It was split from top to bottom by numerous straight fissures.  A few pale-green waterfalls descended here and there, like narrow, motionless threads.  The face of the mountain was rugged and bare.  It was strewn with detached boulders, and great, jagged rocks projected everywhere like iron teeth.  Tydomin pointed to a small black hole near the base, which might be a cave.  “That is where I live.”

“You live here alone?”

“Yes.”

“It’s an odd choice for a woman—­and you are not unbeautiful, either.”

“A woman’s life is over at twenty-five,” she replied, sighing.  “And I am far older than that.  Ten years ago it would have been I who lived yonder, and not Oceaxe.  Then all this wouldn’t have happened.”

A quarter of an hour later they stood within the mouth of the cave.  It was ten feet high, and its interior was impenetrably black.

“Put down the body in the entrance, out of the sun,” directed Tydomin.  He did so.

She cast a keenly scrutinising glance at him.  “Does your resolution still hold, Maskull?”

“Why shouldn’t it hold?  My brains are not feathers.”

“Follow me, then.”

They both stepped into the cave.  At that very moment a sickening crash, like heavy thunder just over their heads, set Maskull’s weakened heart thumping violently.  An avalanche of boulders, stones, and dust, swept past the cave entrance from above.  If their going in had been delayed by a single minute, they would have been killed.

Tydomin did not even look up.  She took his hand in hers, and started walking with him into the darkness.  The temperature became as cold as ice.  At the first bend the light from the outer world disappeared, leaving them in absolute blackness.  Maskull kept stumbling over the uneven ground, but she kept tight hold of him, and hurried him along.

The tunnel seemed of interminable length.  Presently, however, the atmosphere changed—­or such was his impression.  He was somehow led to imagine that they had come to a larger chamber.  Here Tydomin stopped, and then forced him down with quiet pressure.  His groping hand encountered stone and, by feeling it all over, he discovered that it was a sort of stone slab, or couch, raised a foot or eighteen inches from the ground.  She told him to lie down.

“Has the time come?” asked Maskull.

“Yes.”

He lay there waiting in the darkness, ignorant of what was going to happen.  He felt her hand clasping his.  Without perceiving any gradation, he lost all consciousness of his body; he was no longer able to feel his limbs or internal organs.  His mind remained active and alert.  Nothing particular appeared to be taking place.

Then the chamber began to grow light, like very early morning.  He could see nothing, but the retina of his eyes was affected.  He fancied that he heard music, but while he was listening for it, it stopped.  The light grew stronger, the air grew warmer; he heard the confused sound of distant voices.