Feeling for each new handhold and foothold the two climbed slowly up the short shaft and presently found themselves in the tunnel, which Mow had described. Darkness was absolute.
“Do you know the way to the surface?” asked Jude.
“No,” said Tanar. “I was depending upon Mow to lead us.”
“Then we might as well be back in the cavern,” said Jude.
“Not I,” said Tanar, “for at least I am satisfied now that the Coripies will not eat me alive, if they eat me at all.”
Groping his way through the darkness and followed closely by Jude, Tanar crept slowly through the Stygian darkness. The tunnel seemed interminable. They became very hungry and there was no food, though they would have relished even the filthy fragments of decayed fish that the Coripies had hurled them while they were prisoners.
“Almost,” said Tanar, “could I eat a toad.”
They became exhausted and slept, and then again they crawled and stumbled onward. There seemed no end to the interminable, inky corridor.
For long distances the floor of the tunnel was quite level, but then again it would pitch downward, sometimes so steeply that they had difficulty in clinging to the sloping floor. It turned and twisted as though its original excavators had been seldom of the same mind as to the direction in which they wished to proceed.
On and on the two went; again they slept, but whether that meant that they had covered a great distance, or that they were becoming weak from hunger, neither knew.