“We’ll look, Mr. Fritz; we’ll look. Looking costs nothing, as the saying is.”
The investigation might have such priceless results that it had to be undertaken without delay.
The captain, Fritz, and Frank went back to the end of the cave. The boatswain walked behind them, armed with several big candles. To make the way easier, those in front enlarged the aperture by removing some more of the stones which had fallen into it.
A quarter of an hour sufficed to make the opening large enough. None of them had put on flesh since they had landed. Only the boatswain had not lost weight since he had left the Flag.
When they had all got through, the candles gave sufficient light for them to examine this second excavation.
It was deeper than the first one, but much narrower, a hundred feet or so long, ten or twelve feet in diameter, and about the same height. It was possible that other passages branched off from it and formed a kind of labyrinth inside the massive cliff. Captain Gould wondered whether one of these branches might not perhaps lead, if not to the top of the cliff, at any rate beyond the bluff or the bastion.
When Captain Gould urged this point again John Block replied:
“It certainly is possible. Who knows whether we shan’t reach the top through the inside, although we couldn’t do so outside?”
When they had gone some fifty feet through this passage, which gradually got narrower, Captain Gould, the boatswain, and Fritz came to a wall of rock before which they were obliged to stop.
John Block passed the light all over its surface from the ground to the vault, but found only narrow fissures into which the hand could not be put. So there was no more hope of penetrating further through the solid mass.