Abruptly he stopped. He was here and the walls glowed and he could see but needed no vision for this.
"Haazahri," he said again, and she came up to him. "We're here, Haazahri," he said.
The passage looked like all the others. He'd led the way to it instinctively and knew that if he lost whatever instinct had guided his feet, they would be lost in this labyrinth forever. But it did not seem very important now. What was important had been hidden here, in this cavern.
"Where?" Haazahri asked. "Where is it, whatever you seek?"
He touched the wall near her head and she heard a shifting, a grinding of heavy stones. Part of the wall swung slowly to one side, revealing a dark recess, a niche with walls that did not glow. Matlin thrust his hands within the niche and took out a large, heavy book with a black, unmarked cover. When he got it clear of the niche, he looked at it a moment in the glowing cavern light and his eyes grew big and round and the book dropped from his hands to the floor of the cavern. He stood there, clutching his head with his hands and Haazahri cried:
"What is it? What happened, Matlin?"
The pain of returning memory thrust at him like a sharp knife, but was not intolerable. He remembered! He remembered!
"Rhodes," he said in a dream. "My name is Rhodes. Phil Rhodes, and I'm an Earthman. They took me and they tortured me and I was going to break. I must have known it, subconsciously. So I welcomed amnesia, as the one way I could not reveal where I had hidden this. I had revealed once the fact that I'd found it, to Gawroi, before I told the Earth authorities. The Earth authorities still don't know, but when they do know, when they see what has been found...."
"But what is it?" Haazahri asked him.