The ruins of the plantation house wavered forth from the fog. The sailor plucked at Macready's sleeve, and Ernst mumbled thickly that they might as well get back aboard.... But the Irishman stood forth from them; and in that smoky gloom, desolate as the first day, before Light was turned upon the Formless Void, bayed the names of Charter and the woman. Then the answer: "_In the cistern--in the old cistern!_" Macready made a mental appointment with his God, and yelled presently: "Didn't I tell you 'twould take more than the sphit of a mountain to singe the hair of him?... Are you hurted, sir?" TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER PAULA AND CHARTER IN SEVERAL SETTINGS FEEL THE ENERGY OF THE GREAT GOOD THAT DRIVES THE WORLD Charter roused, after an unknown time, to the realization that the woman was in his arms; later, that he was sitting upon a slimy stone in a subterranean cell filled with steam. The slab of stone held him free from the four or five inches of almost scalding water on the floor of the cistern. The vault was square, and luckily much larger than its circular orifice; so that back in the corner they were free from the volcanic discharge which had showered down through the mouth of the pit--the cause of the heated water and the released vapors. An earthquake years before had loosened the stone-lining of the vault. With every shudder of the earth now, under the wrath of Pelée, the walls, still upstanding, trembled. Charter was given much time to observe these matters; and to reckon with mere surface disorders, such as a bleeding right hand, lacerated from the rusty chain; a torn shoulder, and a variety of burns which he promptly decided must be inconsequential, since they stung so in the hot vapor. Then, someone with a powerful arm was knocking out three-cushion caroms in his brain-pan. This spoiled good thinking results. It is true, he did not grasp the points of the position, with the remotest trace of the sequence in which they are put down. Indeed, his mind, emerging from the depths into which the shock of eruption had felled it, held alone with any persistence the all-enfolding miracle that the woman was in his arms.... Presently, his brain began to sort the side-issues. Her head had lain, upon his shoulder during that precipitous plunge, and her hair had fallen when he first caught her up. He remembered it blowing and covering his eyes in a manner of playful endearment quite impossible for an outsider to conceive. Meanwhile, the blast from Pelée was upon the city; traversing the six miles from the crater to the _Morne_, faster than its own sound; six miles in little more than the time it had taken him to cross the lawn from the veranda to the cistern. A second or two had saved them.