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?”