“And you?” said I.
“I go yet a mile to deliver my goods. We will discuss this matter further, bien entendu, on my return.”
He flogged his cattle to an immediate canter, leaving me in all bewilderment alone with the stranger. On every side about us, it seemed, stretched a melancholy waste—a natural graveyard sown with uncouth slabs of stone. The wind swayed the grasses, as if they were foam on black water; the tide of night murmured in innumerable gulfs of darkness.
“Come, then!” muttered the figure, and seized my hand.
We walked twenty cautious paces. I felt the clutch of brambles at my clothes. Suddenly he put his arm about me, and, as we moved, forcibly bent down my head and shoulders. At once I was conscious of a confined atmosphere—damp, earthy, indescribable. It thickened—grew closer and infinitely closer as we advanced.
Now I could walk upright; but my left shoulder rasped ever against solid rock. The blackness of utter negation was terrible; the cabined air an oppression that one almost felt it possible to lift from one’s head like an iron morion. For miles, I could have fancied, we thridded this infernal tunnel before the least little blur of light spread itself like salve on my aching vision.
Then suddenly, like a midnight glowworm, the blur revealed itself, a fair luminous anther of fire in a nest of rays—and was a taper burning on the wall of a narrow chamber or excavation set in the heart of the bed-stone.
“Voilà ton ressui!” exclaimed my sardonic guide; and, without another word, he turned and left me.
I stood a moment confounded; then, with a shrug of my shoulders, walked into the little cellar and paused again in astonishment. From a stone ledge, on which it had been lying, it seemed, prostrate, a figure lifted itself and, standing with its back to me, swept the long hair from its eyes.
I stared, I choked, I held out my arms as if in supplication.