As the familiar sun rose slowly, a gradual gold spread over the vivid green that sloped toward it, till the whole expanse shone with a dazzling splendour; and as the rising light struck across the path on which I stood, it showed a shining band of opalescence that stretched right and left to the horizon limits, beneath the background of the dark-grey wall. The sky was of a deep unbroken blue, and the whole scene was one of great though alien beauty. I had imagined that I might find myself lost amidst the inexplicable complexities of a civilisation different from anything of which I had heard or known, or perhaps amidst enormous jungle growths, and beasts of unfamiliar terrors. But here seemed only an interminable and barren weirdness, offering neither menace to life nor any means by which to support it. So I thought, in a double error, as I was to learn very quickly. The sun was by now almost completely visible, but there was no cry or stir of life to break the silence, nor did any bird cross the blue expanse above me. The need to explore the new world in which I found myself was urgent. There was no hope from inaction amid such surroundings. The cliff on one side was a wall unclimbable. The purple soil, from which I could see that a slight steam was rising, offered no invitation to lose myself among the great green globes, which seemed to be its sole fertility. There remained only the opal platform on which I stood, by which it seemed that I might go on, to right or left, for ever. With nothing to direct my choice, I turned southward, and strapping on the knapsack in which I carried such things as I had brought with me, but from which my stock of food was exhausted, and shouldering the woodman’s axe, which was the only thing beside a heavy clasp-knife which I carried as tool or weapon, I walked briskly forward. CHAPTER III DEATH? I had gone no great distance, and the sun had yet scarcely cleared the horizon, when I came to a high cavity in the cliff-wall. It was of such height that an elephant would have looked a pigmy as he passed inward, and of a shape too regular to have been formed without the tools of some controlling mind. The level sun shone into it, and illumed it, a very spacious tunnel, for a considerable distance. Then it bent out of sight. I went inward a few steps, and hesitated. Anyone who, on a strange and lonely road, has reached a place where it branches in two directions, without knowledge or sign to guide his choice, will understand my feeling. Still in doubt, I walked back to the cave-mouth, and then, down the middle of the opal way, came something very swift and light. Someone who was neither man, nor beast, nor monkey. Someone who ran without effort, but as in urgent and silent fear.