Dr. Fabos Leaves the Valley House.
There was not a sound within the house, nor did an open window upon the landing admit any signal of alarm from the gardens. I could but hazard that the little Jap had crossed the gully of the river and come by such a road into the valley. To question him would have been as absurd as to delay. Here he was, and there stood the open door. When he thrust a revolver into my hand and bade me follow him by the low verandah to the gardens below, I obeyed without further hesitation1. The mystery of Joan’s disappearance2 asked for no clever solution. This night, I said, the Jew had meant to kill me. And for the first time, it may be, I realised the deadly peril3 I had lived through at the Valley House.
Okyada has never been a man of many words. I think he uttered but two that night as we crossed the valley garden and made for the river bank. “Shoot, master,” he said, meaning that if any barred the way, the time for passive flight had passed. I nodded my head in answer, and pressed closer upon his heels as he entered the maze5 of shrubs6 which defended the gully. The silence about us had become a burden to the nerves. Was it possible that none of the Jew’s men watched the garden? Indeed, for a moment, that appeared to be the truth.
We gained the bank of the whirlpool of yesterday, and for a few minutes lay flat in the shadow of the great border of the rock which rises up above the gully. Behind us we could espy8 the lighted windows of the bedroom I had just left and the clear shape of the silent chalet. The gardens and the woods were so many patches of black against an azure9 sky of night. The water below us flowed, in colour a deep indigo10, between walls of lightless rock, in a bed of polished stone. Not a breath of wind stirred the pines upon the hill side. We could no longer see the ocean without or the friendly lights it showed to us. We might have been fugitives11 upon a desert island; and this deception12 would have continued possible until the sound of a distant rifle-shot awoke a thousand echoes in the hills and shattered in a single instant the dream of security we had found so pleasing.
Okyada sprang up at the sound and began to speak with an earnestness of which he was rarely guilty.
“They have found the honourable13 Captain—quick, master, we must go to him,” he said.
My answer was to point up to the sloping lawn of the garden we had left. There, in single file, the figures of seven men, crossing the grass boldly toward the chalet, were clearly to be discerned. I had scarcely observed them when a movement in the shrubbery immediately behind us betrayed the presence of others—three in all—who came out to the water’s edge at a place not ten yards from where we stood, and halting there a little while to inspect the gully, afterwards made off through the woods as though to join the others above.
“Old Val gets such notions into his woolly cranium,” said one of them as he went. “If there’s any lousy Englishman going across there to-night, I’m derned if he ain’t a flip-flop mermaid14.”
A second ventured that the water was lower than he had ever seen it, while the third added the opinion that, low or high, it was hot enough to warm the grog of a Congo nigger, and a —— sight too hot for any police nark to try it.
We listened to them, crouching15 low on the rock and with our revolvers ready to our hands. Had the most trifling16 accident occurred, a falling pebble17 or a clumsy movement betrayed us, that, I am convinced, would have been the whole story of the night. But we lay as men long practised in the arts of silence, and not until the trees hid the men from our sight did Okyada stand up again and prepare to cross the gully.
“Go first, master,” he said. “Here is the rope. Our friends with the honourable Captain wait yonder above. Let us bring them the good news.”
Now, I saw that, as he spoke18, he had caught up a rope which had been dexterously19 fixed20 to a boulder21 upon the opposite bank of the stream and allowed to trail in the water while he went to fetch me from the house. Fixing this as cleverly to the rock upon our side, he made a bridge by which any strong lad could have crossed, the pool being as low as it then was; and no sooner had he given me the signal than I swung myself out and almost immediately found a footing upon the further shore. His own passage, when first he crossed, must have been very perilous22, I thought; and I could but imagine that he had thrown the rope over first and trusted to the grappling iron affixed23 to the end upon the garden side. This, however, was but a speculation24. He crossed now as I had done, and together we cast the knot from the boulder and drew the rope in. If all our acts were cool and collected, I set the fact down to the knowledge that we were prisoners of the valley no longer, and that the hills were before us. What mattered the alarm now sounding through the gardens, the hoarse25 cry of voices, the blowing of whistles, the running to and fro of excited men? More ominous26 by far was a second rifle-shot, awakening27 crashing echoes in the mountains. This, I believed, one of my own yacht’s company had fired. Plainly our men had either stumbled upon an ambush28 or fallen into some snare29 set upon the road we must follow. The truth of the issue could not but be momentous30 to us all. Either we must find them prisoners or free men who stood in instant danger. There could be no moment of delay which was not hazardous31, and we permitted none directly our foothold had been secured and the rope drawn32 in.
“Did you come alone, Okyada?” I asked my servant presently.
He dissented33 as he folded the coils of rope.
“The honourable Scotchman—he is waiting with the lantern, excellency.”
