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It was a grand moment when the bricks had been taken out and daylight poured into the cave, and nothing remained but to break down the dam and let the water run out of the darkness into the sunshine. You can imagine with what mixed feelings the children wondered whether they would rather stay in the cave and see the dam demolished, or stay outside and see the stream rush out.
When he was by himself, his pleasures were almost vegetable. He would slip into the woods towards Achères, and sit in the mouth of a cave among grey birches. His soul stared straight out of his eyes; he did not move or think; sunlight, thin shadows moving in the wind, the edge of firs against the sky, occupied and bound his faculties. He was pure unity, a spirit wholly abstracted.
And we had met at last in this same cave of greenery, while the summer night hung round us heavy with love, and the odours that crept through the silence from the sleeping woods were the only signs of an outer world that invaded our solitude. What followed I cannot clearly remember. The succeeding horror almost obliterated it. I woke as a grey dawn stole into the cave.
And I found a cave in the side of a big rock; and the cave was dry and comfortable, and had the mouth about a score feet above the earth.
Close by the cave's mouth he crouched for a moment, felt the hammer of his gun, and, uncovering the lantern with a quick turn of the hand, passed it to Dan'l and marched boldly in. The soft sand made a floor for the cave for maybe sixty feet within the entrance. It ended on the edge of a rock-pool a dozen yards across, and deep enough to reach above a man's knees.
For I felt how the report of a gun would have published our whereabouts, if there really were any lurkers near a thing that I must say I now thought very probable, since the fact of there being a treasure in the cave, held sacred by the Indians, would, as a matter of course, render them very jealous of intruders. "Where for now, Mas'r Harry?" said Tom. "The cavern, Tom," I said.
The travellers followed for some time a delightful opening into the hills, down which a little brook found its way to the lake. When they had pursued their walk a short distance, Waverley renewed his questions about their host of the cavern. 'Does he always reside in that cave?
Just within the entrance it expands to sixty or seventy feet, with a height of about fifty feet; and this part of the cave has been used by the citizens of the county as a place for holding camp-meeting. I estimated its length at not far short of one mile and a half. The main passage is in general quite spacious, the roof elevated, and the floor tolerably level, but often wet and miry.
"Oh, what lovely times we'll have, girls!" sighed Mollie, when, a little later, the four chums were conversing. "We can go sailing, bathing and sit on the sands and watch the tide come in." "And perhaps find buried pirate-treasure in some cave," added Betty, with a laugh. "Can we, really?" asked Amy, perhaps the most unsophisticated of the quartette.
Then he mounted a camel which awaited him outside the gate and departed with an escort of twelve men, also riding camels. "There is some other road up that mountain, Quatermain," said Ragnall. "A camel could sooner pass through the eye of a needle than through that dreadful cave, even if it were empty."
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