“Stand up, signore,” he said whisperingly. “There is plenty room in here.” I straightened myself nervously; but there was indeed no necessity for precaution. The narrow rent or gully in which we stood was just a disparted fracture in the mass of rock, extending from crown to base and from verge to verge. A man, though a Titan in height, might have walked its length unhurt. “Animo!” whispered my guide. “You follow me down, sir, and we reach it ver’ soon.” I felt him, as I thought, sinking from me, and caught at him like a frightened child. “Si, si,” he said. “You shall see the light com’ at once.” It appeared even with his words--an odd globing radiance, that throbbed and flickered on the walls of rock, like the glimmer of a distant torch to one lost in the labyrinths of a catacomb. But with our every downward step it dilated--broadened--drew nearer and steadier--and lo! at one stride its source was revealed--a square of green casement lit as it were by a rising dawn. I halted, stupefied, as Geoletti halted. It was minutes before I could realise that we had reached, were actually standing in, the sleeping-room of death. But gradually understanding came to me, and I saw. It was the oddest chamber--a sort of cave or embrasure (it might have been sixteen feet in width by a dozen in depth), opening upon the under-sweep of the cataract some two yards beneath its leap, and lit by the strangest window, it appeared, of green agitated spun glass. That ran for ever, as it seemed, off an invisible reel, and shook and fluctuated in its descent. I could hear the swish of its going like the tear of rain--it “droned like a hive”--my God! “And all you can see is the trees and the hills pulled crooked, like we saw ourselves in that looking-glass”--I saw them, warped eccentric demons of things, reaching and clawing and shrinking, as my father had seen them and described them to his friend twenty years ago--I saw them, and---- A cry from Geoletti caught me to my senses: “Zitto! zitto! Ah Dio di compassione! Look, signore! it is there--it has never stirred. The shroud of the waters has enwrapped it where it lay.” I followed the direction of his hand. The cave was humid with a fine floating spray. Something shapeless, grotesque lay on the floor of it near to its farther end--a thing which, in a first hurried glance, I had taken for a mere natural excrescence of the rock. “What?” I gasped--“Geoletti--great God!” We approached it, holding to one another, over the slippery floor, and looked down. A horrible thing; blurred out of mortal recognition; fungussed with lime, preserved in it, decay arrested and perpetuated--a horrible thing. It resembled nothing so much as one of those pitiful casts taken from the ashy moulds in dead Pompeii--grey as pumice-stone--my father. A smaller excrescence lay near it--quite a little one. Geoletti stooped and pulled, and it came away in his hand. “Signore!--the box!” he whispered.