“Maybe to the center of the earth,” Penny chuckled. “It seems like it anyway.”
“Unless I’m mixed up in my directions we’re moving toward the lake.”
“It seems that way to me too,” Penny readily agreed. “But we’ve twisted and turned so many times I couldn’t be sure of anything.”
By this time the girls were convinced that they were underground for they had made a long, straight descent. The walls were moist and damp; the air chilly. Yet one thing puzzled them. If they actually were traveling toward the lake that meant that the tunnel had been bored into the side of the cliff. But such a feat obviously was nothing less than an engineering enterprise.
At length the girls reached the bottom of the second flight of stairs only to find themselves in another passageway. It was much larger than the other and lighter.
“Do you think we could be in an abandoned ore mine?” Penny suddenly demanded, pausing to inspect the walls.
“It does look a little like it. Only I never heard of stone steps in a mine.”
“No, they have shafts. But it strikes me that the steps may have been added later, if you noticed, the upper passage was much smaller than this one.”
“As if it had been dug out to join with this one,” Rosanna added eagerly.
“Exactly. It’s my theory that some person knew about this old mine and decided to connect it with a smaller tunnel which would lead up into the house.”