“I—­I might be silly in thinking it,” she stammered, “but I believe—­oh, please, Mr. Holman, try and walk in the direction I pointed in!”

“I certainly will try,” said the youngster.  “If I go wrong, you put me right, will you?  I believe somehow that we’re going to find a way out.  I don’t know the right path to it, but I’ve got a premonition we’ll find it.  Now we’re off again.”

We moved forward with anxious footsteps.  Imagination furrowed the floor of that place with bottomless crevices, and the cold hand of fear gripped our hearts.  It required a mental effort to move one foot past the other, and whenever one of the girls stumbled, her little cry of alarm brought untold agony to Holman and myself as we took a grip of the rope and braced ourselves against the happening which our excited minds expected any moment.  We were walking hand in hand with dread—­a dread that became greater when we thought that a false step of ours might drag to death the two women that we loved.

On, and on, and on, we bored into the horrible night.  With blind footsteps we walked fearfully through the Stygian waves that rolled around us.  The place seemed to be of enormous size, and in the dead silence that surrounded us our footsteps woke clattering echoes that appeared to mock our efforts to escape.

The air in places had a strange odour that reminded us of camphor.  This peculiar smell seemed to be in certain stratas of the atmosphere through which we passed, and whenever our passage through these scented layers was unduly prolonged, we experienced a sensation that I can only liken to the near approach of seasickness.  It made the girls sick and faint, but they walked on without complaining.

We struck the wall of the place after we had been walking for a period that we judged to be about three hours, and we decided to rest for a while.  We sat close together upon the cold floor and endeavoured to cheer each other’s spirits by constantly asserting that the air of the place made it reasonable to suppose that there must be some other entrance besides the hole through which Leith had lowered the three, and the fissure through which Holman and I had rolled down the gigantic ash pile.  And the assertions seemed logical.  The two entrances that we knew of opened into Leith’s retreat, and it was hard to think that the air supply of the enormous cavern in which we were wandering could come through those two openings.  We combatted our fears with this argument as we ate a morsel of the food we had received that morning, and feeling that he who has the biggest stock of hope has the biggest grip upon life, we endeavoured to make light of our misfortunes as we stumbled on again after a short rest.