I smiled, but did not offend his sense of that which was due to so great a person as Balaam, the Scotch34 boatswain.
“Would it be far from here, Okyada?”
“That which your excellency could walk in a minute.”
I said no more, but followed him up the cliff side, scrambling35 and slipping like a boy upon a holiday jaunt36, and no less eager for the heights. To the darkness of the night and the quickness of our movements, my faithful servant and I undoubtedly37 owed our lives. Remember that the valley now raised the cry of alarm from one end to the other. Whistles were blown, bells were rung, rifles fired wildly. That the bullets struck the rocks both above and below us, my ears told me unmistakably. Had we been an open mark moving in the clear light of day, the suspense38 of this flight, the doubt and the hazard of it had been easier to support. As it was, we went on blindly, our hands clasping the rough boulders39, our feet scattering40 the pebbles41 of the path; and conscious through it all that a wild bullet might find a lucky billet and grass either or both of us as though we had been hares in a tricky42 covert43. Never was a man more thankful than I when a vast fissure44 in the cliff side appeared before us suddenly as a sanctuary45 door opened by an unknown friend’s hand. By it we passed gladly, and were instantly lost to the view of those in the valley; while a profound silence of ultimate night enveloped46 us. There was no longer the need to pant and toil47 upon a crazy slope. Nature herself had here cut a path, and it appeared to lead into the very heart of the mountain.
Now, this path we followed, it may have been for some two hundred yards in a direction parallel to that of the valley we had quitted. Its gentle declivity48 brought us in the end to a low cavern49 of the rock, and here we found the boatswain, Balaam, sitting with his back to the cliff, smoking his pipe and guarding his ship’s lantern as calmly as though the scene had been Rotherhithe and the day a seaman’s Saturday. Hearing our approach, he bestirred himself sufficiently50 to fend7 the light and to ask a question.
“Would it be the Doctor and the wild man?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer he ran on, “I kenned51 your step, Doctor, and said you were doing finely. There’s firing on the hills, sir, and ye would be wise not to bide52. I’m no gleg at the running myself, but yon manny can take the licht, and I’ll make shift for myself. Ay, Doctor, but if I had that bit of an ass4 the boys go daft upon?——”
I told him to show the way and not to talk, though I was glad enough to hear the good fellow’s voice. His name was Machie, but a donkey ride at Cowes christened him Balaam for good and all aboard the White Wings. Very methodically now, and with a seaman’s widening lurch53, he set out to cross the cavern, Okyada and I upon his heels and all the mesh54 of subterranean55 wonder about us. Here, for a truth, a man might have feared to go at all, lantern or no lantern in his hand; for the cavern revealed the source of the boiling springs, and there was one great chamber56 of the rock so dreadful to breathe in, so white with steam and scalding spray, that my own courage would have recoiled57 from it but for the example set me by these brave fellows. They, however, held straight on without a word spoken, and coming to a clearer air presently they indicated to me that we were approaching some place of danger, and must now go with circumspection58. Then I saw that the cavern roof narrowed rapidly until we stood in a passage so regularly moulded that the hand of man might have excavated59 it. And beyond this lay the Atlantic, plainly visible though the night was moonless. Never did a glimpse of the open water cheer my heart so bravely. Liberty, home, my friends! A man is a man upon the sea, though every port but one be shut against him. And the breath of life is in his lungs, and the desire of life at his heart. Nay60, who shall deny it?
A sharp exclamation61 from the Scotchman, a sudden halt upon my servant’s part, quickly tempered these reflections upon liberty and brought me back to a sense of our situation and its dangers. That which they had seen, I now perceived to be nothing less than the figure of a man standing62 with his back to the rock as though guarding the entrance to the tunnel and there keeping watch, not only upon the path, but upon another figure which lay prone63 in the fair way and was, I had no doubt whatever, a figure of the dead. To come instantly to the conclusion that the dead was one of our own, and that he had been killed by one of the rifles whose report we had so recently heard, I found natural enough. Not only was it my thought, but that of the others with me, and together we halted in the cavern and asked what we should do. To be sure, we were not to be affrighted by a single sentry64, though he carried a rifle in his hand; but the certainty that others would be within call, and that a single cry might bring them upon us, robbed us for a moment of any clear idea, and held us prisoners of the cave.
“’Twould have been the firing that I heard syne,” the boatswain whispered.
I turned to Okyada and asked him what we should do. His own uncertainty65 was reflected in his attitude. He stood as still as a figure of marble.
“The master wait,” he said presently. “I think that I shall know if the master wait. Let the lantern be covered. I shall see by the darkness.”
