There was no mistaking that figure, and if the figure had not been ample confirmation of identity, there were the full widow's weeds, and, above all, the pale, placid face. The full light of the unclouded sun fell on her. The distance was not great, and she stood out in bold relief against the white field of cloud stretching across the northern sky.

On impulse, Alfred rose in the boat, and took off his hat and bowed.

She returned his salute, and without a moment's pause drew back from the edge on which she had been standing, and disappeared from view.

"Mrs. Davenport!" said Phelan, forgetting his ill-humour in his surprise. "What a place for a lady to be all by herself! I thought Mrs. Davenport was away somewhere in foreign parts."

Alfred sat down. The boatmen had resumed their oars, and the yawl was gliding steadily through the water.

"Is the Rock really dangerous at this time?" asked Alfred anxiously of Phelan. O'Brien was buried in thought, and did not heed what the others were saying.

"Not dangerous now, sir--not dangerous when the water is so smooth and the air so calm; but if there's a little sea on, and a little breeze, you never know what may happen here. Sometimes the sea alone will do it, and sometimes the wind alone will do it, and sometimes both together won't do it. You can only be sure she'll spout when the sea is high and the wind a strong gale from the south-west. What surprises me to see the lady there is because the place has a bad name, and she was just standing on the worst spot of all when we saw her first."

"How a bad name, and how the worst place of all? Are you quite sure there is no danger to the lady now?" asked Alfred, struggling violently and successfully to conceal his extraordinary solicitude.

"I am perfectly sure there is no danger of the spout now. The reason I said it has a bad name is because of all the people who were carried off that Rock; and where Mrs. Davenport stood is just the worst spot of all."

"But Mrs. Davenport must know the Rock well. I dare say, as her house is near, she often comes to see it."

"Ay, she may often come to see it. But to see it and to walk on it are different things. There are very few women in the village who would care to go on it without a man to lend them a hand. Why, sir, it's as slippery as ice, and two people fell and were killed on it out of regard to its slipperiness."

"Is there no way of landing here?"

"No, sir. You can't get a foot ashore anywhere nearer than Kilcash. You might, of course, land on many a rock here and there, but you couldn't get up the cliffs. It's iron-bound for miles."

"But could not the lady be cautioned in some way? She could hear a shout even though we cannot see her. She cannot yet be out of hearing?" Paulton could scarcely sit still in the boat.

"And suppose she could hear a shout, sir, what could you tell her she doesn't know? Do you think Mrs. Davenport has lived all these years and years a mile from the Black Rock, and doesn't know as much as any of us could tell her about it? Why, she lives nearer to it than any one else in the world! Her next-door neighbours are, I may say, the ghosts of men who lost their lives on that very spot."

"What is that you're saying?" asked O'Brien, coming suddenly out of his reverie.

"Only, sir, that Mrs. Davenport's next-door neighbours are the ghosts of the men who lost their lives on the Black Rock."

O'Brien looked in amazement at the boatman. He had been recalled from his abstraction by the word "ghost;" but he had not fancied, when he asked his question, that the answer would lie so close to the thoughts which had been occupying his mind a moment before. For a while he could not clear his mind of the effect of this coincidence.

"What on earth do you know or guess about the matter, Phelan?" he cried, quite taken off his guard.

"I suppose I know as much about the Rock as any man of my years along the coast," answered Phelan, with a slight return of his former sullenness.

O'Brien at once saw that he had made a mistake, that Phelan's words were perfectly consistent with ignorance of what he knew of the Fahey affair--or, indeed, with the absence of intention to refer to the Fahey affair. He hastened to put himself right.

"Of course you do, Phelan," said he cordially. "No man knows more than you. Excuse me for what I said. I was thinking of something else when you spoke, and I did not exactly hear what you said. I did not mean to annoy you. I was only stupid myself."

Jim Phelan considered this a very handsome and ample apology, not only for the words just then spoken, but for what had occurred a few minutes before.

"He was thinking, poor gentleman," thought Phelan, "of those blackguards of Commissioners. I know how anxious a man gets about fish."

"He was thinking," thought Alfred, "of Madge. I know all about that kind of thing."

