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His official name was Lightfoot, Queen of the Fairies, because of his ballet-like costume. For four hours we descended the valley through high thorn scrub or the occasional grassy openings. We were now in the floor of the Rift Valley, and both along the escarpments and in the floor of the great blue valley itself mountains were all about us.
"Not so," said the thrall, "if only I can find the place by which, some thirty summers ago, I won yonder rift, and through it the crest of the fell," and he pointed to a narrow cleft in the face of the rock high above their heads, that was clothed with grey moss. Then he moved to the right and searched, peering behind stones and birch-bushes, till presently he held up his hand and whistled.
Dummy was panting to be off, and keeping his lantern hidden, he felt his way onward toward the glow, keeping tightly hold of Mark's hand, till, as they came nearer, they saw that the man must have been descending a steep rift, and as the light came into sight again, they found that they were standing on the very edge of this place, and that the light was away to their left, twenty feet or so lower, and gleaming upon the surface of a smooth far-spreading pool.
"Bergy Bits". Pieces, about the size of a cottage, of glacier-ice or of hummocky pack washed clear of snow. "Growlers". Still smaller pieces of sea-ice than the above, greenish in colour, and barely showing above water-level. "Crack". Any sort of fracture or rift in the sea-ice covering. "Lead" or "Lane". Where a crack opens out to such a width as to be navigable.
The sea was dyed red, and through this opaque liquid I could see nothing else. Nothing else until the moment when, through a rift in the clouds, I saw the daring captain clinging to one of the animal's fins, fighting the monster at close quarters, belaboring his enemy's belly with stabs of the dagger yet unable to deliver the deciding thrust, in other words, a direct hit to the heart.
Before this vision of horrors they had fled, the greater fear conquering the less. Jack stood looking up at the rift with blanched face, and teeth set like a steel-trap. His heart gave another jerk within him. A second torch flashed through the rift. But this time the torch whirled flaming through the air, and fell at the mouth of the tunnel, within a yard of Jack's foot. He stamped it out.
"Nay," she said, recovering herself and withdrawing her hands, "I am not an Egyptian but a Hebrew, unbiased by the prejudices of thy nation. It is not strange that I can understand thy rebellion, which is but a rift in thine Egyptian make-up through which reason shows. Any alien could comfort thee as well."
Clouds of a peculiar aspect with a slow, crawling gait gather and grow in the azure, throwing out satiny fringes, and becoming gradually darker until every lake-like rift and opening is closed and the whole bent firmament is obscured in equal structureless gloom.
They seemed making for the Tiber, which they would have speedily choked; but ere they could arrive there a huge rift opened in the earth, down which they madly precipitated themselves.
I crept close up to the cliff, and then stooped down, after a timid look in the direction taken by the pirates, and found Ching standing by a piece of the rock which had split away from above, fallen clear, and then its top had leaned back against the rock face, leaving a narrow rift between its base and the cliff, through which we could see the light dimly, some twelve or fourteen yards away, but it was only a faint gleam showing that the far end was nearly closed.
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