Chapter 3

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 among
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 splendor 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, skeletonlike 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,
bierlike litter, and last the Black-veiled Woman and the White-
robed Skeleton.

But now, as I halted on the tableland, backed by the mountain and
fronting the valley, the woman left her companion, passed by the
litter and the armed men, and paused by my side, at the mouth of
the moonlit cavern.

There for a moment she stood, silent, the procession below mounting
upward laboriously and slow; then she turned to me, and her veil
was withdrawn.

The face on which I gazed was wondrously beautiful, and severely
awful. There was neither youth nor age, but beauty, mature and
majestic as that of a marble Demeter.

"Do you believe in that which you seek?" she asked in her foreign,
melodious, melancholy accents.

"I have no belief," was my answer. "True science has none. True
science questions all things, takes nothing upon credit. It knows
but three states of the mind--denial, conviction, and that vast
interval between the two which is not belief but suspense of
judgment."

The woman let fall her veil, moved from me, and seated herself on a
crag above that cleft between mountain and creek, to which, when I
had first discovered the gold that the land nourished, the rain
from the clouds had given the rushing life of the cataract; but
which now, in the drought and the hush of the skies, was but a dead
pile of stones.

The litter now ascended the height: its bearers halted; a lean hand
tore the curtains aside, and Margrave descended leaning, this time,
not on the Black-veiled Woman, but on the White-robed Skeleton.

There, as he stood, the moon shone full on his wasted form; on his
face, resolute, cheerful, and proud, despite its hollowed outlines
and sicklied hues. He raised his head, spoke in the language
unknown to me, and the armed men and the litter bearers grouped
round him, bending low, their eyes fixed on the ground. The Veiled
Woman rose slowly and came to his side, motioning away, with a mute
sign, the ghastly form on which he leaned, and passing round him
silently, instead, her own sustaining arm. Margrave spoke again a
few sentences, of which I could not even guess the meaning. When
he had concluded, the armed men and the litter bearers came nearer
to his feet, knelt down, and kissed his hand. They then rose, and
took from the bierlike vehicle the coffer and the fuel. This done,
they lifted again the litter, and again, preceded by the armed men,
the procession descended down the sloping hillside, down into the
valley below.

Margrave now whispered, for some moments, into the ear of the
hideous creature who had made way for the Veiled Woman. The grim
skeleton bowed his head submissively, and strode noiselessly away
through the long grasses--the slender stems, trampled under his
stealthy feet, relifting themselves as after a passing wind. And
thus he, too, sank out of sight down into the valley below. On the
tableland of the hill remained only we three--Margrave, myself, and
the Veiled Woman.

She had reseated herself apart, on the gray crag above the dried
torrent. He stood at the entrance of the cavern, round the sides
of which clustered parasital plants, with flowers of all colors,
some among them opening their petals and exhaling their fragrance
only in the hours of night; so that, as his form filled up the jaws
of the dull arch, obscuring the moonbeam that strove to pierce the
shadows that slept within, it stood now--wan and blighted--as I had
seen it first, radiant and joyous, literally "framed in blooms."