Chapter XXIX: The Body in the Cave

Emerging from the pine woods at last, we saw before us a vast barren slope scattered with an infinite débris of rocks and stones. The hill went up, shouldering itself hugely against a cold white sky. There might have been, from our point of view, no higher altitudes beyond; yet but a short climb was needed to reveal this waste as but a low-down step to the majesty of the peaks. They rose into view before us as we advanced, remote and ethereal, springing loftier with our every step, a whipped froth of pinnacles white as cream.

Presently, bearing to the right, we saw a cleft open in the ridge of the hill, and Geoletti, pointing to it, stopped us with a quivering cry:

“Ecco! Lapluietonnante!”

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.

“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.

“Ah!” I cried. “Go, while I watch, and fetch the others. They must come--they must see this--Valombroso will know what to do. Go, do you hear? I am not afraid any longer. Do you not understand what he was to me?”