Page:Weird Tales Volume 09 Issue 02 (1927-02).djvu/62

 a loud growl to a roar, and an exclamation burst from us.

It were impossible to convey to the reader the eery effect of that sudden, strange transition. One moment we were in the gallery; the next we had issued from it and stood in a most tremendous cavern—or, rather, on a ledge or shelf high up on one of the walls of that cavern.

The opposite side was but dimly visible. The roof swept across a hundred feet or more above our heads. And the bottom? I gazed at the edge of the rock shelf on which wre stood, out and down into that yawning abyss, and I felt a shudder run through me and on through my heart. The roar of the falling waters came from our right. We turned the rays of our lights in that direction, but nothing was visible there, save the dark limestone rock and Cimmerian blackness.

We then moved to the edge and turned our lights down into those awful depths—to depths perhaps never before touched by ray of light since time began. Far down the beams went plunging and farther still; but we could not see the bottom. Bottom there was, however, for the water was tumbling and growling down there.

I was glad to draw back from the edge, and I leaned against the rock wall and gazed upon the dark scene in wonder, amazement and awe. Rhodes joined me.

"Well, what do you think of it, Bill?"

"Milton, this is awful."

"It is. I have never seen a sight more strange and terrible."

"And the angel?" I queried.

"What about her, Bill?"

"How on earth did she make her way through this awful place?"

"Why, along this ledge on which we are standing. There is no other way."

I glanced along that shelf, and I felt very sad.

"She's got a better head," I told him, "than I have. Why didn't we bring along an airplane? I wonder if the way lies down oi' up, toward the fall."

We bent over and examined the rock.

"Down," I observed.

"Down," Milton nodded.

Whilst I stood there pondering this and wondering what was down there in the blackness of that frightful chasm, Rhodes moved off to the right and examined the ledge there.

"And up too," he announced. "Somebody or something, or both, has gone up toward the fall."

"Great heaven, if we get caught between them!"

"The program is becoming, interesting," Rhodes admitted.

For a time we stood in silence, then Milton said: "I suggest that we go up and take a look-see."

I nodded. So far as I could perceive, one way was just as good—I mean just as bad—as the other.

That shelf was, as a whole, not an easy thing to negotiate, and some spots made my head swim and made me wish mightily that I was somewhere else. Undoubtedly, some thousands of years in the dim and mysterious past, the stream once flowed at this level—at any rate, that is the only theory that, in my opinion, will explain that ledge, and something we were soon to discover. Not that I ever spent much time in worrying about theories and hypotheses; the facts themselves gave me enough to think about, enough and to spare.

At times the shelf would be twenty or thirty feet in width or even more, and then the going was easy enough; but at other times the space would contract to a couple of yards, and then it was another story. Once or twice Milton Rhodes himself, an experienced and fearless