Page:The Great Secret.djvu/116

, Countess de Bergamont and the Baroness von Hilda. They only had escaped.

Crowds of strange-looking bats, startled by this sudden and fierce glare, were trooping out to the night and dashing, in their blind alarm, against white-winged seabirds, who had sought here a shelter, but were now also seeking to escape; the lofty space above, in that vast cave, was crowded with them, although their shrieks could not be heard through the outside tumult.

But other sights, stranger and more terrifying, met their eyes as they looked into the cave.

Below the birds crouched indistinct forms not unlike huge bats with human faces. They clung desperately to the rocks and gazed with horrified glances at the dead faces as they bobbed up outside the ledge, and hung there for an instant before sinking out of sight. Adela and the rest shivered as they turned from the ghastly faces of those rock-clingers to the dead faces in mid-air, for some of the faces there were repeated inside. The horrified living were watching their own dead faces, during the brief space that this awful red glow lasted.

Then the snowflakes came down faster, heavier and more densely than before, and chaotic darkness fell upon them—the bat-like spirits at the rocks; the six male and female Anarchists in the centre of the floor, and those miserable spectators who did not know yet whether they were in the body or not.