"But not bringing them down, eh? Suppose you tell me what you know, Mr. Editor. I assume you're the best-informed man on the situation, barring the conspirators who have dragged us aloft."
"You think it's a conspiracy?"
"It's not an act of God."
Clark began to fill an ancient pipe, so well caked that the pencil with which he tamped the tobacco barely fitted into the bowl. By the time the pipe was ready for a match he had exhausted the solid facts. Don then took over and described the underground passage he had seen that afternoon. He was about to go further when the old man held up a hand.
"The facts only, if you please. Mr. Cort, what you saw in the underground chamber fits in remarkably with something I stumbled on this afternoon while I was skating."
"Skating?" Clark said.
"Ice skating. At North Lake. It's completely frozen over and I'm not so decrepit that I can't glide on a pair of blades. Well, I was gliding along, humming the Skater's Waltz, when I tripped over a stump. When I said I stumbled on something I was speaking literally, because I fell flat. While I lay there, with the breath knocked out of me, my face was only an inch from the ice and I realized I was eye-to-eye with a thing. Just as you were, Mr. Cort."
"You mean there was something under the ice?"
"Exactly. Staring up at me. Balefully, I suppose you could say, as if it resented my presence."
"Did you see the whole face?"