"We're keeping west," whispered another voice in the boat. The noise of the oars in the rowlocks clanked in the echoes like the complainings of a gigantic wheel whose bearings were dry. The whispers came back from the echoes like the whispers of a Titan whose teeth were gone, and whose tongue was thick with age or clumsy with disease. The voice of the giant seemed near--on a level with the head. It stirred the hair. The torch went out. "Light--give us light," whispered a voice in the boat. "Wait. Watch astern," whispered another voice. "Astern," whispered the awful, almost inarticulate voice close to the ear, in the hair. Then all was still. The oars stopped. All eyes were, unseeing, turned in the direction whence the boat had come. The faintest glimmer indicated the opening to the cave. All was black as the heart of unhewn granite. "Now watch," whispered a voice in the boat. "Now watch," whispered the echo against the throat and neck. "On no account start or stir. The report will be very loud. Hold on to the thwarts. I am going to fire!" Blended with the earlier portion of this speech, the echoes gave back a sharp battering sound like that of throwing metal from a height. This was the cocking of the gun. When this sound ceased, the echo whispered: "Fire!" A jagged rod of flame and luminous smoke shot outwards and upwards into the black void from the boat aft, and cleared the black space for a moment. Then the clash and clangour of a thousand shattered echoes close at hand bore downward on the head and bent the head, while out of far-reaching caverns thunders were torn with shrieks and yells and flung against concave-resounding roofs, until the whole still air of the monstrous hollows roared, and secret off-spring tombs of darkness, never seen by man, answered with fearful groans and shrieks of the Mother Cave. Paulton let go the thwart, bent his head, flung his arms up, and crossed them over his head. Here was the solid earth riven through and through with prodigious thunders of all the heavens! The roar of sound fell to a shout, the shout to a groan, the groan to a mutter. Then all was still, stiller than before--still with the silence of annihilation accomplished. Nothing that had been was. The echoes were dead, and would speak no more. The material had failed to be, and only darkness and the unweary spirit of man remained. A voice whispered, "Watch." Some lingering phantom of an echo whispered in ghostly gutturals, "Watch!" There was a hiss, a purple commotion on the surface of the water, in the air on the wake of the boat. A cone of intense red flame, as thick as a man's arm, rose up from the level of the water in the wake, and stood a cubit high: