“As far as the candles will let us,” said Panton. “Hallo!”
His voice was echoed from a distance as loudly as he had spoken, and the “Hallo!” went reverberating away in the gloom.
“We must be in a big opening,” he said, and again his voice echoed, and then went on repeating itself and dying away.
Panton thrust a hand into his pocket and brought out a roll of magnesium wire, gave Wriggs his gun to hold, and then lit one end which flashed out into a brilliant whitish light, surrounded by dense fumes of smoke, and illuminating the vast hall in which they stood, for here the tiny river ran in a wide-spreading plain of smooth lava which must at one time have been a lake of molten stone, now hard, cold, and dry, save where the water glided on like so much steel in motion.
As the magnesium wire burned out, the candles which were getting short looked like so many yellowish sparks in the midst of utter blackness, and it was some minutes before even Panton showed any disposition to stir. But at last the eyes of all began to lose the dazzled sensation caused by the white glare, and Panton proposed that they should go on.
“What for?” said Drew. “There are specimens enough for you here without going farther, and the place seems to be all alike.”
“Oh, no: all variety. You are not afraid, are you?”
“Well, I don’t know so much about that,” replied Drew, quietly. “I have no wish to seem cowardly, but it is not very pleasant moleing along here in the darkness. I keep expecting to step down into some bottomless pit.”
“If we come across one, you’ll see me go down first. But hark! What’s that?”
“I don’t hear anything,” said Drew.