“Yes; the rock split just like a flash of lightning. Mind how you come—the roof is lower down here. Let’s see, this must be where I hit my head in coming down. No, it can’t be, for that was somewhere about the middle of one of the slopes, I think, and this is the end, just where it turns back and forms another slope.”
Aleck ceased speaking and raised the lanthorn so as to examine the rock above and around him more attentively.
“Nice work this for a fellow’s uniform. What with the climbing and sleeping in it I shall be in rags. But why don’t you go on?” said the midshipman.
“I—I don’t quite know,” said Aleck, hesitating. “It seems different here to what it was when I came down.”
“But you said you came down in the dark?”
“I did, and I suppose that’s why it seems different.”
“Well, never mind. Go on. It hurts my feet standing so long resting in this nick.”
Aleck was still busy with the lanthorn, and remained silent, making his companion more impatient still.
“I say, go on,” he said. “Why do you stop?”
“Because it seems to me as if I had come the wrong way, taken a wrong turning that I did not know of—one, I suppose, that I passed in the dark.”