a wallet by the vision's side—not into his mouth—which first made me understand with a joyful thrill that it was a man before me—a real, living man in this huge chamber of dead horrors! Then again it flashed across my mind in a luminous moment that where one man could come, or go, or live, another could do likewise, and never did cat watch mouse with more concentrated eagerness than I that quaint, bent-shouldered thing hobbling about in the blue morning shadows where all else was silence.

Nearer and nearer he came, till so close face and garb were discernible, and then there could no longer be any doubt, it was a woodman, an old man, with grizzled monkey-face, stooping gait, and a shaggy fur cloak, utterly unlike the airy garments of my Hither folk, who now stood