CHAPTER VI
Catastrophe
For a long, blank moment of dismay and horror, I stood staring out across that deserted passageway. I was as one who, in mid-ocean, suddenly feels the waves foaming over him with no sign of a rescuing sail. Not until this instant had the full terror of my plight overwhelmed me; not until this instant had I felt utterly hopeless and helpless. Now that Clay was gone, it was as if the very under-pinnings of my world had been torn from beneath me.
Yet my alarm was not for myself. It was of Clay that I was thinking; it was Clay's tormented face that flashed before my mind as if surrounded by a red glare of danger. And the conviction came to me, irrational yet irresistible, that he had either been slain or was in mortal peril.
Goaded by that dread, I shook myself out of the inaction that had seized me as I regained the main gallery. I forgot my personal risk; I scarcely cared whether or not a death-bolt felled me; I began running furiously up and down, as recklessly as one who courts his own destruction. Still no trace of Clay! Surely, he would not willingly have deserted me! But had he too rushed into one of the side-corridors? Then why had he not returned? Had he not heard my shouting? Would he not shout for me as well?
While these and other questions shot across my mind in baffling succession, I peered fruitlessly into the shadows of half a score of side-galleries; and into each of them I called as loudly as my cracked and broken voice would permit; "Phil! Phil! Phil! Where are you? Where are you, Phil?"
But still only the mocking echoes came back to taunt me.
Had I been a more cautious man, I would have been less ready to cry out into those mysterious depths. For, while I accomplished nothing for Clay, I was weaving a grim net of danger about my own head....
I had called into the tenth or eleventh passageway, when an answering yell met my ears—not the welcome voice I craved, but a high-pitched cry in some unknown tongue, a cry of such unspeakable shrillness and ferocity that I stopped short as if paralyzed and felt my knees faltering beneath me and my hair bristling.