“Then forward it is,” announced the professor, plunging once more into the narrow confines of a subterranean corridor.
But suddenly an alarming thing happened. A great rush of wind beat against their faces accompanied by a roaring, rushing sound, somewhat like the voice of the cloudburst on the never-to-be-forgotten night when they had lost their equipment.
In a flash their torches were extinguished and they were plunged into total darkness, something soft and clammy brushed by Jack’s head and then a perfect avalanche of the same unpleasant things was upon them. They were knocked down like ten pins by the charge, and badly scared, too, as you may imagine.
Presently the noise and the turmoil ceased, and the passage was quiet once more with the roar of the mysterious creatures dying away in the distance.
“Let’s get out of this!” cried Walt tremblingly.
“Nonsense,” said the professor. “We might have expected some such thing. Those were bats. Thousands of them, I guess, who have made their home here undisturbed for centuries.”
“Wonder if they are of the kind that suck your blood?” shuddered Ralph, with the horror of the contact of the clammy bodies still upon him.
“Vampires, you mean?” asked the professor. “No, at least I don’t think so. We are too far north for that. The vampire is found in South America, in Brazil and so on. But let us light up the torches again.”
Ralph produced the matches and a cheerful red glow soon radiated upon the stone walls and roof. A sickly, musty smell, the trace of the bats, was still in the air, however, as a reminder of their passing.
The passage soon ended, and the professor’s feet encountered a steep flight of steps cut in the stone, or so it seemed.