Now arrived the abbot and several hundred monks and nuns, and behind them a multitude of pilgrims and a couple of acres of foundlings, all drawn by the prodigious smoke, and all in a grand state of excitement.

The abbot inquired anxiously for results.

Merlin said: "If any labor of mortal might break the spell that binds these waters, this which I have but just essayed had done it.

It has failed; whereby I do now know that that which I had feared is a truth established; the sign of this failure is, that the most potent spirit known to the magicians of the East, and whose name none may utter and live, has laid his spell upon this well.

The mortal does not breathe, nor ever will, who can penetrate the secret of that spell, and without that secret none can break it.