Thenceforth we moved on in a burdened silence. Even Valombroso seemed subdued under the weight of the responsibility approaching him. We neared the cleft, and the murmur of descending waters grew upon our ears. Then in a moment a crease seemed to open in the slope, and we recognised that we were coming to the brow of a falling gully or ravine, which divided the hill into two. The murmur increased, as we advanced, to a roar, tumultuous, astounding; and suddenly, ascending among rocks, we came out upon a little mossy sward, with the curved edge of a cataract whirling beyond it, like a section of a huge half-buried fly-wheel. It poured over a ledge a couple of yards above us, and, as one could see by peering cautiously, plunged in one unbroken fall of fifty feet or more into the sharp corner of a wooded gorge. It came sweeping in the beginning through a great yat or gate in the rocks above--a sluice regulating the overflow of some vast cistern of the mountains--and, after rebounding from that first mad descent, went crashing stair by stair down into the green basements of the world, where it sped itself away in a flurry of foam. Huge rocks toppled to the lip of the fall, and piled themselves landward in a fantastic jumble. They were cracked, and split, and creviced in a thousand directions, but, among all the fissures, there was none that, to an ordinary soul, seemed potential of revelations. Mr Shapter, looking about him with a very white face, put our common thought into words: “It must have needed an ingenious as well as an adventurous spirit to discover the clue to this secret.” “Signore,” said Geoletti proudly, “Milord was not the first.” The man, exalted to these rocky attics which were his home, was become another being from the hang-dog creature of my knowledge. His eyes had brightened, his step become elastic, he walked like one entitled to the command of the expedition. “Behold,” he said, “the door!” In an instant he had sprung upon a ledge--we saw him stoop--and he was gone. But his voice rallied us from a resonant hollow: “It is here! Com’!” I think we all hung fire for an instant--a natural enough qualm. It was not the adventure in itself, but--merciful God! what, after all these years, were we expecting to find? One’s imagination, drifted to the very threshold at last, sickened as in the emanations from a charnel vault. Twenty years! and lying in what abnormal atmosphere--subject to what unspeakable transformation! It could have wrought of him surely nothing “rich and strange” like drowned Alonso? It---- I felt Valombroso pushing by me, and I held him back instantly, and took the leap--and almost struck against an upright slab of stone. Then I saw that behind this veiling slab there was a low-down aperture in the rock face, narrow and uninviting enough to one of my bulk. But Geoletti’s hand came through, and, with difficulty, guided me in--and instantly the thunder of the waters fell to a murmur.