It was a cornice inclining downwards upon the wall of the precipice, as
you see, sometimes, a flight of stairs built against the outside wall of
a house. And it resembled a stair roughly, with long, sloping steps, wet
with rain.
“_Por Dios_, Señor, do not let us stay to think here, or we shall perish
in this tempest.”
He howled, gesticulated, shrieked with all the strength of his lungs.
He knew these tornadoes. Brute beasts would be found lying dead in the
fields in the morning. This was the beginning only. The lightning
showed his kneeling form, the eager upturned face, and a finger pointing
urgently into the abyss. The wind was nothing! Nothing to what would
come after. As he shrieked these words I was feeling the crust of the
earth vibrate, absolutely vibrate, under the soles of my feet, with the
sound of thunder.
He unfastened his cloak, and was seen to struggle above his head with
the hovering and flapping cloth, as though he had captured a black and
pugnacious bird. We mastered at last a corner each, and then we started
to twist the whole, as if to wring the water out. We produced, thus, a
sort of short rope, the thickness of a cable, and the descent began.
“Do not look behind you. Do not look,” Castro screeched.
The first downward steps were terrible, but as soon as our heads had
sunk below the level of the plain it was better, for we had turned about
to the rock, moving sideways, cautiously, one step at a time, as
if inspecting its fractured roughness for traces of a mysterious
inscription. Castro, with one end of the twisted cloak in his hand,
went first; I held the other; and between us, Seraphina, the rope at her
back, imitated our movements, with her loosened hair flying high in
the wind, and her pale, rigid head as if deaf to the crashes. I saw
the drawn stillness of her face, her dilated eyes staring within three
inches of the strata. The strain on our prudence was tremendous. The
knowledge of the precipice behind must have affected me. Explain it as
you will, several times during that descent I felt my brain slip away
from my control, and suggest a desire to fling myself over backwards.
The twigs of the bushes, growing a little below the outer edge of the
path, swished at my calves. Castro stopped. The cornice ended as a
broken stairway hangs upon nothing. A tall, narrow arch stood back in
the rock, with a sill three feet high at least. Castro clambered over;
his head and torso, when he turned about, were lighted up blindingly
between the inner walls at every flash. Seeing me lay hold of Seraphina,
he yelled:
“Señor, mind! It’s death if you stagger back.”
I lifted her up, and put her over like a child; and, no sooner in
myself, felt my strength leave all my limbs as water runs out of an
overturned vessel. I could not have lifted up a child’s doll then.
Directly, with a wild little laugh, she said to me:
“Juan--I shall never dare come out.”