I wondered what it could mean. I felt a vague uneasiness; a nameless foreboding was creeping over me.
It was futile to think and wonder what it meant, and yet I could not help doing it. Glad had I been to stop, but, strangely enough, glad I was to get under way once more. For 'twas only so that we could hope to get the answer.
Well, we got it—an answer that I wish never to know again.
Chapter 25
THE LABYRINTH—LOST
We soon saw that we had entered not a cavern but a perfect labyrinth of caverns. I could never have imagined a place like that. It was bewildering, dreadful, forsooth, in the possibilities that it limned on the canvas of one's imagination. How in the world could any one ever have found his way through it? But somebody had, for there were the inscriptions and signs on the wall. For these the Dromans kept a keen watch, and the relief evinced whenever one was sighted showed what a frightful thing it might be to lose the way.
An hour passed, another, and still we were moving in that awful maze.
"Great Erebus," said I, "but this is confusion worse confounded. Do you think that we can ever find our way back through this?"
"I've got it all down here, Bill," returned Rhodes, tapping his notebook. "The angel, the leader now, is finding her way through it: what she can do can't we do also?"