"Just listen then, one second," said Walter, and, disembedding a huge piece of stone, he rolled it with all his force to their right, listening with senses acutely sharpened by danger and excitement. The stone bounded once, then they heard in their ears a rush, a shuffling of loose and sliding earth, the whirring sound of a heavy falling body, and then for several seconds a succession of distant crashes, startling with fright the rebounding mountain echoes, as the bit of rock whirled over the rift and was shattered into fragments by being dashed against the sides of the precipice. "Good God!" cried Walter, clutching both the boys and dragging them hurriedly backwards, "we are standing at this moment on the very verge of the chasm. It won't do to go on; every step may be death." A pause of almost unspeakable horror followed his words; after the fall of the rock had revealed to them how frightful was the peril which they had escaped, all three of them for a moment felt paralysed in every limb, and after looking close into each other's faces, blanched white by a deadly fear, Kenrick and Power sat down in an agony of despair. "Don't give way, you fellows," said Walter, to whom they both seemed to look for help; "our only chance is to keep up our hope and spirits. I think that, after all, we must just stay here till the mist clears up. Don't be frightened, Ken," he said, taking the boy's hand; "nothing can happen to us but what God intends." "But the night," whispered Kenrick, who was most overpowered of the three; "fancy a night spent here. Mist and cold, hunger and dark. O this horrible uncertainty and suspense. O for some light," he cried in an agony; "I could almost die if we had but light." "O God, give us light," murmured Walter, echoing the words, and uttering aloud unconsciously his intense prayer; and then he fell on his knees, and the others, too, hid their faces in their hands as they stood upon the bleak mountainside, and prayed to Him Whom they knew to be near them, though they were there alone, and saw nothing save the ground they knelt upon, and the thick clammy fog moving slowly around and above them in aimless and monotonous change. To their excited imagination that fog seemed like a living thing; it seemed as though it were actuated with a cold and deathful determination, and as though it were peopled by a thousand silent spirits, leaning over them and chilling their hearts as they shrouded them in the gigantic foldings of their ghostly robes.