"But Cannell?" he asked. "What of my friend? We came here to rescue him, you know, and can't leave without him."
"There are eight days yet in which to find him," Denham pointed out, "and if you can not find him in that time, we four will try to locate him after you and Wheeler have escaped. If he's here in the pit, we'll have him with us by the time you come back."
Our conversation was abruptly broken off by the entrance of a number of the room's occupants, who regarded our little group with suspicious stares.
"We'd best break up," Denham whispered, "for we don't want it to get abroad that we're planning something."
So, rising, we sauntered out of the room into the street. Outside a hot sunlight was pouring down from the glass globes in the roof, so strongly that one could not look up at that roof directly, any more than one can look directly at the sun. Whatever method the Kanlars had devised to collect and bring so far underground the light and heat of the sun, it was a wonderfully efficient one.
Behind us loomed the gray-rock wall of the pit, and before us, stretching away for miles to the opposite wall, were the masses of white buildings that housed the city's teeming thousands. And at the central plaza, the titanic, gleaming spiral of the metal stairway rose vastly up toward the black, round shaft that pierced the cavern's roof, its winding turn on turn glinting in the light like a huge, upraised serpent of metal.
In the shifting, noisy throng that pressed by us along the street, that swirled aimlessly through streets and buildings, I sensed a quality of expectation, of eager, restless waiting. Even I, new to the city as I was, could feel the unwonted excitement that pulsed from the passing crowds. And I saw that my companions felt it likewise.
A grizzled seaman in stained, shapeless clothes, who might have sailed with Drake or Hawkins, stopped in front of us.
"Ho, comrade!" he cried to Denham; "hast heard the news?"