They told me now, that we were captives. Back there in the tunnel Og had called off his attacking fishes—called them from us or we would have been torn to ribbons. Then, floating me with them, the Maagogs under Og’s direction had brought us here to this small room adjacent to the main cave—and left us.
I sat up, then swam a little. I was all right! Nona was all right—we were all safe and sound! My hopes revived. Why should we not now escape?
But none of my companions reflected my jubilant mood.
“Let him look around,” said Caan to Atar. Never had I heard Caan speak so sourly, so despondently.
I did look around. We were in a black mud room some forty feet square and half as high. It was bare of furnishings; and lighted overhead by a crude sort of illuminated bladder that gave off a dull green glow. On one side against the black wall were beds, hollowed out of the mud. To you they would have looked like shallow graves; and in one of them I had been lying. Across the room was a shelf of mud with a dozen clay seats on it—like a row of huge toadstools.
A third side gave into a tunnel. I approached it eagerly; then drew back shuddering. That pack of blood-hound fishes was out there, circling back and forth, on guard. They saw me, and darted lazily forward. As I stopped, they seemed satisfied, and went back to their endless circling, following every twist and turn of two or three who seemed to lead them.
Caan laughed cynically. “Not there, Nemo, you see.”
My arms went protectingly about Nona, and she drew me wordlessly to the fourth side of the room. The wall here was gone. A grating of woven seaweed like prison bars, took its place. I stood on a precipice, gazing through the bars into a black void of water.
Can I make you understand the shuddering fear that possessed me? This water out there was moving swiftly downward, like a torrent, or a subterranean waterfall. Its current, drawing the water out of the room, flattened me involuntarily against the bars.
I had never seen swiftly moving water before. I felt as you would feel gazing from a great height into a dizzy abyss. And this water I could see, was boiling hot down there. But for those bars, I should have been whirled down into it! And from far below I could hear a faint sizzling, as of water dropped on a bed of embers.