He felt and he felt for some time in vain, then suddenly when he had nearly given up, he came upon a hole.
Kneeling, he felt that a little barrier of stone divided the hole from the floor of the cave, and that it was more than wide enough to admit him. He scarcely hesitated a second before he climbed over the barrier and found himself in a narrow tunnel at the end of which the speck of light was shining.
Pavlo advanced a few steps very slowly. It was a dark, damp, up-hill passage, and so narrow that he could feel the walls on either side without stretching his arms.
Suddenly he gave a violent shudder.
Something alive, something that felt heavy and cold, a rat perhaps, or a toad or a lizard, ran over his foot. Still he kept on. If the light, which was growing larger, should prove to be a side opening to the cave, he would run back for the others, and they would all get out that way, managing somehow to carry Iason between them if he could not walk, while the man went on throwing stones and waiting for them at the big entrance. The idea of the man waiting there perhaps all day, appealed to Pavlo, and he laughed a little to himself as he got nearer to the light.
He found, as he had expected, that it came from a small hole in the rock which led out to the hillside, and was almost quite hidden by hanging creepers.
The opening was not large, but they could easily crawl out. In fact it would have been safer had it been a smaller hole.
Pavlo could see the purple flowers of an osier bush waving in the open air before he quite reached the opening. He was just on the point of crawling out to make quite sure of his discovery before returning by the same way, when his eye caught sight of some sort of a white rag, fluttering above the osier bush. He drew back and, lying flat on the ground of the passage so as to see better, peered cautiously out.
What he saw made him nearly scream out aloud with terror, in fact it was really the horrible nightmare-ish sort of fear which came over him, that prevented a sound escaping from his lips.
The fluttering white rag was a fold of the red-bearded man’s foustanella!