And at the very next moment they could see a white ball descending from the immeasurably distant heights, plunging with mad haste down the mountain slope, tearing away with it whole masses of rock and uprooted pines, swelling every moment into a more tremendous bulk, and dashing down the decline in leaps of two hundred feet at a time into the valley below.
“Heaven defend us!” cried the terrified Clement, clutching his guide with one hand and holding on to the rock with the other. “It is coming this way, and will overwhelm us all.”
“Keep still,” cried Sange Moarte, seeing them inclined to clamber up again and thus expose themselves to the danger of a fall. “The avalanche will take the direction of that block of rock standing in its way, and will there either stop or disperse.”
And indeed they could see that the snow-slip, now grown colossal, was making for a projecting point of rock which was dwarf-like in comparison. Every other sound was lost in the thunder of the avalanche.
And now the huge snowball bounded upon the obstructive rock, and fell prone across it with a terrific thud, which shook the whole mountain to its very base.
For a moment the whole region was enveloped in a cloud of steam-like snow-spray, and after the final crash the thunder of the avalanche ceased. But immediately afterwards it began again with a frightful crackling; the weight of the snowy mass had uprooted the obstructing rock, and whirling down with it in dizzy rotations, plunged perpendicularly into the lake below.
The agitated lake, lashed out of its basin on both sides, rose in an enormous wave, three hundred feet high, up to the very spot where the bold climbers were clinging to the naked rock, and after poising in the air for a second, like a huge transparent green column, broke and fell back into the lake, which very slowly subsided.
“Now we will go on our way,” said Sange Moarte. “The rock is moist now, and the descent will be all the easier.”
After the lapse of half-an-hour, the wanderers found themselves at the mouth of a stream.
A wondrous corridor lay open before them. The brook sprang from a hot spring, which, after racing down the deep valleys, buried itself beneath icebergs and snowdrifts. But the hot water had bored a passage through the ice, constantly melting the frozen mass around it with its warm stream, so that only the thick outermost layer remained, which, constantly renewed by the cold air without, and as constantly dissolved by the hot stream within, grew into a sort of transparent crystal arcade with huge dependent glittering stalactites above the stream.
Through this channel Sange Moarte now led his companions.
Clement could not but call to mind the fabulous fairy palace where spellbound mortals only see the light of day through transparent waters.
Wading thus in the bed of the stream, they reached a point where the bright arcade began to grow dark. Its transparent roof grew thicker and thicker, passing gradually into an ever deeper blue, till at last it became quite black, and the murmuring of the stream was the wanderers’ only guide. As they advanced, with their hose tucked up to their knees, into the ever-darkening darkness, they felt the water getting hotter and hotter, till at last they heard a hissing sound and saw once more the daylight streaming through the rocky chasm, through which the brook rushed down into its subterraneous cave.
Here, with the help of some dangling shrubs, they scaled the hillside to avoid the onslaught of the boiling spring, and after a brief exertion found themselves on the other side of the mountain, in a deep, well-like valley.
This is the Gradina Dracului.
It is a perfectly round dell, shut in on every side by a wall of perpendicular cliffs more than six hundred feet high. Whoever wishes to look down from above, must approach the edge of the rock lying on his stomach, and even then must have a good head not to be seized by vertigo. At the bottom of this dell the flowers have an amaranthine bloom. When the snow is falling thickly all around, and the ice is sparkling everywhere else, here in the depths of the hardest winter may then be seen those dark-green flowers with broad, indented petals, and those little round-leaved trees the like of which are to be met with nowhere else in this district. Just at this time too the leather-leaved Nymphaea opens its light-yellow calices here; the grass, both summer and winter, is of the brightest green; and the wild laurel climbs high up into the crevices of the rocks, and casts its red berries down into the valley, when Nature all around is cold and dead.
Throughout the winter this dell is clothed with the rarest flowers. Therefore the Wallach calls it “the Devil’s Garden,” and fears to approach it.
But the whole wonder has quite a natural cause.
In the depth of the dell a hot mineral spring bubbles up in a cave, never coming to light, but soaking all the circumambient soil through and through, and it is because these warm waters possess a flora of their own that these unknown shrubs and flowers are forever blooming in the neighbourhood of the vivifying element. The whole thing is a splendid open-air orangery in the midst of snowstorms and icebergs.
Sange Moarte beckoned to his comrades to follow him. A feverish impatience possessed him, and when he had advanced a few steps into the cavern, he pointed with trembling hand at a dark recess, in which an iron door was visible.
“What is it?” cried Clement, clutching his sabre. “Does anybody dwell here?”
“Yes,” rejoined Sange Moarte (his blood at that moment seemed to be on fire, and the veins of his temples stood out like cords). “There, in that water-basin, she is wont to bathe. There have I watched her, from day to day, without ever daring to approach her,” stammered he, in a whisper that was
