We shouted back, and then up she came, just like a cat, we pulling the rope up as she came, so that if she slipped she would only fall the least possible distance. But Aryenis never slipped. She seemed to have eyes in her feet when it came to going over bad places. I reached out, and caught her hands and pulled her into the cave.
As I was unknotting the rope she said: “This is the place. I remember. The way is there,” and she pointed along the right-hand side of the cave.
It took us a little time longer to haul up our belongings, which Wrexham and Payindah had tied up in three bundles, wrapping the rifles in the poshtins to prevent damage against the rock. Then we let down the rope: the others fastened it below, coiled up the slack, and waving us good luck started back down the hill.
We opened up the bundles, divided the kit, lit the hurricane-lamp, and told Aryenis to show us the way. From the pillared part, which stretched about a hundred feet, we passed through thickening grey gloom into the darkness and silence—darkness and silence that you could feel—of a long, narrow, winding passage with smooth wall and a rounded roof.
Under foot the rock was covered with loose dust, the dust of many, many centuries, I think. The wall showed tool marks in the lantern’s dim light, and I remarked to Forsyth that the passage was obviously artificial.
“It is here,” he said, “but it may not all be.”
Later on we found rough parts, which showed clearly that the original finders of the pillared cave and the smaller ones that led out on either side of it had discovered a line of natural fault and improved it, making the passages big enough to walk in.
Our way wound steadily upward. Luckily there was but the one passage, or Aryenis might not have remembered her way so easily. We passed through two large open spaces, where the light, instead of being reflected back from the rock walls, dimmed and died in the circle of darkness. In one of them there was what looked like a rough altar cut in the wall.
We had been going for nearly half an hour when we remarked a faint grey light ahead. It grew and grew, until rounding a bend we found ourselves in a little open grotto veiled by trees and thick undergrowth.