The echo of their feet was bad enough. Each downward step was repeated until the darkness became full of a din like the clapping of unseen hands; the clink of the sirdar’s spurs was multiplied into the jingle and clank of ghostly squadrons, and the whirring of unseen bat-wings grew into the snort of the war-horses charging line on line. It was easy enough to imagine lance and pennon, and the dead from a thousand battle-fields repeating history.
Ommony began trying to count the steps, but lost the reckoning at the sixth or seventh turn; the stairway zigzagged to and fro across the face of a wall that seemed from its smooth, yet irregular feel to have been hewn by giants from the virgin rock. And when they did at last reach bottom there appeared by the swinging lantern-light to be a causeway running right and left, gray-white and firm with a million years’ accumulation of the bats’ excreta.
The sirdar hesitated—took the right-hand way, and led with a swinging stride that it took all of Ommony’s strength to follow. There was hardly any echo now, because the bat-dirt underfoot consumed the sound (and filled the air, too, with acrid dust), but there began to be a weird, very far-away rumbling, at first not more than a peculiar, irregular pulsation of the silence, gradually increasing until it sounded as if all the echoes in the world were hiding in the cellar of a mountain, crowding one another to find room.
A roof became vaguely visible at last. They were entering a tunnel, whose floor sloped downward. It appeared to have been originally a natural fissure in the base of a granite mountain; Titans had hewn and enlarged it, leaving buttresses six feet square of natural rock, that curved overhead until they met to support the roof. They were spaced about twenty feet apart, and every gap between was occupied by an enormous image, hewn out of the wall, resembling nothing in the world that Ommony had ever seen. Vaguely, but only vaguely, they suggested temple images of ancient Egypt. No two were alike. Due to the moving shadows, they appeared to change position as the lantern passed them, and the weird sounds that filled the tunnel suggested conversation in the language of another world.
The only remark the sirdar made of any kind was midway down the tunnel, more than a quarter of a mile from the point where its roof had first become dimly visible. He paused for a moment, seemed to hesitate whether or not to speak, then pointed upward.
“We are under the Brahmaputra.”
His voice sounded muffled. The noise of the tremendous river galloping and plunging overhead absorbed all other sounds.
“How thick is the roof?” Ommony asked. But he did not know how to pitch his voice; the words died on his lips; his own ears could not hear them.
In one place there was water; it appeared to be an artificial drain; there was a trickling, sucking sound where it disappeared through a hole in the wall into obscurity. The floor for twenty yards was built of very heavy timber spiked on to transverse beams laid in slots in the rock wall; the slots were very ancient and the timbers not a generation old, marked here and there with the print of ponies’ hoofs—which seemed to Ommony to prove one point at any rate: there must be another way out from the Ahbor Valley than that goat-path down the side of the ravine. No pony, laden or unladen, could negotiate the trail by which he and the sirdar had come.
Once they had crossed the wooden bridge the track began to rise, but the sirdar continued leading at the same speed, neither heat nor stuffiness impeding him. He swung the lantern in his right hand with an air of indifference, as if he had long ago ceased wondering at the titan labors of the men who hewed the tunnel. There was no air of haste about him; his natural speed appeared to be more than four miles an hour, just as his natural mood was silent, and his natural condition fearless, unsurprised, indifferent to circumstance.