CHAPTER LXXXI.

Margrave now entered the litter, and the Veiled Woman drew the black
curtains round him. I walked on, as the guide, some yards in advance.
The air was still, heavy, and parched with the breath of the Australasian
sirocco.

We passed through the meadow-lands, studded with slumbering flocks; we
followed the branch of the creek, which was linked to its source in the
mountains by many a trickling waterfall; we threaded the gloom of stunted,
misshapen trees, gnarled with the stringy bark which makes one of the
signs of the strata that nourish gold; and at length the moon, now in all
her pomp of light, mid-heaven amongst her subject stars, gleamed through
the fissures of the cave, on whose floor lay the relics of antediluvian
races, and rested in one flood of silvery splendour upon the hollows of
the extinct volcano, with tufts of dank herbage, and wide spaces of paler
sward, covering the gold below,--Gold, the dumb symbol of organized
Matter's great mystery, storing in itself, according as Mind, the informer
of Matter, can distinguish its uses, evil and good, bane and blessing.

Hitherto the Veiled Woman had remained in the rear, with the white-robed,
skeleton-like image that had crept to my side unawares with its noiseless
step. Thus in each winding turn of the difficult path at which the convoy
following behind me came into sight, I had seen, first, the two
gayly-dressed, armed men, next the black bier-like litter, and last the
Black-veiled Woman and the White-robed Skeleton.