Ommony threw himself down, panting, his clothes sodden with sweat and his head in a whirl from the violent exertion and the change in altitude. Every sinew in his legs was trembling separately, and his heart thumped like a steam-injector. Diana lay still at his feet. The sirdar appeared calm and not particularly out of breath; he sat down on a rock near by with an air of concentrated attention.
Presently Ommony began to feel the chill of damp earth under him. He got to his feet to look for a better place closer to the cliff, and stood for a moment craning upward trying to gauge with his eye the distance they had come from the lip of the ravine that showed at one point sharp as a pencil-line against the sky. He realized he could never find the way back if life depended on it, and guessed there must be another way than that into the Ahbor Valley, or how could men and animals find egress? He turned to speak, leaning one hand against the cliff.
“This way!” said the sirdar’s voice on his left hand; and before he could turn he felt himself shoved violently.
His head still singing from the strain of the descent, a vertigo still swimming through his brain, he was sure, but only dimly, that he had been pushed, then pulled through a narrow fissure in the shadowy corner of a projecting spur. He had scarcely noticed the opening—had not observed that the lower portion of the spur was split away, like the base of a flying buttress, from the wall itself. Within, the opening turned and turned again, a man’s breadth wide each shoulder against the wall, a zigzag passage driven (there were tool marks) into a granite mountain; and when he turned to look, there was nothing to see but the outline of the sirdar’s head against dim light behind him.
Diana forced her way between his legs and ran ahead to explore; he could hear her hollow barking—“All’s well so far—marvelous! mysterious! exciting!”— and then the sirdar shoved him forward, saying not one word. He could not see, but felt the whirring of bats, and knew by the sound that he had stepped into a cavern. The sirdar groped and found an oil lantern with a bail. Lighting it, and swinging it until the shadows leaped like giant goblins and enormous bats streamed in panic toward the open air, he led the way to a low tunnel at the rear through which it was just possible to walk by bending nearly double.
At the end of fifty yards of that uncomfortable going, there was vastness, black as pitch, and such empty silence that the ear-drums ached. The lantern-light shone into nothing and was swallowed—ceased, except where it struck the natural, dark-granite wall and the end of the hewn tunnel. They were standing on a platform ten feet wide, from which hewn steps descended for ever and ever for all the brain could guess. The roof was utterly invisible; the space beneath it was alive with whirling bats. The air was breathable but stuffy. Sweat began to stream from every pore.
“What next?” asked Ommony.
“What next—ot nex—ot nex—ot nex—ot nex!” the echoes answered, dying away in a grumble at last somewhere in the bowels of the world.
He did not care to speak again. He tried to suppress thought, lest the echoes should learn that and multiply and mock it in the solemn hugeness of the underworld. Diana was afraid now—crouched against his legs and howled when the sirdar started down the smooth stone steps, that looked dark-green in the lantern-light.
The howl let loose the hounds of Pandemonium. A phantom pack gave tongue in full cry down the valley of hell—pounced on their quarry leagues away—worried it—and vanished into silence. The sirdar laughed, and the laugh went after them, until a thousand devils seemed to mock the ghost the hounds had slam. Diana was seized with panic and had to be dragged by the collar. Ommony did not dare to speak to her for fear of the echoes. He tried whispering once, but only once; it turned into a hiss that made Diana tremble in abject misery.