"Every time we make a turn we'll do this. Then we can retrace our steps." Lane smiled sarcastically. "But a hot-and-cold engineer wouldn't think of a thing like that, I suppose?"
Tim made no reply. But he reproached himself secretly for not having considered this necessity; it did not make him feel much better that Dorothy, standing beside him, pressed his arm in mute encouragement.
The corridor was a short one, opening into another cavern like that which they had just quitted. Similar, but not quite the same. For as Lane played his light about the walls of this inner, deeper, chamber, all three adventurers gasped with the impact of sudden, breathtaking beauty. The ebon walls, warmed by the light, flashed into a glittering, scintilliscent miracle of loveliness; a galaxy of twinkling stars seemed to appear from nowhere and hang in dark space burning and gleaming.
"It—it's magnificent!" breathed the girl. "What is it, Daddy? Jewels? It looks like the fabulous caves of Ali Baba."
It was Tim who supplied the answer. "They're not jewels. Just nitre crystals protruding through a coating of black oxide of manganese. I've seen the same thing on Earth—in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky."
And they moved on. Deeper and yet deeper into the Lethean depths, pausing from time to time to char a signpost for their retreat. Miracles without wonder they saw. Domes huge enough to house a spaceship, stalactites lowering like great, rough fangs from ceilings lost in dizzy heights, twin growths springing, oftimes without apparent reason, from the cavern floor—stalactites formed by centuries of slow lime dripping from the roof. And gigantic columns, hoariest monsters of all, columns of strange, iridescent beauty.
Once they passed a pit so deep, so dark, that even the skipper's probing beam could not penetrate its majestic depths. From somewhere far below came the whispering surge of churned water; in the light of the flash there seemed to hover above the rim of this chasm a faint, white, wraithly film. Lane frowned, unscrewed his face-port for an instant, sniffed, and hastily ducked back into the bulger.
"Ammonia," he said. "I thought as much. Keep your bulger-ports closed. Venus caves aren't Earth caves. Queer things here. No telling what we'll bump into."
He didn't mention the all-too-obvious fact that so far they had not "bumped into" that thing which they sought. A fuel supply, a water supply, signs of an underground grotto wherein might be found food. Nor had their winding way at any time moved them toward the surface, toward a possible second exit from the caverns. Their movement was ever down, deeper into the bowels of this weird, faery wonderland.