It was only the most distant electric lamps that looked as if they were diamonds stuck close together along the roof. The near ones were balls of light under swaying umbrellas of ink-black shadow; and sometimes we would flash past great sharp stalactites, which were, as Maida said, like Titanesses' hatpins stuck through from the top of the mountain.
At first the tunnel road was inches thick with white dust; then, much to our surprise, we ran into a track of greasy mud which made our car waltz as it had in the Roya valley close to the precipice.
"It's the water filtering in through the holes your Titanesses' hatpins have made in their big pincushion," explained Mr. Barrymore, who had heard Maida make that remark. And the hateful creatures had so honeycombed the whole mountain over our heads, that Mamma and I put up umbrellas to save ourselves from being drenched.
"What a place this would be for an accident! Or—suppose we met something that objected to us!" Mamma shrieked, her voice all but drowned by the reverberation made by our motor in the hollow vault.
With that, as if her words had "conjured it from the vasty deep"—to use a quotation of Sir Ralph's—something appeared, and it did object to us very much.
It was a horse, and it gleamed like silver as our front lamp pointed it out to our startled eyes with a long, bright finger of light.
He was coming towards us, down the narrow, arched passage, walking on his hind legs, with some one in a cart behind him, standing up and hitting him on the head with a whip.
We were not really going very fast on account of the splashy mud; but what with the roaring echo of the motor, the dripping of water, the narrowness of the tunnel, the yapping of our little dog, the shouts of the man in the cart, and the strangeness of the picture ahead—just like a lighted disc on the screen of a magic lantern—it did seem as if everybody concerned must come to awful grief in about three seconds.
I don't know whether I screamed or not; though I know Mamma did; a deaf man would have known that. But the first thing I was really sure of was that Mr. Barrymore had not only stopped the car but the motor, had jumped down, and gone to the horse's head.
He said something quickly to the driver, which I couldn't understand, because it was in Italian; but the man didn't yell or whip the horse any more. Mr. Barrymore patted the poor beast, and talked to him, until he seemed tired of dancing about as if he were popcorn over a hot fire. Then, when he had quieted down, and remembered that his forefeet were given him to walk with and not to paw the air, Mr. Barrymore led him gently up to our automobile, patting his neck all the time. He snorted and quivered for a minute, then smelt of what Mr. Barrymore calls the "bonnet," with the funniest expression of disgust and curiosity.