“What a rum place,” I interjected.
“Yes, it was that,” said Ashton, “but it got still rummer as we went up and down more stairs, and then popped through a hole into a lower gallery, and I noticed side passages branching off in several different directions.
“‘Walk carefully and look where you tread,’ said my monkish guide. ‘There are pitfalls here; be very wary.’
“Then I noticed at my feet a deep, rock-hewn pit about two feet wide right across the passage. ‘What is that for?’ I asked. ‘To trap intruders and enemies,’ said the little monk. ‘Look down.’ I did so, and I saw at the bottom, in a pool of water, a whitened skull and a number of bones. We passed four or five such shafts in our progress.”
“’Pon my word, this beats me altogether,” I interpolated.
“It would have beaten me altogether if I had fallen into one of those traps,” said Ashton. “Suddenly the close, damp, fungus sort of air changed and I smelt a sweet fragrant odour. ‘I smell incense,’ I said to the monk.
“‘It is the wraith, or ghost, of a smell,’ he said. ‘There has been no incense hereaway since 1546. There are ghosts of sounds and smells, just as there are ghosts of people. We are here surrounded by spirits, but they are transparent, and you cannot see them unless they are materialised, but you can feel them.’
“‘Hush, hark!’ said the monk, and then I heard a muffled sound of most beautiful chiming bells, the like I never heard before.
“‘What is that?’
“‘The old bells of St Andrews Cathedral. That is the ghost of sounds long ago ceased,’ and the monk muttered some Latin. Then all of a sudden I heard very beautiful chanting for a moment or more, then it died away.