Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 04.djvu/98

Rh abyss. Its roar seemed to shatter their cars, and its flying spray was cold on their white faces.

Clark gripped his nerves and crawled out onto the stone steps. The steps were not four feet wide, grown with the slimy green moss of ages, drenched and dripping with spray. Looking up, he could just glimpse the moonlit interior of the great temple, could just see the heads of the armored guards on duty at the head of the stair.

Looking down, he could see nothing—nothing but an unplumbed abyss of darkness into which the waters tumbled, and round whose side dropped the coils of the spiral stair. Clark's nerves shrank, appalled for the moment from the thought of venturing down into that enigmatic gulf, along that at slippery, ancient way. Then his jaw set in renewed resolution. Below lay what he had come so far to seek.

"Lurain, we go downward now," he told the girl, raising his voice over the roar. "Would you rather wait here?"

"No, Stannar—I go with you," she cried. "My promise was to lead you to the lake itself."

Cautiously, every nerve strung taut, Clark stepped downward, feeling with his foot for the next step. He dared not use the flashlight here, so near the surface. The wet, mossy stone was slippery under his feet, threatening to send him slipping and sliding off the unrailed stair. Sick dizziness swept him as he visualized himself plunging downward, racing those tumbling waters in a nightmare fall.

Now he and Lurain had followed the spiral stair twice around the falling cataract, were deeper below the surface. They were in almost complete darkness. Spray stung their cheeks, gusty air-currents howled up the great shaft, the thunder of the falling waters beside them was brain-numbing. Still down and down they crept, feeling for each slippery step, groping down through somber, eternal night toward the mystic Lake of Life and its legended warders.