In spite of this, Aldous was not in a comfortable frame of mind as they
hurried after Joanne. She had half an hour's start of them when they
reached the mouth of the gorge, and not until they had travelled another
half-hour up the rough bed of the break between the two mountains, and
MacDonald pointed ahead, and said: "There's the cavern!" did he breathe
easier.
They could see the mouth of the cavern when they were yet a couple of
hundred yards from it. It was a wide, low cleft in the north face of the
chasm wall, and in front of it, spreading out like the flow of a stream,
was a great spatter of white sand, like a huge rug that had been spread out
in a space cleared of its chaotic litter of rock and broken slate. At first
glance Aldous guessed that the cavern had once been the exit of a
subterranean stream. The sand deadened the sound of their footsteps as they
approached. At the mouth of the cave they paused. It was perhaps forty or
fifty feet deep, and as high as a nine-foot room. Inside it was quite
light. Halfway to the back of it, upon her knees, and with her face turned
from them, was Joanne.
They were very close to her before she heard them.
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