“Go on!” I said, in a repressed voice. “I have come so far; I must follow, I suppose.”
“Will you not let me lead you?”
“No.”
“You may stumble in the dark.”
“Not to the fall you think.”
“I am sorry.”
“Very well. Go on.”
He went before, submissively. The gully cut straight, like a giant furrow, through the hill. It was narrow and pitch-dark, sodden here and there with dripping water, and always smelling like a vault. Not once in its entire length, so far as I could see, did the dense mat of overgrowth thin to that texture that a star of all the hosts above was visible.
At last he stopped so suddenly that I near fell against him.
“Hush!” he whispered, “we are at the end. Can you see enough to follow me?”