But that impenetrable night produced a depression that we could not shake off.  Imagination sprang ahead of the moment and pictured our final struggles.  We fought with the nightmares that entered our minds, and conversation languished.  We couldn’t speak while the mental canvases were being rapidly coloured with scenes depicting our end in the darkness and the silence, where a grim fate would even deny one a last look at a dearly loved face.  A silence came upon us that had the same effect as intense cold.  Each in his own frozen husk of despair plodded forward with the idea that the others were so engrossed in their own thoughts that they were not inclined to answer when addressed.  The darkness so completely isolated each person that after some hours of silence it required a tremendous effort to thoroughly convince the mind that one was walking with living people and not with phantoms.

It was after one of these intervals of silence that Barbara Herndon made a discovery that chilled our blood.  She made some commonplace remark to her sister and received no reply.  She repeated the observation, but it brought no comment.  The happening seemed to drag the rest of us from the strange torpor, and we stopped.  We sensed that Barbara Herndon was feeling her way toward her sister, and presently the younger girl gave a shriek of alarm that stirred a million echoes in that place of terror.

“Edith!” she shrieked.  “Edith!  Edith!  Where are you?”

Holman and I clawed fiercely upon the rope, moving toward each other in an effort to find a quick solution for the mystery.  We collided violently as we reached the spot where the rope had circled Edith Herndon’s waist, and we stood, stunned and speechless, as we fingered the cord.  In some manner, probably severed by a knifelike projection of rock, the loop which I had knotted around her body had been cut through, and the rope had fallen unnoticed from the waist of the weary girl!

“Great God!” I cried.  “Where did we lose her?  What way did we come?”

The questions were ridiculous.  The numbing influence of the place had made us walk for an hour or so in complete silence, and it was impossible to say when she had lost her position in the line.  And now, as we moved round and round, endeavouring to peer into the blackness, we lost all sense of direction.  Each had a different notion about the way we had come.  While we were moving forward, our combined efforts to walk straight ahead made it impossible for one to turn and go in an opposite direction, but in the few moments of our excitement as we turned and twisted in clawing for the loop where Edith had been tied, we became bewildered.  We didn’t know in which direction to turn in searching for the lost one!

“What’ll we do?” cried the Professor.  “Do something!  Quick!  Find her!  Find her!”

I took a great breath and yelled her name into the darkness.  The sound thundered through the place like the noise made by a freight train.  Again and again I screamed it, and the million devils in the place shrieked the name in mockery.  I exhausted myself in my mad efforts to send my voice to her ears.