He had not been thinking of one or the other. He was wondering how Mrs. Davenport would have been affected if the figure of Fahey suddenly rose before her on that Rock.

"This, sir," said the boatman, addressing Alfred, the stranger, "is what we call the Red Gap, and the cave beyond is what we call the Red Gap Cave--or the Gap Cave, or the Red Cave, for short."

Alfred looked around him, and then up.

Above towered the great perpendicular cliffs, silent and forlorn. From the dark green water at their bases, to the hard, dark line they made against the azure plain of sky that roofed the chasm, was no break, in form or colour, no noteworthy ledge or hollow, no clinging weeds below or verdurous patch above. All was smooth, and bluff, and huge, and liver-coloured.

A peculiar silence, a silence of a new and startling quality, filled the gigantic cleft. The silence abroad upon the sea was that in which vast spaciousness engulfed sound. Here adamantine walls, beetling and threatening, a thousand feet thick, stood between the stagnant air and the large breathings of the sea. The atmosphere was dense, motionless, inert with salt vapours. The prodigious circumvallation of cliff crushed vitality out of the air. There was a breathless whisper of water against the sea line of the ramparts, and deep in the gorge of the cave a smothered snore, like the hushed breathing of some stupendous monster.

The yawl glided slowly up between the closing walls of the Red Gap. No one spoke. The two boatmen were indifferent to the place. O'Brien and Paulton were lost in thoughts of diverse kinds, awakened by the spectacle of Mrs. Davenport on the Black Rock. None of the men was paying attention to the Gap.

At last a sudden darkness fell upon the boat. O'Brien and Paulton looked up. The sky was no longer overhead. A gloom of purple brown was above them. The light of day stood like a lofty, luminous pillar in their wake. They had entered the Red Cave.

The boatmen ceased rowing, and Phelan lit a torch.

For a few moments nothing could be seen but the blazing red torch flare against a vast black blank, and round the glowing red boat a narrow pool of glaring orange water.

No one moved. No sound informed the silence but the hiss of the torch and the profound sighs of distant, impenetrable hollows.

The water illumined near the boat looked trustworthy, denser than water, a ruddy platform with shadowy verge. No undulation moved over its face save a dulling ripple caused by the boat's imperceptible motion. The boat and figures in it seemed the golden boss of a fiery brazen shield hung in a night of chaos.

Alfred Paulton put his hand outward and downward. It touched the gleaming surface of the water. He drew his hand back with a start. The cold of the water froze his fingers, his soul. The water shone like solid metal, felt less buoyant than the ruddy air he breathed. Instead of resting on a firm plain of luminous beaten gold, the boat hung on a faint, thin fluid over a sightless abyss.

This was a terrible place. Here was nothing but space for thought--for visions and fears too awful to dwell upon. Nothing was surer than that no loathsome dangers lurked, or swam, or hung pendulous above. Nothing was surer than that the imagination crouched back from dreads which had never affrighted it before.

This water was only phantom water. It was no better than the spume of sea-mists held between invisible crags of blackness, of mute eternity. If one should fall out into that water, he would sink through it swift as lead through air. One would shoot down, and down, and down, giddy, but not stunned. One would sink--whither? Whither? To what fell intimacy with dripping rocks and clammy weeds and slime would one come? What agonising sense of impending gloom reaching infinitely upwards would lie upon one, as one fell! Would the falling ever cease? Never, never. Nor would one live, for to fall thus for a moment of time would serve to fill the infinite of eternity with chimeras of ebon adamant too foul for human eyes.

The oars dipped. The boat moved forward into the immeasurable vagueness of shadow--into this sleeping chamber of night. It glided over the silent floor between hushed arras, which saw neither the gaudy sun that drowns in light the tender whisperings of the sea, nor the silver moon that hearkens forlorn to the faint complainings of the weary waves, arras woven of the flame of earth's primal fire, and limned by night in the smoke of ancient chaos.

Something floated from the side of the boat and shone a while in the wake, and then was lost in the darkness as the boat moved slowly on.

"Keep her west," whispered a voice in the boat.

"We're keeping west," whispered another voice in the boat. The noise of the oars in the rowlocks clanked in the echoes like the complainings of a gigantic wheel whose bearings were dry. The whispers came back from the echoes like the whispers of a Titan whose teeth were gone, and whose tongue was thick with age or clumsy with disease. The voice of the giant seemed near--on a level with the head. It stirred the hair.

