What mysteries might not these grim walls hold?
What might not happen here, where everything was so strange, so weird, and so different from the wilderness world just over the range?
Rod tried to laugh away his nervousness, but the very sound of his own voice was distressing.

It rose in unnatural shivering echoes--a low, hollow mockery of a laugh beating itself against the walls; a ghost of a laugh, Rod thought, and that very thought made him hunch closer to the fire.

The young hunter was not superstitious, or at least he was not unnaturally so; but what man or boy is there in this whole wide world of ours who does not, at some time, inwardly cringe from something in the air--something that does not exist and never did exist, but which holds a peculiar and nameless fear for the soul of a human being?
And Rod, as he piled his fire high with wood and shrank in the warmth of his cedar shelter, felt that nameless dread; and there came to him no thought of sleep, no feeling of fatigue, but only that he was alone, absolutely alone, in the mystery and almost unending silence of the chasm.

Try as he would he could not keep from his mind the vision of the skeletons as he had first seen them in the old cabin.
Many, many years ago, even before his own mother was born, those skeletons had trod this very chasm.

They had drunk from the same creek as he, they had clambered over the same rocks, they had camped perhaps where he was camping now! They, too, in flesh and life, had strained their ears in the grim silence, they had watched the flickering light of their camp-fire on the walls of rock--and they had found gold! Just now, if Rod could have moved himself by magic, he would have been safely back in camp.