I leaped away to safety and the marvellous geyser burst upward. The roaring noises thundered upon the air of the place with deafening reverberations; the steam rolled away in tremendous volumes. Spray and drops of the boiling liquid that splashed, fell all about, some on my hand, burning me badly. The basin was all a-surge with its seething brew; the waters gushed hungrily up, swirling about, filling the cracks and tossing in extreme agitation. Down came the massive column of the fountain, as if the source had been cut off in an instant. A tidal wave of the boiling stuff swelled up to the brink of the cauldron, inundating the golden nodules, stalagmites and the radiating fissures. I knew, then, as much as a man could ever know, who had not been present, how that other man had lost his life, and how it came that his skeleton was gilded. That heel told the story. He had probably caught his foot just as I had done, but he had not been able to get away. He had doubtless fallen headlong into the basin of boiling liquid, where his life must have been forfeited instantly. Then time after time the water had risen about him, until all the flesh had been boiled away from the bones, and then the process of plating with gold had commenced on the skeleton. Poor wretch. It had then been left, I thought, for one of the braver spirits among the Links to rescue all that remained and carry it forth from the dread cavern. I felt somewhat chilly to think how near I had been to the same dreadful fate. The demonstration having ceased, the water subsided, the rocks and nuggets dripped, and the steam arose, hotter than before. My zeal for exploring the place had oozed away. It seemed to me that discretion counselled me to complete my work and depart. “I’ll only stop for a few hundred pounds,” I told myself with a feeling of virtuous moderation. “A man should never be a pig.” The first thing to do was to strip off my bear-skin, in which I was now perspiring like a porpoise. Then I selected a fine, large nodule of gold, from the vicinity of which I could easily escape when the geyser began to spout, and this I began to batter with one of the clubs. I had conceived an idea that I would bend these formations over and break them off with comparative ease. I was in for a large disappointment. Not only were the gold masses bended over at the expense of great energy and perseverance, but they refused to break after quite a number of such bendings. That first one having been once so bent, refused to be knocked back in the opposite direction. Also the geyser took its turn very soon and in the end I humbly abandoned nodule number one and tackled one which was smaller.