As if in response to the bugle blast, half a dozen villanous-looking fellows came rushing along the path to meet their compatriots. They eyed us with a broad stare of astonishment, and then fell to questioning our captors eagerly.
The track now led us down over the lip of the crater, and in a moment we found ourselves on a sort of terrace strewn with boulders, and apparently blasted out of the volcanic detritus deposited centuries before amid frightful convulsions of nature.
CHAPTER XIX.
IN THE CRATER CAVE.
It was a weird spot, and in the gathering darkness had a depressing effect upon one’s spirits. Here there might have been enormous catacombs, where the dead of untold ages had been brought from other lands to be entombed; and if so, what troops of uneasy ghosts might be found wandering about the yawning chasms of the gloomy crater after nightfall!
For was there not the dusky entrance yonder to some land of hidden rock-tombs?
Before it stood two small brass cannon, their polished mouths gleaming with a menacing look through the semi-darkness. Beside these weapons of war stood, neatly arranged, piles of shot.
It flashed across me immediately that the pirates had here some cave dwellings; perhaps their headquarters, where they kept their looted cargoes.
I was not long kept in suspense, for our captors hurried us through the dark entrance which I had noticed in the cliffs as resembling the gloomy portals to some dreary abode of the dead.
We found ourselves in a beautiful little grotto, low in the roof, but almost circular in shape. The atmosphere reeked with the strong fumes of tobacco. On one side several cases, bales of goods, and barrels were piled, the one on top of the other, and on one of the latter stood a lighted ship’s lantern, which thoroughly illuminated the little cavern.
I was enabled to take only a very hurried survey of our new surroundings, for the pirates hustled us through a very narrow passage opening from the rear of the cave into another of about the same dimensions, but irregular in shape, and exceedingly dark and gloomy in appearance, there being no natural orifices in the roof to admit light or air. It was in fact a subterranean dungeon, for such in my present depression of spirits I felt it to be.