Hope came with the first step, for it was upon hard slippery rock, and
gathering courage from this, the young naturalist kept one foot firm,
and stamped with the other to try whether the rock was brittle and
likely to give way.
But it seemed firm, and fixing his eyes upon the other side, Oliver drew
himself up erect and walked boldly on to the narrow bridge, profoundly
conscious of the fact that there, on either side where he dare not look,
the walls went down almost perpendicularly into a gulf too awful to
ponder on, even for a moment.
Onward slowly, step by step, with the glistening crisp bridge some yards
wide where he started, but as he went on, it grew narrower and narrower,
while the farther side of the gulf which had appeared so short a
distance away when he was high up and looking down, now looked far-off
to his swimming eyes.
The giddy feeling increased as he neared the middle, and then he stopped
short, and dropped upon his knees. For suddenly, with the profound gulf
on either side, there came a loud resonant crack, and a piece of the
lava split away and fell.
Lane knew that he ought to have rushed onward now, literally bounding
across, but the horror of his position, as he felt that the frail bridge
was giving way beneath his feet unnerved him, and he could not stir, but
knelt there seeing the rock before him seem to rise and fall while he
listened for what seemed as if it would never come, the echoing roar
when the mass which had fallen struck below. Even if the lava on which
he knelt had followed, he would not have stirred, only knelt there
gazing at the remainder of the bridge in front as it undulated, rising
and falling slowly, while the fume which arose from the chasm added to
the giddy swimming in his head.
At last! A deafening, reverberating roar, and Lane clutched at a piece
of the rock, and closed his eyes, feeling that all was over, but opened
them again directly to see that the bridge before him was not
undulating, and he knew that it was an optical illusion due to the heat
and the giddiness from which he was suffering.
Nerving himself once more, he rose cautiously, and holding his gun
across him with both hands, as if it were a balancing pole, he stepped
cautiously forward a dozen steps or so, feeling the brittle, glassy rock
quiver beneath his weight; and then with the lower side, and safety, not
a dozen yards away, he was unable to contain himself, and springing
forward he nearly ran, ending by making one great bound and landing
safely as the whole mass over which he had passed gave one crashing
sound and fell.
Oliver Lane dropped on his knees a few yards from the edge he had left
behind, and gazed wildly at the broad opening till a terrific roar arose
from the depths below.
For some moments his senses must have left him, and he was hardly
himself when he rose to his feet and reeled and staggered downward. But
this passed away; his consciousness fully returned, and no longer acting
upon the blind instinct which urged him to escape, he began to hurry on
more steadily toward where, far below, he could see the green trees, and
as his dry lips parted he, in imagination, saw clear, cool water waiting
to quench his awful thirst.
But during the next two hours his progress grew more and more
mechanical, and there were times when he went on down and down the loose
slope like one in a dream. There, though far below, was the object
which guided him, a glistening thread of silver water from which the
sun's rays flashed, and down by which he fell at last to bathe his face
in its cool depths and drink as he had never drunk before.
It was as if he had imbibed new life when he finally drew away from the
water and lay gazing up at the mountain slope, and the summit whose
highest parts were hidden in the rounded cloud of smoke and steam which
rested there. Danger was apparently absent, and Oliver Lane felt ready
to imagine he had exaggerated everything, and been ready to take alarm
without sufficient cause. He was ready now, in the pleasant restful
feeling which came over him, to laugh at what he mentally called his
cowardice. But this passed off in time, and he knew that he had not
only been in grave peril, but that even now his position was far from
free of danger, it would soon be night again, he was without food, and
that line of mist was like an impassable wall between him and his
friends.
As he arrived at this point in his musings, he tried to spring up,
knowing that he must make an energetic effort to regain them.
But there was very little spring in his motions, for though the cool
draught of water had been delicious, and reclining there restful to a
degree, the moment he stirred every joint moved as if its socket was
harsh and dry, so that he would not have been surprised had they all
creaked. He began to walk with pain and difficulty, with his mind made
up as to what he should do. For there below him to his right was the
long line of mist, and his object was to keep along parallel with it
till he could pass round the end, which must be somewhere toward the
shore, over which they had been carried inland. Once there, he would be
able to reach his friends who ought, he felt, to have made some effort
to find him in a similar way to that which he now proposed trying
himself.
"And by the same rule," he said half aloud with a bitter laugh, as he
shifted his gun from one shoulder to the other, "I ought to have gone at
once to try and reach them instead of attempting such a mad adventure
all alone."
It was too late for repentance, and he tramped wearily on, trying to
make out in the lower ground upon which he gazed down to his right, the
dense forest and the huge fig-tree in which he had passed the night. He
laughed the next minute as he saw the impossibility of his search, for
he looked down upon the rounded tops of hundreds of such trees rising
like islands out of a sea of golden green shot with orange in the glow
of the sinking sun.
Before long he found that he must be on the look-out for another
resting-place, and that as there would not be time to reach the band of
trees at the foot of the mountain, he must find some patch of rocks on
the slope along which he was painfully walking. Then, finding that he
had left himself but little time, he halted by some greyish cindery
blocks whose bases were sunk in volcanic sand, and hungry and faint with
thirst, he threw himself down to lie looking up at the golden ball of
illumined steam floating above the top of the volcano high up in the
wonderfully transparent heavens till the light began to fade away, and
then suddenly went out, that is to say, seemed to go out; for, in spite
of hunger, thirst, and weariness, Oliver Lane's eyelids dropped to open
as sharply, directly, as it seemed to him, and he lay staring with
dilated eyes upward at the object he had last seen.
But it had changed, for the cloud, instead of looking golden and orange,
as it glowed, was now soft, flocculent and grey.
"There it is again," he said, excitedly then. "I thought it was part of
my dream."