in bunches, like tassels of shaded red. Straight in front of them stood a wall of rock, and at the foot a low opening, half masked by scraggy brushwood.
"Holloa!" said Kurt; "this is the cave. I hear their voices in there. Nothing for it now but to follow them."
The Princess leaned a little more heavily on his arm, and gasped –
"Must I go into that hole?"
"You are fond of caves, you know, Princess."
She was a courageous woman, though she was so unwieldy. She had gone through so much this day, that really one discomfort more or less could not matter much. Her cup of bitterness might as well be quite full as half full. Princess Tryphosa was not a woman to do things by halves. She had walked over thorns and stones – she might as well walk into a damp cave.
"Yes; I am fond of caves," she said, rather faintly; and, rallying her resolution for the crowning effort, she went forward without another murmur, trailing her silk dress after her, carrying with her a perfume of distilled roses, and a general air of mock Parisian elegance.
Never before had that wall of rock looked down upon anything as beautiful as her face or as incongruous as her costume. The rock stared down in blank and frigid surprise as the last tip of her coloured train glided vanishing into the cave like the tail of a glittering serpent.
CHAPTER XXIX. – BY TORCHLIGHT.
"Leicht ist die Hülle die den Hass bedeckt." –Auffenberg.
Though the hole in the rock was so low that mountain-gnomes alone could have entered it upright, yet it proved to be the portal of a space more suited to giants than to dwarfs.
As the party stood together in the cave they looked no more than a tiny group, and the flames of their firwood torches were but little spots of light, lost in the vast blackness around. Their progress was not easy, for the ground was slippery with damp, and irregulary strown with large round stones. Above their heads the vaulted ceiling rose away out of the circle of light; hollows and undefined niches blackened vaguely on all sides. But, where the ceiling lowered, it was of a snowy glistening white, a fine fretwork of delicate points hanging downward, like icicles turned into stone. The air was chill and clammy; the voices of the speakers sounded unnatural, striking weird echoes against far-off corners, and rolling back towards them with a hollow murmur. And in every silence that fell they could hear a note of melancholy music, – the slow sad dropping of the ever-filtering water, which, with the patient toil of centuries, has worked out the intricacies of that wonderful fretwork ceiling.
"I suppose the rock is safe," remarked Vincenz, staring upwards at the white stone icicles.
The Bohemian shrugged his shoulders.
"It may be safe, or it may not; if the day and hour for our death have come, there is no use trying to escape it."
"Let us hope for the best," said Kurt, cheerfully.
