This was perfectly true. The blind youth’s fingers were so sensitive that they could tell him more than the eyes of others could tell them. The boys watched Beowald run his fingers down the crack in the middle of the statue. They watched him feel round the staring stone eyes. They followed his quivering fingers round the neck and head, touching, feeling, probing, almost like the feelers of an enquiring butterfly!
Suddenly Beowald’s sensitive fingers found something and they stopped. The boys looked at him.
“What is it, Beowald?” whispered Prince Paul.
“The statue is not solid just here,” answered the goatherd. “Everywhere else it is solid, made of stone — but just behind here, where its right ear is, it is hollow.”
“Let me feel,” said Jack eagerly, and pushed away the goatherd’s fingers. He placed his own behind the right ear of the statue, but he could feel nothing at all. The stone felt just as solid to him there as anywhere else. The other boys felt as well, but to them, as to Jack, the stone was solid there. How could Beowald’s fingers know whether stone was solid or hollow behind a certain spot? It seemed like magic.
Beowald put his fingers back again on the spot he had found. He moved them about, pressed and probed. But nothing happened. Jack shone his torch on to the ear. He saw that it was cleaner than the rest of the head, as if it had been handled a good deal. It occurred to him that the ear itself might be the place containing a spring or lever that worked the statue so that it split in half.
The left ear was completely solid, Jack saw — but the right ear, on the contrary, had a hole in it, as have human ears! Beowald found the hole at the same time as Jack saw it, and placed his first finger inside it. The tip of his finger touched a rounded piece of metal set inside the ear. Beowald pushed against it — and a lever was set in motion that split the stone image silently into half!
Actually it was a very simple mechanism, but the boys did not know that. They stared open-mouthed as the statue split completely down the crack, and the two halves moved smoothly apart. Beowald knew what was happening, though he could not see it. He was afraid, and moved back quickly. He half-thought the statue was coming alive, when it moved!
“Look — there’s a hole underneath the statue, in the middle of the low rock it sits on,” said Jack, and he shone his torch down it. The hole was round in shape, and would take a man’s body easily. A rope, made of strips of leather, hung down the hole from a staple at the top.
“That’s the entrance to the robber’s lair!” said Jack, in a low voice. “No doubt about that! I bet their cave is below this one, in the mountain itself.”