"Courage, my friend! It is that we come to seek."

"Ah! My God, yes--it is that! I dare not--I dare not!"

He drew back livid with fear, but I urged him on.

"Remember the dream, Camille!" I cried.

"Yes, yes--it was good. Help me, Monsieur, and I will try--yes, I will
try!"

I drew his arm within mine, and together we stumbled on. The undergrowth
grew denser and more fantastic; the murmur filled out, increased and
resolved itself into a sound of falling water that ever took shape, and
volume, and depth, till its crash shook the ground at our feet. Then in
a moment a white blaze of sky came at us through the trunks, and we burst
through the fringe of the wood to find ourselves facing the opposite side
of a long cleft in the mountain and the blade's edge of a roaring
cataract.

It shot out over the lip of the fall, twenty feet above us, in a curve
like a scimitar, passed in one sheet the spot where we stood, and dived
into a sunless pool thirty feet below with a thunderous boom. What it may
have been in full phases of the stream, I know not; yet even now it was
sufficiently magnificent to give pause to a dying soul eager to shake off
the restless horror of the world. The flat of its broad blade divided the
lofty black walls of a deep and savage ravine, on whose jagged shelves
some starved clumps of rhododendron shook in the wind of the torrent.
Far down the narrow gully we could see the passion of water tossing,
champed white with the ravening of its jaws, until it took a bend of the