“On you go, then; but don’t you want a candle?”
“No, sir; I can see best like this, with you holding the light behind.”
Mark relapsed into silence, and his guide remained silent too, and went on and on, along passages formed by the busy miners of the past, in following the lode of lead, and along ways that were nature’s work.
At last, fully an hour after Dummy had announced how far they had to go, he stopped short, took a candle, lit it, and looked smilingly at Mark, who gazed round the natural cavern in which they were, and then turned to his guide.
“Well,” he said, “is this it? Not much of a place. I thought you said it went farther.”
“So it does, Master Mark. Shut your eyes while you count a hundred.”
Mark obeyed, and counted his hundred aloud, opened his eyes again, and he was alone.
“Here! Where are you?” he cried; and he looked about the place, up and down, but to all appearances, he was in a cul de sac, whose walls were dotted with the fossil stems of pentacrinites, over which stalagmitic petrifaction had gradually formed, looking as if dirty water had run over the walls in places, and hardened in the course of time to stone.
“Here, Dummy! Haven’t run back, have you?” shouted Mark, as it occurred to him that should the boy have played him a trick, he would have no little difficulty in getting back to the part where the men were at work.
But there was no occasion for so loud a cry; the words had hardly passed his lips when a hand holding a candle suddenly appeared against the wall in front, and upon stepping to it, he found that the sheet of stalagmite there, instead of touching the wall, was a foot away, leaving room for any one to creep up a steep slope for thirty or forty feet, and continue the way through a long crevice, whose sides looked as if they might have separated only a few hours before.