"Shades of the great Ulysses," said I as we moved along in the rear, "are we going to keep up this wandering until we drop?"
"Just what I was wondering myself, Bill. I fancy, though, that our Dromans are beginning to think that a rest would not be inexpedient."
Inexpedient!
Shortly after issuing from the passage, the party came to a halt, and Drorathusa, to my profound thankfulness, announced that the time for rest and sleep had come.
"Sleep?" said I to myself. "Who can sleep in such a place and at such a time?"
From his pack, Ondonarkus took a small silk-like bundle; like the tent that Captain Amundsen left at the South Pole,[11] one could have put it into a fair-sized pocket. The white-haired girl handed Ondonarkus the sort of alpenstock which she carried, and, lo and presto, there was a tent for the ladies!
Rhodes and I betook ourselves off to a hollow in the wall, where we halted and disposed ourselves for rest. This disposition, however, was a very simple affair: we simply removed our packs and sat down on the floor, the softness of which by no means vied with that of swan's-down.
I drank a little water, but it seemed to augment rather than to assuage my burning thirst. For a time I sat there, my aching body leaning back against the rock-wall, my fevered, tortured mind revolving the grisly possibilities that confronted us. Meditation, however, only served to make our situation the more appalling. With an exclamation of despair, I lay down, longing for sleep's sweet oblivion. At this moment Ondonarkus and the young man—whose name, by the way, was Zenvothunbro—were seen approaching. They laid themselves down nearby, their lanterns extinguished. We had shut off the electric lights, but our phosphorus-lamps, and those of the Dromans, shed their pale and ghostly light around.
Rhodes was sitting up, engaged in bringing his journal forward, as carefully and cooly as though he were in his library at home, instead of in this mysterious and fearful abode of blackness and silence, thousands of feet below the surface of the earth, far—though how far we could only guess—below the level of the sea itself.
When I closed my eyes, pictures came and went in a stream, pictures swaying, flashing, fading. The amazing, the incredible things that had happened, the things that probably were to happen—oh, was it all only a dream?