"Surely, Milton—why, the thing sounds like something from Jules Verne or from Lucian's Icaromenippus."
"On the contrary," he told me, "it is not a bit out of romance either modern or ancient, but it is a fact that has long been known. At Argostoli in the Island of Cephalonia, the sea flows right into the limestone rock."[7]
"Shades of Lemuel Gulliver, but this old ball that men call the earth is certainly, after all, a strange old sphere!"
"How strange," said Milton Rhodes, "no scientist has ever dreamed, though your scientist has thought of things far stranger than any that were ever conceived by your wildest romancer, who, after all, Bill, is a pretty tame homo."
"I have an idea," I answered, glancing down the cavern, "that we are going to find the homos here in this place anything but tame."
Milton laughed, and then suddenly, without any other answer, he turned and resumed the descent.
For one thing I was profoundly thankful: the wall ran along without any pronounced cavities or projections in it, so that we had little to apprehend from a sudden attack on this our giddy way—except, of course, an attack by a demon. Had the wall been a broken one, any instant might have found us face to face with a band of Hypogeans, as Rhodes called the denizens of this subterranean place.
But how long would the wall remain like that? And, after all, did it really greatly matter? Meeting, sooner or later—and, in all likelihood, very sooner—was inevitable. 'Tis true, I could not conceive of a worse place than this, supposing the meeting to be, in any measure, an unfriendly one. And, from what had happened up there at the Tamahnowis Rocks, I could not suppose that it would be anything else.
This, however, was to prove simply another instance of how inadequate the imagination, when confronted with the reality, is sometimes found to be, for even now we were drawing near a place more terrible even than this—and that the place where we met!
It required but little imagination, though, to make us aware, and painfully so, of the extreme probability (regarded by ourselves as a certitude) that eyes were watching our every movement. But where were those eyes? And what were the watchers? To what fearful thing—or could it be wonderful—were we drawing near at every single moment now?