“Don’t be alarmed; I’m going to put out the light.”
Instantly we were in complete darkness, but being close at Hall’s side I could detect his movements. He pulled out the drill, and for half a minute remained motionless as if listening. There was no sound.
“I must enlarge the opening,” he whispered, and immediately the faint grating of a sharp tool cutting through the rock informed me of his progress.
“There,” at last he said, “I think that will do; now for a look.”
I could tell that he had placed his eye at the hole and was gazing with breathless attention. Presently he pulled my sleeve.
“Put your eye here,” he whispered, pushing me into the proper position for looking through the hole.
At first I could discern nothing except a smoky blue glow. But soon my vision cleared a little, and then I perceived that I was gazing into a narrow tunnel which met ours directly end to end. Glancing along the axis of this gallery I saw, some two hundred yards away, a faint light which evidently indicated the mouth of the tunnel.
At the end where we had met it the mysterious tunnel was considerably widened at one side, as if the excavators had started to change direction and then abandoned the work, and in this elbow I could just see the outlines of two or three flat cars loaded with broken stone, while a heap of the same material lay near them. Through the centre of the tunnel ran a railway track.
“Do you know what you are looking at?” asked Hall in my ear.
“I begin to suspect,” I replied, “that you have accidentally run into Dr. Syx’s mine.”