The air took fire and burned, and out from the brown darkness leaned huge polished pillars, copper-red, and broken walls, smooth pilasters, and architraves keen with light, and sightless gargoyles blurred with fire, and cloisters whose rich arches dripped with flame, and buttresses with fierce outlines impacted on plutonian shade, plinths with shafts of Moorish lightness and arabesques with ruby tags, sturdy bastions and flat curtains, broken Gothic windows, capitals of acanthus leaves flushed with ruddy flare. Aloft yawned arches and domes and hollow towers, vast in sombre distances and sultry with hidden fires. The secrets of their depths no eye could pierce. They were abysmal homes of viewless voices--homes of virgin night. Hither and thither, chapels and aisles and corridors and galleries, reached from the great central space into the copper gloom. Here above the surface of watery floor stood columns of fallen pillars, masses of broken walls, points of ruined spires. In the centre of the level floor rose a block of stone, flat, a little above the surface of the water, and on this the headless form of a colossal figure, showing in rude outline like an Egyptian sphinx. The ground was polished red granite here and there, ribbed with ruby marble, that shone with dazzling brightness against the aqueous glare. On the pedestal of the sphinx the men of the boat landed, and stood to gaze upon this Pompeii beneath Vesuvia's pall--this subterranean Venice in ruins--this water-floored Heliopolis without the sun! There was a loud hiss. The blood-red architecture thrust forward in fiercer light. A louder reverberating hiss, and all was dark! Everything had vanished--had drawn back into immeasurable darkness. The crimson light had burned down to the level of the tiny raft which bore it, and the water of the cave had quenched its flame. All was black darkness, turn which way one might. "Light!" whispered Paulton, overcome by what he had heard and seen. "What is that?" asked O'Brien, catching Phelan's hand, and pointing down to where the western gallery had glowed a minute ago. Light was seen piercing the cliff to the westward. For a while no answer was given. Then, in accents of awe and fear, the boatman answered: "A light--a light made by no mortal hand!" Far down in the gloom of the western gallery a yellow spot shone! CHAPTER XLIII. A RETROSPECT. Mrs. Davenport's visit to the Black Rock that day had not been one of mere curiosity, although nothing of import to her life was likely to result from it. Her career was over, if, indeed, it might be said ever to have begun.