I told him that I forbade him to go, and that it was madness to suppose that the sentry would stand there alone. He did not hear me, disappearing immediately upon his words, and being lost to our view as completely as though the earth had opened and swallowed him up. I shall always say that a quicker, surer-footed, or more faithful fellow never lived to earn the gratitude66 of an unemotional master. My own confidence in him found its best expression in the complacency with which I waited for his news. He would kill the sentry if need be—of that I felt sure—and there was something horrible in the thought that a living man, whose figure we could see in the dim light beyond the cavern, stood upon the very brink67 of eternity68 and might have spoken his last word on earth. This reflection was my own. The stolid69 boatswain made nothing of it. He covered the lantern methodically and squatted70 back against the rock.
“Yon yellow laddie’s fine,” he whispered. “’Twould be as good as dead the man were. Has your honour such a thing as a bit of baccy upon ye? No; well, I’ll do well wanting it.”
I smiled, but did not answer him. In truth, I had begun to find the minutes of waiting intolerable. What with the oppressive atmosphere of the tunnel, the heated, steam-laden air, and upon this the ghostly fascination71 of the spectre at the cavern’s mouth, it came to me that my own strength might not carry me safely through the ordeal72. What kept Okyada? The sentry, on his part, did not appear to have moved since I had first seen him. There was no sound in the cave save that of the hissing73 steam behind us. I could not discover the little figure of my servant, though I was looking from the darkness toward the light. Had he come to the conclusion that it was dangerous to go on? This seemed possible, and I had already taken a few steps towards the tunnel’s mouth when his figure suddenly emerged into the light, and standing side by side with the sentry, he uttered that soft, purring whistle which called to us to come on.
“Yon’s one of our own, then,” the boatswain said, starting to his feet clumsily.
“Then someone has gone under, and he is keeping watch over him,” I replied. “God send that it is not one of our crew.”
“Amen to that, sir, though ’twere in a Christian74 man to say that we maun all die when the day comes.”
“But not in this cursed island or at the hands of a rascally75 Jew. The day will be an unlucky one if it comes here, my man. Put your best foot foremost, and say that it shall not.”
My words were Greek to him, of course; and he answered me with a strange oath and an expression of opinion upon Portuguese76 and others which was quite valueless. My own curiosity now turned, however, to consider the odd fact that the sentry remained motionless, and that Okyada did not appear to have exchanged a single word with him. Who, then, was the man, and what kept him in that grotesque77 attitude? At a distance of fifty yards from the light I could not have told you, but at twenty yards I understood. The wretched man was as stone dead as his comrade who lay upon the path. A bullet from an unknown rifle had shot him through the heart as he stood in ambush waiting for me. So much I hazarded on the instant. The truth must be made known to me upon the yacht’s deck.
I name the yacht, and this is to tell you in a word that, coming out of the pit, we espied78 her, lying off the headland—a picture of life and light upon the still water. There below, upon the shore, stood the friends who had known so many anxieties, suffered upon my account such weary days of waiting, such long hours of strenuous79 labour since I had left them. And now I had but to scramble80 down the rugged81 cliff side and clasp their hands, and to tell them that all was well with me. But nine days away from them, I seemed to have lived a year apart, to have changed my very self, to be a new man coming into a living world of action from a grave of dreams.
And what voice more earthly could I have heard than that of the unsurpassable Timothy McShanus crying, “Me bhoy!” in tones that might have been heard upon the mountain top?
No, indeed, and Timothy was the first to greet me, and I do believe there were tears of gladness in his eyes.
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1
hesitation
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| n.犹豫，踌躇 | |
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disappearance
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| n.消失，消散，失踪 | |
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peril
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| n.(严重的)危险；危险的事物 | |
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ass
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| n.驴；傻瓜，蠢笨的人 | |
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maze
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| n.迷宫，八阵图，混乱，迷惑 | |
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shrubs
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| 灌木( shrub的名词复数 ) | |
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fend
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| v.照料（自己），（自己）谋生，挡开，避开 | |
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espy
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| v.（从远处等）突然看到 | |
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azure
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| adj.天蓝色的，蔚蓝色的 | |
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indigo
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| n.靛青，靛蓝 | |
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11
fugitives
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| n.亡命者，逃命者( fugitive的名词复数 ) | |
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12
deception
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| n.欺骗，欺诈；骗局，诡计 | |
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honourable
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| adj.可敬的；荣誉的，光荣的 | |
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mermaid
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| n.美人鱼 | |
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crouching
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| v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的现在分词 ) | |
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trifling
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| adj.微不足道的；没什么价值的 | |
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pebble
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| n.卵石，小圆石 | |
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18
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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dexterously
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| adv.巧妙地，敏捷地 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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boulder
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| n.巨砾；卵石，圆石 | |
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perilous
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| adj.危险的，冒险的 | |
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23
affixed
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| adj.[医]附着的，附着的v.附加( affix的过去式和过去分词 )；粘贴；加以；盖（印章） | |
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speculation
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| n.思索，沉思；猜测；投机 | |
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hoarse
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| adj.嘶哑的，沙哑的 | |
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ominous
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| adj.不祥的，不吉的，预兆的，预示的 | |
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awakening
