“Move back, until this burns itself out!  The earth gave into some kind of underground room.  This is a passage.”

It stretched black behind them.  Glenfernie caught up a thick, arm-long piece of lighted wood that would answer for brand.  They worked through a long vaulted tunnel, turned at right angles, and came into what their torch showed to have been an ancient chapel.  In a niche stood a broken statue, on the wall spread a painting of St. Christopher in midstream.

“Shall we go on?  There must be a way out of this maze.”

“If the torch will last us through.”

They passed out of the chapel into a place where of old the dead had been buried.  They moved between massy pillars, by the shelves of stone where the bones lay in the dust.  It seemed a great enough hall.  At the end of this they discovered an upward-going stair, but it was old and broken, and when they mounted it they found that it ended flat against thick stone, roof to it, pavement, perhaps, to some old church.  They saw by a difference in the flags where had been space, the stair opening into the hollow of the church; but now was only stone, solid and thick.  They struck against it, but it was moveless, and in the church, if church there were above, none in the dead night to hear them.  They came down the stair, and through a small, half-blocked doorway stumbled into a labyrinth of passages and narrow chambers.  They found old pieces of wood—­what had been a wine-cask, what might have had other uses.  They broke these into torch lengths, lighting one from another as that burned down.  These underways did not seem wholly neglected, buried, and forgotten.  There lacked any total blocking or demolition, and there was air.  But intricacy and uncertainty reigned.

The mood of the amphitheater when they had sat side by side claimed them still.  There had been a reversion or a coming into fresh space where quarrel faded like a shadow before light.  The light was a golden, hazy one, made up of myriads of sublimed memories, associations, judgments, conclusions.  Nothing defined emerged from it; it was simply somewhat golden, somewhat warm light, as from a sun well under the horizon—­a kind of dreamy well-being as of old Together, unquestioning Acceptance.  Suddenly aroused, each might have cried, “For the moment—­it was for a moment only!” Then, for the moment, there was return, with addition.  It came like a winged force from the bounds of doing or undoing.  While it lasted it imposed upon them quieted minds, withdrew any seeming need for question.  They sought for egress from this place where their bodies moved, explanation of this material labyrinth.  But they did not seek explanation of this mood, fallen among pride and anger, wrong and revenge.  It came from at large, with the power of largeness.  They were back, “for the moment,” in a simplicity of ancient, firm companionship.