“I know,” she replied quietly, but with convincing emphasis.
“Then he is here! I am right. You know where he is. You will take me to him!”
“Ah! Perhaps you will not go. You are a white woman; you will be afraid to leave your friends and go with me.”
“I am not afraid.”
“Perhaps this man you look for has changed. Perhaps he will not know you. And this other, his enemy, perhaps he is here. There will be trouble, danger.”
“Take me to him!” demanded Una passionately. “If there is danger, I should be with him. I am not afraid. I trust you.”
“That is good,” said Narva. “Come!”
Una now became aware that the corridor down which they were slowly walking widened out into a respectable thoroughfare at its further end, whence it abruptly turned and was merged in the main trail that had brought them to Narva’s dwelling. Thus, the latter, through some labyrinthine arrangement of passages, was entered at one place and offered an exit in an entirely opposite direction, whence, by devious twists and turns, it came back to the first point of approach. To Una, at least, bewildered by the intricacies of cave topography, this seemed the explanation of the course they were pursuing, although the mysterious doubling of their tracks brought little consolation—especially when she realized that her uncle and his companions were lost in the center of a maze the clew to which completely eluded her. Anxiety for their safety overrode, for the moment, every other consideration; she grasped Narva’s arm with a detaining gesture, a half uttered question on her lips. Her appeal, however, was not answered. Like some ancient oracle, from which has proceeded the final Pythian message, no further revelation was to be granted. In true sibylline fashion, with finger on lip and eyes set on some object in the distance hidden from Una, Narva indicated that the time for speech had passed and now it remained for them to carry out as expeditiously as possible, the design upon which they were setting forth. From her gesture and the stealthy caution with which she advanced, Una gathered that there were urgent reasons for maintaining a strict silence. They might be surrounded by hostile forces, their destination might be a secret one, or at least a knowledge of it might involve danger to the man for whose preservation she firmly believed they were engaged. Narva, in warning her of this danger, hinted that whatever they had to fear was in some way due to the presence of Raoul Arthur in the cave. The enmity of the latter to David, moreover, was full of sinister possibilities, and the conviction that they were about to foil the evil thus threatened nerved Una to face anything.
Una would have felt a stronger confidence in their mission, a keener enthusiasm, had Narva been more definite as to the identity of the man to whose rescue she believed they were hastening, or had she given some hint of the kind of danger to which he was actually exposed. But it was all so vague, she feared that some mistake had been made, a mistake easily growing out of the fervid imagination that, any one could see, quite controlled Narva’s mind. While there was no shaking the old sibyl’s reticence, however, the calm determination with which she set about her task proved, in a measure, inspiring. Una might feel an occasional doubt as to the outcome of their venture, but this doubt finally disappeared altogether before the faith, growing stronger with the changing aspect of the scene through which they were passing, that in some unlooked-for way she was about to attain the main object that had brought them into this ancient home of a vanished race.
They had now entered a portion of the cave where the dim half-light to which Una was accustomed turned, by comparison, almost to the light of day. This light appeared to come from a fixed point directly in front of them. No central globe, or body of fire, to which this appearance might be traced was visible; but, in the far distance, where the light reached its greatest intensity, over the top of a dark ridge of rock rising before them like the summit of a mountain, thin streamers of white radiance shot upward, rising and falling in the unequal flashes and subsidences generated by an electric battery. This luminous appearance, however, was too stupendous in its effects to be attributable to a mere electric battery. To Una’s dazzled vision it rather resembled the first onrush of the morning sun, when the presence of that luminary just below the horizon is proclaimed by advancing rays of light. Here, however, an effect of greater motion was produced than in the steady and gradual illumination of the heavens heralding the coming of the sun. The sparkles and flashes neither grew nor shrank in intensity. If they were produced by a central body corresponding to the sun that shone upon the outside world, it was a stationary sun, fixed in some mysterious, invisible recess of the cave.