Vorski was the first to venture down. The others followed him cautiously.
The steps, which at first consisted of earthen stairs reinforced by flints, were presently hewn out of the rock. The cave which they entered was in no way peculiar and seemed rather to be a vestibule. It communicated, in fact, with a sort of crypt, which had a vaulted ceiling and walls of rough masonry of unmortared stones.
All around, like shapeless statues, stood twelve small menhirs, each of which was surmounted by a horse's skull. Vorski touched one of these skulls; it crumbled into dust.
"No one has been to this crypt," he said, "for twenty centuries. We are the first men to tread the floor of it, the first to behold the traces of the past which it contains."
He added, with increasing emphasis:
"It is the mortuary-chamber of a great chieftain. They used to bury his favourite horses with him . . . and his weapons too. Look, here are axes . . . and a flint knife; and we also find the remains of certain funeral rites, as this piece of charcoal shows and, over there, those charred bones . . . ."
His voice was husky with emotion. He muttered: "I am the first to enter here. I was expected. A whole world awakens at my coming."
Conrad interrupted him:
"There are other doorways, another passage; and there's a sort of light showing in the distance."
A narrow corridor brought them to a second chamber, through which they reached yet a third. The three crypts were exactly alike, with the same masonry, the same upright stones, the same horses' skulls.