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| n.觉醒，醒悟 adj.觉醒中的；唤醒的 | |
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ambush
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| n.埋伏(地点)；伏兵；v.埋伏；伏击 | |
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snare
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| n.陷阱，诱惑，圈套；（去除息肉或者肿瘤的）勒除器；响弦，小军鼓；vt.以陷阱捕获，诱惑 | |
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momentous
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| adj.重要的，重大的 | |
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hazardous
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| adj.(有)危险的，冒险的；碰运气的 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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dissented
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| 不同意，持异议( dissent的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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scotch
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| n.伤口，刻痕；苏格兰威士忌酒；v.粉碎，消灭，阻止；adj.苏格兰(人)的 | |
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scrambling
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| v.快速爬行( scramble的现在分词 )；攀登；争夺；（军事飞机）紧急起飞 | |
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jaunt
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| v.短程旅游；n.游览 | |
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undoubtedly
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| adv.确实地，无疑地 | |
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suspense
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| n.（对可能发生的事）紧张感，担心，挂虑 | |
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boulders
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| n.卵石( boulder的名词复数 )；巨砾；（受水或天气侵蚀而成的）巨石；漂砾 | |
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40
scattering
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| n.[物]散射；散乱，分散；在媒介质中的散播adj.散乱的；分散在不同范围的；广泛扩散的；（选票）数量分散的v.散射(scatter的ing形式)；散布；驱散 | |
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41
pebbles
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| [复数]鹅卵石； 沙砾； 卵石，小圆石( pebble的名词复数 ) | |
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42
tricky
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| adj.狡猾的，奸诈的；(工作等)棘手的，微妙的 | |
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43
covert
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| adj.隐藏的；暗地里的 | |
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44
fissure
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| n.裂缝；裂伤 | |
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45
sanctuary
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| n.圣所，圣堂，寺庙；禁猎区，保护区 | |
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46
enveloped
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| v.包围，笼罩，包住( envelop的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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47
toil
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| vi.辛劳工作，艰难地行动；n.苦工，难事 | |
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declivity
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| n.下坡，倾斜面 | |
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49
cavern
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| n.洞穴，大山洞 | |
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50
sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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51
kenned
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| v.知道( ken的过去式和过去分词 )；懂得；看到；认出 | |
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52
bide
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| v.忍耐；等候；住 | |
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53
lurch
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| n.突然向前或旁边倒；v.蹒跚而行 | |
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54
mesh
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| n.网孔，网丝，陷阱；vt.以网捕捉，啮合，匹配；vi.适合； [计算机]网络 | |
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55
subterranean
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| adj.地下的，地表下的 | |
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56
chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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recoiled
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| v.畏缩( recoil的过去式和过去分词 )；退缩；报应；返回 | |
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58
circumspection
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| n.细心，慎重 | |
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excavated
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| v.挖掘( excavate的过去式和过去分词 )；开凿；挖出；发掘 | |
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60
nay
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| adv.不；n.反对票，投反对票者 | |
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61
exclamation
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| n.感叹号，惊呼，惊叹词 | |
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62
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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63
prone
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| adj.(to)易于…的，很可能…的；俯卧的 | |
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64
sentry
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| n.哨兵，警卫 | |
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65
uncertainty
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| n.易变，靠不住，不确知，不确定的事物 | |
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66
gratitude
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| adj.感激，感谢 | |
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67
brink
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| n.(悬崖、河流等的)边缘，边沿 | |
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68
eternity
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| n.不朽，来世；永恒，无穷 | |
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stolid
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| adj.无动于衷的，感情麻木的 | |
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70
squatted
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| v.像动物一样蹲下( squat的过去式和过去分词 )；非法擅自占用（土地或房屋）；为获得其所有权；而占用某片公共用地。 | |
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71
fascination
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| n.令人着迷的事物，魅力，迷恋 | |
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ordeal
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| n.苦难经历，（尤指对品格、耐力的）严峻考验 | |
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73
hissing
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| n. 发嘶嘶声, 蔑视 动词hiss的现在分词形式 | |
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Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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rascally
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| adj. 无赖的，恶棍的 adv. 无赖地，卑鄙地 | |
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76
Portuguese
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| n.葡萄牙人；葡萄牙语 | |
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77
grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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78
espied
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| v.看到( espy的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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79
strenuous
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| adj.奋发的，使劲的；紧张的；热烈的，狂热的 | |
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80
scramble
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| v.爬行，攀爬，杂乱蔓延，碎片，片段，废料 | |
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rugged
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| adj.高低不平的，粗糙的，粗壮的，强健的 | |
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