I examined the lift. It was electrically operated, and of a type perfectly familiar to me, fitted with an automatic magnetic brake. I saw that it travelled from its secret recess behind the mirror to one other spot only, stopping nowhere on the way. A touch of the rope started it, and it would stop itself when its journey was done.
Well, there was no use waiting. Again I must plunge into the unknown. Connie was waiting! I wondered how honourable Danjuro was getting on, and laid myself long odds that he wasn't having such an exciting time as I was! How he would stare if he came back to "The Miners' Arms" in a few hours and found me there with Connie, and the artistic Mr. Vargus cooling down in the patent papier mâché handcuffs from Japan! Mr. Trewhella of the inn had shown me a large pig, which he called "Gladys," and of which he was fond. There was a vacant and stoutly-built sty next door, which would be an excellent place of confinement for the interpreter of Chopin!
... Yes, I thought these thoughts, even at that moment. I was madly exhilarated. Everything had gone so easily and well. I stepped into the lift humming a song. It was the old chanty that the pirates had roared in the inn two short hours ago:
"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest."
There was a looking-glass on one side of the lift—probably the thing had been bought entire at some sale—and I saw myself in it. The song died away. Whose was this grim and terrible face, gashed with deep lines, with eyes that smouldered with a red light? Mine? I have told you how Danjuro looked when the bloodhound that he was emerged for an instant from behind the bland Oriental mask. There was not a pin to choose between us.
The lift sank slowly. Every second I expected the soft jerk of its stopping. But the seconds went on. Down and down, what cellar was it that lay so low? Were we dropping to the centre of the earth? It seemed an age before the motion slowed, and I had already obtained an inkling of the truth when a dim archway rose up before me, and the machine came to rest.
This was no cellar. I was deep down in Tregeraint Mine, which must run under the house itself! In the necessity for fox-like caution, I did not follow out the thought—not yet. But I believe that the subconscious brain had already seen far into the mystery....
I stepped out into a mine cutting. The walls were cut in the rock, and the roof here and there shored up with heavy timber props. It was wide enough for two men to walk abreast, and quite eight feet high. Every fifteen yards or so hung a roughly-wired electric lamp, and the floor was beaten hard by the passage of many feet. The air was hot and stagnant.
I prowled down this passage without a sound, my pistol in my hand, ready to shoot at sight, but for what seemed an interminable time I met no one, and saw nothing but the damp walls, here and there sparkling with yellow pyrites and the green of copper.
There came at length a rough wooden door, which swung easily open, and beyond a much narrower and higher passage than before, a more natural cleft in the immemorial rock, it seemed, owing nothing to the agency of human hands. It dripped with water. Hitherto I had been walking on a level, now I trod a fairly steep descent, while the path was no longer straight, but full of fantastic twistings. Each moment the air grew cooler, and each moment a deep, murmurous noise, like very faint and muffled drums, grew louder.