It seemed a desolate scene even now. One might figure it with some sense of horror in a gale of wind black with snow, so dark that if you did not mind, the next step might carry you into the scaling hiss that was washing, bubbling, fretting, trumpeting into breakers just below.
Miss Conway seized the ring and raised it, not without exerting considerable strength. She had often raised that stone cover, and now, when she had got it off, she knew what to do. It was, in short, the entrance to a smuggler's passage, designed for the lifting of goods from a height. It had been abandoned, not, however, before it had been formed, nor before a whole wheel of like corridors had radiated out of this mainspring under the earth. All were of no use, and had been deserted by the smugglers as worthless. Few took much trouble to wander in those cold caves. They felt tolerably certain that bold Bill and Harry Spikem had not left anything worth their acceptance in those gloomy depths. Boatmen offered to conduct visitors through them for sixpence; but a visitor was an extremely rare bird at a town where there were no lodgings to be had, and but two small inns of those old days for the traveller to put up at—inns such as Nelson sat in with Collingwood and his wife in a little room, whilst little Miss Collingwood watched the dog playing.
The stone being lifted, Miss Conway peered down and called. She peered down and shrieked. The echoes of her voice seemed to flash like light, so piercing were her tones. But under earth the voice is very deceptive, as you shall know if you hail a man from a depth of soil.
Why couldn't he have come to the place where he entered? she thought; and then she reflected that he might have strayed in one of the corridors, and have got to the end of it, and was there standing, thinking the entrance was over his head, and waiting with a beating heart for his release. For certain it was there was no release for the man save through the smuggler's exit.
If that was his luck in those branching corridors, he would have been well off had he fallen and been caught by some projection of rock; for then they could have seen him above; they could have lowered tackles and a bowline; they could more clearly have heard his shouts. Now he could not approach the seaward-facing hole so as even to show himself to those down-looking.
A flight of four rude steps sank into the gloom, and the cutting went away in blackness. She had a great deal of pluck in her veins; only a plucky woman, single-handed, would have ventured this rescue. It was no longer now like opening a trap-door and letting a man out; it was seeking for a captive in blinding blackness, save where the orifice in the cliff let in at its mouth of tunnel, at a distance, a green light like the object-glass of a telescope at evening.
It was clear that some officious hand must have closed this trap-door above on observing it opened, supposing it so by neglect; for the people of the place, though they got no money by the thing, rather valued themselves upon it as a small sight, though there were scores of greater wonders, east and west, particularly west, much of the same kind. Ada walked a little distance, until she was plunged in darkness; she then stood and shouted—
'Where are you?'
No answer was returned. Some faint sheen from the trap-door lay just here, and a little further onwards, and you could have distinguished the marks of the axe in the solid stuff the dare-devils had sheered through till they came to the open. The labour was wonderful because it had been secret, it had been done in passages of blackness in long nights, with look-outs to silence the axe and hands striking fiercely, by small lantern light, against the portion they had opened by a line ruled straight by magnetic compass.
But Miss Conway knew that the smugglers had run a number of tunnels, besides this long corridor, on either hand of it, extending like the antennæ of an aquatic insect. If the man had wandered into one of them, then, after she had cried aloud in vain to and from the central passage, she must return for help and lights, and make a proper search.