"My friend," he said, presenting me to a cadaverous man of middle age, with a thin, prominent, rather hooked nose, high cheek-bones, and curious eyes of a steely grey, which bushy eye-brows partly concealed.
The man looked at me keenly, but he neither smiled nor spoke, nor did he offer to shake hands.
We were now inside the shop. Quickly we passed into an inner room, and thence to a room beyond it. This room was lined apparently with bookshelves. Advancing to a corner of it, after carefully locking the door, the cadaverous man, standing on tiptoe, pressed what appeared to be a book in the topmost shelf. At once a door in the bookshelves opened. In silence we followed him through it, and the door shut noiselessly behind us.
I suppose we had walked ten or twelve yards along the narrow, low-ceilinged, uncarpeted passage, lit only by the candle lantern that our guide had unhooked from a nail in the wall, when he suddenly stopped and bent down. Now I saw that he was lifting the boards, one after another. A few moments later the upper rungs of a ladder became visible. François descended, I followed carefullyI counted fifteen rungs before I reached the groundand the gaunt man came after me, shifting the boards back into position above his head when he was half-way down the ladder.
The darkness here was denser than it had been in the passage above, but the lantern served its purpose. We were in a much narrower passage now, so low that we had to stoop to make our way along it. The ceiling was roughly hewn, so was the ground we walked upon. Half a dozen steps along the rough ground and we stopped again. Facing us was a low, extremely narrow door, apparently an iron doorit resembled the door of a safe. Fitting a key into it, the gaunt man pushed it open, and one by one we entered.
At once I became aware of a singular change in the atmosphere. In the narrow, cavernous, obviously subterraneous little passage we had just left the air had been humid, chill, and dank, with an unpleasant earthy odour. Here it was dry and stuffy, as if heated artificially. So intense was the blackness that I seemed almost to feel it. There was a dull thump. Turning, I saw that the cadaverous man had shut this door too. Just as I was wondering why he took such precautions something clicked beside me, and the chamber was flooded with light.
For an instant the glare blinded me. Then, as I looked about me, the sight that met my gaze made me catch my breath. Was this an Aladdin's Palace I had suddenly entered? Had my brain become deranged, causing a strange, an amazing hallucination? Or was I asleep and dreaming?