It was not death she feared here, nor the horror from which she
had escaped above, but something unknown and indescribable, for which
she would never be able to give a reason. She clung to Alan, and when at
last the narrow fissure widened over their heads, and light came down
and softened their way, he saw that her face was deathly white.
"We are almost there," he comforted. "And--some day--you will love this
gloomy kloof as I love it, and we will travel it together all the way to
the mountains."
A few minutes later they came to an avalanche of broken sandstone that
was heaped half-way up the face of the precipitous wall, and up this
climbed until they came to a level shelf of rock, and back of this was a
great depression in the rock, forty feet deep and half as wide, with a
floor as level as a table and covered with soft white sand. Mary would
never forget her first glimpse of this place; it was unreal, strange, as
if a band of outlaw fairies had brought the white sand for a carpet, and
had made this their hiding-place, where wind and rain and snow could
never blow. And up the face of the cavern, as if to make her thought
more real, led a ragged fissure which it seemed to her only fairies'
feet could travel, and which ended at the level of the plain. So they
were tundra fairies, coming down from flowers and sunlight through that
fissure, and it was from the evil spirits in the kloof itself that they
must have hidden themselves.
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