CHAPTER XV
In Which I Pursue My Studies as a Troglodyte.
My instinct had been right in giving way to my drowsiness, for I woke up from my sleep a new man. How long I had been there, of course, I had no means of knowing; but I fancy I must have slept a good while, for I felt so refreshed and full of determination to tackle my escape in good earnest.
It is remarkable how rest sharpens one's perceptions. When we are weary, we only half see what we look at, and the very thing we are desperately seeking may be right under our nose and we quite unaware.
So I had hardly relit my lantern, when its rays revealed something which it seemed impossible for any one with eyes, however weary, to have overlooked.
In the right-hand corner of the little cavern, five or six feet above my head, was a dark hole, like the entrance to a tunnel, or, more properly speaking, a good-sized burrow—for it was scarcely more than a yard in diameter. It seemed to be something more than a mere cavity in the rock, for, when I flashed my lantern up to it, I could see no end. To climb up to it, at first, seemed difficult; but providentially, I had a stout claspknife in my pocket, and with this I cut a step or two in the porous rock, and so managed it. Lying flat on my stomach, I looked in.
It was, as I had thought, a narrow natural tunnel, snaking through the rocks—as often happens in those curious fantastic coral formations—for all the world, indeed, as if it had been made ages ago by some monstrous primeval serpent, a giant worm-hole no less, leading—Heaven alone knew where.
There was just room to crawl along it on all fours, so I started cautiously, making sure I had my precious matches, and my jackknife all safe.
After all, I said to myself, I was no worse off than thousands of poor devils in mines. I had myself snaked through just such passages in coal-mines. Still, I confess that the choking sense of being shut in this earth-smelling tube, like a fox in a drain, and the sudden realisation of the appalling tonnage of superincumbent earth above me—liable at any moment to loosen, and, as with a giant thumb, press out my poor little insect existence—made the sweat pour from me and my heart stand still. I had to shut my eyes for a moment and command myself back to calmness and courage, before I could go on. Above all things I had to blindfold my imagination, the last companion for such a situation.
After this first flurry of fear, I went on crawling in a methodical way, allowing no thought to enter my mind that did not concern the yard or two of earth immediately ahead of me. So I progressed, I should say, for some twenty or thirty yards when, to my inexpressible relief, I came out, still on all fours, onto a spreading floor; then, standing up, I perceived that I was in a cave of considerable loftiness, and some forty feet or so across. It was good to breathe again such comparatively free air; yet, as I looked about and made the circuit of the walls, I saw that I had but exchanged one prison for another. There was this difference, however: whereas there had only been one passageway from the cave I had just left, there were several similar outlets from that in which I now stood. Two or three of them proved to be nothing but alcoves that ran a few yards and then stopped.