Reaching the burnt recess, a few moments sufficed to restore my self-confidence; and without further hesitation I dived under the inner little fan-shaped fall—­which was there, indeed, as Camille had described it—­and recovered my balance with pulses drumming thicker than I could have desired.

In a moment I became conscious that some great power was before me.  Across a vast, irregular disc filled with the ashy whiteness of the outer twilight, strange, unaccountable forms, misty and undefined, passed, and repassed, and vanished.  Cirrus they might have been, or the shadows flung by homing flights of birds; but of this I could not be certain.  As the dusk deepened they showed no more, and presently I gazed only into a violet fathomless darkness.

My own excitement now was great; and I found some difficulty in keeping it under control.  But for the moment, it seemed to me, I pined greatly for free commune with the liberal atmosphere of earth.  Therefore, I dipped under the little fall and made my cautious way to the margin of the cataract.

I was surprised to find for how long a time the phenomenon had absorbed me.  The moon was already high in the heavens, and making towards the ravine with rapid steps.  Far below, the tumbling waters flashed in her rays, and on all sides great tiers of solemn, trees stood up at attention to salute her.

When her disc silvered the inner rim of the slope I had descended, I returned to my post of observation with tingling nerves.  The field of the great object lens was already suffused with the radiance of her approach.

Suddenly my pupils shrank before the apparition of a ghastly grey light, and all in a moment I was face to face with a segment of desolation more horrible than any desert.  Monstrous growths of leprosy that had bubbled up and stiffened; fields of ashen slime—­the sloughing of a world of corruption; hills of demon, fungus swollen with the fatness of putrefaction; and, in the midst of all, dim, convulsed shapes wallowing, protruding, or stumbling aimlessly onwards, till they sank and disappeared.

* * * * *

Madame Barbiere threw up her hands when she let me in at the door.  My appearance, no doubt, was ghastly.  I knew not the hour nor the lapse of time covered by my wanderings about the hills, my face hidden in my palms, a drawn feeling about my heart, my lips muttering—­muttering fragments of prayers, and my throat jerking with horrible laughter.

For hours I lay face downwards on my bed.

“Monsieur has seen it?”

“I have seen it.”

“I heard the rain on the hills.  The lens will have been blurred.  Monsieur has been spared much.”

“God, in His mercy, pity thee!  And me—­oh, Camille, and me too!”

“He has held out His white hand to me.  I go, when I go, with a safe conduct.”

* * * * *

He went before the week was out.  The drought had broken and for five days the thunder crashed and the wild rain swept the mountains.  On the morning of the sixth a drenched shepherd reported in the village that a landslip had choked the fall of Buet, and completely altered its shape.  Madame Barbiere broke into the room where I was sitting with Camille, big with the news.  She little guessed how it affected her listeners.