The torch went out.

"Light--give us light," whispered a voice in the boat.

"Wait. Watch astern," whispered another voice.

"Astern," whispered the awful, almost inarticulate voice close to the ear, in the hair.

Then all was still. The oars stopped. All eyes were, unseeing, turned in the direction whence the boat had come. The faintest glimmer indicated the opening to the cave. All was black as the heart of unhewn granite.

"Now watch," whispered a voice in the boat.

"Now watch," whispered the echo against the throat and neck.

"On no account start or stir. The report will be very loud. Hold on to the thwarts. I am going to fire!"

Blended with the earlier portion of this speech, the echoes gave back a sharp battering sound like that of throwing metal from a height. This was the cocking of the gun.

When this sound ceased, the echo whispered:

"Fire!"

A jagged rod of flame and luminous smoke shot outwards and upwards into the black void from the boat aft, and cleared the black space for a moment.

Then the clash and clangour of a thousand shattered echoes close at hand bore downward on the head and bent the head, while out of far-reaching caverns thunders were torn with shrieks and yells and flung against concave-resounding roofs, until the whole still air of the monstrous hollows roared, and secret off-spring tombs of darkness, never seen by man, answered with fearful groans and shrieks of the Mother Cave.

Paulton let go the thwart, bent his head, flung his arms up, and crossed them over his head.

Here was the solid earth riven through and through with prodigious thunders of all the heavens!

The roar of sound fell to a shout, the shout to a groan, the groan to a mutter. Then all was still, stiller than before--still with the silence of annihilation accomplished. Nothing that had been was. The echoes were dead, and would speak no more. The material had failed to be, and only darkness and the unweary spirit of man remained.

A voice whispered, "Watch."

Some lingering phantom of an echo whispered in ghostly gutturals, "Watch!"

There was a hiss, a purple commotion on the surface of the water, in the air on the wake of the boat. A cone of intense red flame, as thick as a man's arm, rose up from the level of the water in the wake, and stood a cubit high:

The air took fire and burned, and out from the brown darkness leaned huge polished pillars, copper-red, and broken walls, smooth pilasters, and architraves keen with light, and sightless gargoyles blurred with fire, and cloisters whose rich arches dripped with flame, and buttresses with fierce outlines impacted on plutonian shade, plinths with shafts of Moorish lightness and arabesques with ruby tags, sturdy bastions and flat curtains, broken Gothic windows, capitals of acanthus leaves flushed with ruddy flare.

Aloft yawned arches and domes and hollow towers, vast in sombre distances and sultry with hidden fires. The secrets of their depths no eye could pierce. They were abysmal homes of viewless voices--homes of virgin night.

Hither and thither, chapels and aisles and corridors and galleries, reached from the great central space into the copper gloom. Here above the surface of watery floor stood columns of fallen pillars, masses of broken walls, points of ruined spires.

In the centre of the level floor rose a block of stone, flat, a little above the surface of the water, and on this the headless form of a colossal figure, showing in rude outline like an Egyptian sphinx.

The ground was polished red granite here and there, ribbed with ruby marble, that shone with dazzling brightness against the aqueous glare.

On the pedestal of the sphinx the men of the boat landed, and stood to gaze upon this Pompeii beneath Vesuvia's pall--this subterranean Venice in ruins--this water-floored Heliopolis without the sun!

There was a loud hiss. The blood-red architecture thrust forward in fiercer light. A louder reverberating hiss, and all was dark! Everything had vanished--had drawn back into immeasurable darkness. The crimson light had burned down to the level of the tiny raft which bore it, and the water of the cave had quenched its flame.

All was black darkness, turn which way one might.

"Light!" whispered Paulton, overcome by what he had heard and seen.

"What is that?" asked O'Brien, catching Phelan's hand, and pointing down to where the western gallery had glowed a minute ago. Light was seen piercing the cliff to the westward.

For a while no answer was given. Then, in accents of awe and fear, the boatman answered:

"A light--a light made by no mortal hand!"

Far down in the gloom of the western gallery a yellow spot shone!