not one of the fugitives who passed, however desperate he might be, who did not make a mock at me as he darted by.  The laughing-stock of all those miserable objects, the sport of fate, afraid to go forwards, unable to go back, with a fire in my veins urging me on!  But presently I grew a little calmer out of mere exhaustion, which was all the relief that was possible to me.  And by and by, collecting all my faculties, and impelled by this impulse, which I seemed unable to resist, I got up and went cautiously on.

Fear can act in two ways:  it paralyzes, and it renders cunning.  At this moment I found it inspire me.  I made my plans before I started, how to steal along under the cover of the blighted brushwood which broke the line of the valley here and there.  I set out only after long thought, seizing the moment when the vaguely perceived band were scouring in the other direction intercepting the travellers.  Thus, with many pauses, I got near to the pit’s mouth in safety.  But my curiosity was as great as, almost greater than my terror.  I had kept far from the road, dragging myself sometimes on hands and feet over broken ground, tearing my clothes and my flesh upon the thorns; and on that farther side all seemed so silent and so dark in the shadow cast by some disused machinery, behind which the glare of the fire from below blazed upon the other side of the opening, that I could not crawl along in the darkness, and pass, which would have been the safe way, but with a breathless hot desire to see and know, dragged myself to the very edge to look down.  Though I was in the shadow, my eyes were nearly put out by the glare on which I gazed.  It was not fire; it was the lurid glow of the gold, glowing like flame, at which countless miners were working.  They were all about like flies,—­some on their knees, some bent double as they stooped over their work, some lying cramped upon shelves and ledges.  The sight was wonderful, and terrible beyond description.  The workmen seemed to consume away with the heat and the glow, even in the few minutes I gazed.  Their eyes shrank into their heads; their faces blackened.  I could see some trying to secret morsels of the glowing metal, which burned whatever it touched, and some who were being searched by the superiors of the mines, and some who were punishing the offenders, fixing them up against the blazing wall of gold.  The fear went out of my mind, so much absorbed was I in this sight.  I gazed, seeing farther and farther every moment into crevices and seams of the glowing metal, always with more and more slaves at work, and the entire pantomime of labor and theft, and search and punishment, going on and on,—­the baked faces dark against the golden glare, the hot eyes taking a yellow reflection, the monotonous clamor of pick and shovel, and cries and curses, and all the indistinguishable sound of a multitude of human creatures.  And the floor below, and the low roof which overhung whole myriads within a few inches of their faces, and the irregular walls all breached and shelved, were every one the same, a pandemonium of gold,—­gold everywhere.  I had loved many foolish things in my life, but never this; which was perhaps why I gazed and kept my sight, though there rose out of it a blast of heat which scorched the brain.