Page:Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869) v2.djvu/122

102  to the light, just as it had adapted itself to the darkness, and he was able to distinguish objects. The light, which had seemed at first too bright, settled into its proper hue and became livid. He cast a glance into the yawning space before him, and what he saw was terrible.

At his feet were about twenty steps, steep, narrow, worn, almost perpendicular, without balustrade on either side,—a sort of stone ridge cut out from the side of a wall into stairs, and leading into a very deep cell, into which one gazed down as into a well. The cell was large, and if it was really the bottom of a well, it must have been a cyclopean one. The idea that the old word "cul-de-basse-fosse" awakens in the mind could only be applied to it if it was supposed to be a den of wild beasts. The cell was neither flagged nor paved. The bottom was of that cold, moist earth, peculiar to deep places. In the midst of the cell, four low and disproportioned columns sustained a deeply arched canopy, the four mouldings of which united in the interior of the canopy, something like the inside of a mitre. This covering, similar to those under which sarcophagi were formerly placed, rose nearly to the top of the vault, and made a sort of central chamber in the cave, if that can be styled a chamber which has only pillars in place of walls. From the centre of the arch hung a brass lamp, round and barred like the window of a prison. This lamp threw around it—on the pillars, on the vault, on the circular wall which was seen dimly behind the pillars—a wan light, cut by bars of shadow. This was the light which had at first dazzled Gwynplaine; now it seemed only a confused redness. There was no other light in the cell,—neither window, nor door, nor loop-hole. Between the four pillars, exactly under the lamp, in