Following back into the canyon, among the mass of rotting plant and
through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy staging,
with a wry windless on the top; and clambering up, we could look
into an open shaft, leading edgeways down into the bowels of the
mountain, trickling with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams,
whence I know not. In that quiet place the still, far-away tinkle
of the water-drops was loudly audible. Close by, another shaft led
edgeways up into the superincumbent shoulder of the hill. It lay
partly open; and sixty or a hundred feet above our head, we could
see the strata propped apart by solid wooden wedges, and a pine,
half undermined, precariously nodding on the verge. Here also a
rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned bowels of
the rock. This secure angle in the mountain's flank was, even on
this wild day, as still as my lady's chamber. But in the tunnel a
cold, wet draught tempestuously blew. Nor have I ever known that
place otherwise than cold and windy.
Such was our fist prospect of Juan Silverado. I own I had looked
for something different: a clique of neighbourly houses on a
village green, we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and
varnished; a trout stream brawling by; great elms or chestnuts,
humming with bees and nested in by song-birds; and the mountains
standing round about, as at Jerusalem.
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