Holman gripped my arm when I had worked myself into an insane frenzy, and he begged me to be quiet.

“Barbara thought she heard an answer,” he cried.  “Listen!  There it is again!”

It was Edith!  Her voice came to us like a thread of silver, and with no thought of the bottomless crevices that might be in our path, we charged blindly toward the spot from which her cry had come.

It seemed ages before we met her.  The sounds puzzled us, but at last we gripped her hands, and the Professor and Barbara, hysterical with joy, sobbed their thanks into the gloom.

“I don’t know how the rope became undone,” cried Edith.  “I didn’t find out that I had become separated from the rest of you till I attempted to draw your attention to the waterfall.”

“To the what?” I questioned.

“To the waterfall,” repeated the girl.  “Did you pass it?  It is a beautiful little waterfall, and the water flows over a white limestone rock that makes it sparkle like so many fireflies in the dark.”

I cannot explain what happened to me at that moment.  Some veil within my mind was torn away by the few words that the girl had uttered.  I was back upon Levuka wharf, lying under the copra bag where Holman had found me, and for a moment I could not speak as the subconscious mind flung a score of half-forgotten incidents into my conscious area.

"It is the White Waterfall!" I yelled.  “It is the White Waterfall that the Maori sang of on the wharf at Levuka!  He was warning Toni, and Toni was killed by Soma because he knew!  It is the way out!  We’re saved!  We’re saved!  It is on the road to heaven out of Black Fernando’s hell!”

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XXIII

THE WIZARDS’ SEAT

As we stumbled toward the spot from which came the sounds of running water, the incidents of the preceding ten days seemed to be dropping into their places within my brain like the pieces of a picture puzzle that has suddenly become plain to the eye of the child who is putting it together.  I understood!  My brain seemed bursting within my skull.  It appeared to me that God, in his own way, had made me a blind instrument to do his work.  The big Maori on the wharf at Levuka knew of the hell upon the Isle of Tears.  The Maori had warned Toni, the little Fijian, but fear of what might happen to any one possessing the knowledge had made Toni deny that he was the companion of the Maori when he was questioned before and after he had reached The Waif.  In a burst of confidence he had confessed the truth to me on the afternoon after I had saved him from being washed overboard, but the confession had been made in the presence of Soma, and, as Kaipi asserted, it had cost Toni his life.  Leith, alias Black Fernando, had ordered the big Kanaka to put the possessor of such important information out of the way.

I repeated over and over again the words which the Maori had addressed to his woolly headed pupil on that hot day at Levuka.  They raced madly round in my mind, as if exultant because I had found the reason why they persisted in storing themselves in the cells of my brain.  The soul within me had known that the knowledge would be wanted!