“If I only had that,” he said to himself.
He stood thinking in the darkness, wondering which way he had better try.
“Any way,” he said at last, “for I will have it; and then if I don’t find my way out of this hole, I’m as stupid as that fellow thinks.”
Stretching out his hands to save himself from a blow against any obstacle, he stalked off in as straight a direction as he could go, feeling his way with his feet, and always making sure of firm foothold before he moved the one that was safe, for his one great dread in the vast cavern was lest he should suddenly find himself on the brink of some yawning shaft.
He knew little about the district, his ideas of the place being principally confined to what he had seen of the coast-line from the sea, but rugged piles of stone had been pointed out to him here and there as being the refuse of the stone that had been ages before dug and regularly mined by shafts and galleries out of the bowels of the earth; and a little thinking convinced him that he must be shut up in one of those old quarries which had been seized upon by the smugglers as a place to hide their stores.
It was a shrewd guess, and he could not help thinking afterwards that it was no wonder that so little success attended the efforts of the revenue cutter’s crew to trace cargoes which had been landed when the smugglers had such lurking places as this.
As he crept slowly on, step by step, these and similar thoughts came rapidly through the prisoner’s brain, and as he slowly mounted what seemed to be a pile of fragments, he began to wonder where his prison could be—whether it was close to the shore or some distance inland.
He stopped to listen, hoping to hear the breaking of the waves among the rocks, which would have proved what he wished to know at once; but though he listened again and again, he could not distinguish a sound. The only noises he heard were those he made in stepping on one side of some piece of stone, which gave forth a musical clink as it struck another.
He was climbing up now what appeared to be a steep slope, over great fragments of stone heavier than he would have been able to lift, and he seemed to creep up and up till he felt assured that the ceiling was just above him, and raising his hand he touched the roof, his fingers tracing out again the great cast of one of the old-world shell-fish—one of the great nautiluses of the geologist.
But fossils were unknown things in Archy Raystoke’s day. He was hunting for a lanthorn, not for specimens.