"Got to find some place," Torrence panted. He had to shout it above the roar as the wind tore at his words and hurled them away.
"Over there?" Jan gestured. "Looks like a cave."
The sides of the ravine were rifted in many places with vertical crevices. They headed toward a wider slit of opening which seemed to lead well back underground. A place of shelter until this storm passed....
To Jan, what happened then was weirdly terrifying. He suddenly realized that as they approached the opening, they were being pulled at it. Into it! A suction, as though somewhere down underground this storm had created a partial vacuum—a far lesser pressure so that the air of the little ravine was rushing into it!
Terrified, both of them now were fighting to keep away. But it was no use. Like wind-blown puffs of cotton they were sucked into the yawning opening. A sudden chaos of roaring horror. Jan felt that he was still clutching at Torrence. Then both of them fell, sliding, sucked forward as a plunger cylinder is sucked through a pneumatic tube. The ground here in the passage felt smooth as polished marble.
For how long they plunged forward Jan had no conception. Roaring, sucking darkness. Then it seemed that there was a little light. An effulgence; a pallid, eerie glow, like phosphorescence streaming from the rocks. The narrow passage was steadily widening; and then abruptly they were blown out into emptiness.
It was a vast grotto, with smooth metallic floor almost level. The effulgence here was brighter, so that an undulating, vaulted ceiling glistened far overhead. For a moment the nearer wall was visible, smooth, burnished metal rock. Eroded by the winds of centuries, all the rock here was burnished until it shone mirror-like.
The huge pallid interior roared and echoed with the tumbling wind-torrents seething in it. A lashing cauldron jumbled with eddying blasts. Jan and Torrence tried to get to their feet. They could see now that they were far out from the wall—sliding, buffeted, desperately clinging together, hurled one way and then another. Bruised from head to foot, panting, gasping in the swiftly changing pressures, Jan felt his senses leaving him. A numbed vagueness was on him, so that there was only the suck and roar of the winds and the feel of Torrence to whom he was clinging. They were lying prone now—
"Easing up a little—" He heard Torrence's voice as though from far away. And then he came to his senses to find that he and Torrence had hit against a wall of the grotto and were clinging to a projection of rock.