“When the knowledge broke upon me, I grew great to myself in the possession of a wonderful secret.  Day after day I visited the cave and examined this phenomenon—­and yet another more marvellous in its connection with the first.  The huge lens was a simple accident of curved rocks and convex water, planed smooth as crystal.  In other than a droughty summer it would probably not exist; the spouting torrent would overwhelm it—­but I know not.  Was not this astonishing enough?  Yet Nature had worked a second miracle to mock in anticipation the self-sufficient plagiarism of little man.  I noticed that the rays of the sun concentrated in the lens only during the half-hour of the orb’s apparent crossing of the ravine.  Then the light smote upon a strange curved little fan of water, that spouted from a high crevice at the mouth of the shallow vitrified tunnel, and devoured it, and played upon the rocks behind, that hissed and sputtered like pitch, and the place was blind with steam.  But when the tooth of fire was withdrawn, the tiny inner cascade fell again and wrought coolness with its sprinkling.

“I did not discover this all at once, for at first fright took me, and it was enough to watch for the moment of the light’s appearance and then flee with a little laughter.  But one day I ventured back into the cave after the sun had crossed the valley, and the steam had died away, and the rock cooled behind the miniature cascade.

“I looked through the lens, and it seemed full of a great white light that blazed into my eyes, so that I fell back through the inner fan of water and was well soused by it; but my sight presently recovering, I stood forward in the scoop of rock admiring the dainty hollow curve the fan took in its fall.  By-and-by I became aware that I was looking out through a smaller lens upon the great one, and that strange whirling mists seemed to be sweeping across a huge disc, within touch of my hand almost.

“It was long before I grasped the meaning of this; but, in a flash, it came upon me.  The great lens formed the object glass, the small, the eyeglass, of a natural telescope of tremendous power, that drew the high summer clouds down within seeming touch and opened out the heavens before my staring eyes.

“Monsieur, when this dawned upon me I was wild.  That so astonishing a discovery should have been reserved for a poor ignorant Swiss peasant filled me with pride wicked in proportion with its absence of gratitude to the mighty dispenser of good.  I came even to think my individuality part of the wonder and necessary to its existence.  ’Were it not for my courage and enterprise,’ I cried, ’this phenomenon would have remained a secret of the Nature that gave birth to it.  She yields her treasures to such only as fear not.’

“I had read in a book of Huyghens, Guinand, Newton, Herschel—­the great high-priests of science who had striven through patient years to read the hieroglyphics of the heavens.  ‘The wise imbeciles,’ I thought.  ’They toiled and died, and Nature held no mirror up to them.  For me, the poor Camille, she has worked in secret while they grew old and passed unsatisfied.’