“Knowledge!” exclaimed the fearful man; “the age-long lore of one that hath learnt his every footstep in this maze of oubliettes. There are beaten tracks here and there. Here and there a fool has been known to leave them. It may be days or weeks before I happen across his body--the eyes slipping forward of their lids, his mouth puckered out of shape from sucking and gnawing at the knuckles of his hands.” “It is terrible! And none comes hither but thou?” “I, and the beasts of blood that must not be denied. When they hunt, I lead; therefore it is well to win my favour.” Carinne hurriedly raised herself. She threw her arms about me. “Oh, my husband!” she cried, “take me where I may see the sweet daylight, if only for a moment!” I had thought the poor child slept. “Hush!” I murmured. “Citizen Gusman is going to show us his township!” * * * * * * * By interminable corridors, so intricate that one would have thought their excavators must have lain down to die, each at the limit of his boring, from sheer despair of ever finding their way to the open again, we followed the flare of the torch, our eyes smarting in its smoke, our arms most fervently linked, Carinne’s to mine, in inseparable devotion. Now and again I would hear my poor little friend whisper, “Light, light!” as if her very heart were starving; and then I would draw her face to mine and cry confidently, “It is coming, _ma mie_!” Still on we went over the uneven ground, thridding an endless labyrinth of death, oppressed, weighed upon, hustled by inhuman walls, breathing and exhaling the thin black fluid that is the atmosphere of the disembodied. Sometimes, as if it crouched beneath a stroke, the flame of the torch would dip and shrink under a current of gas, then leap jocund again when the peril was swept by; sometimes the tinkle of falling water would gladden our ears as with a memory of ancient happiness; and, passing on, in a moment we should be bedewed with spray, and catch a glimpse, in the glare, of a very dropping well of fire. At length, at the turning of a corridor, Gusman called us to a halt. He hollowed his left hand to his mouth. “_Holà--làee--eh--h--h!_” he yelled, like a very _lutin_. “_Là--là--là--là--làee--eh--làee--eh--làee--eh!_” was hooted and jangled back in a tumbling torrent of sound, that seemed to issue from the throat of a passage facing us and to shake the very roofs with merriment. Involuntarily we shrunk against the wall, as if to allow space to the impetuous rush we foresaw. _Mon Dieu_, the strange illusion! Only the swarming imps of echoes, summoned to the Master call, came hurrying forth, leaping and falling over one another, fighting and struggling, clanging with reverberant laughter, distributing themselves, disappearing down this or that corridor, shouting over their shoulders as they fled--faint, fainter--till silence settled down once more like water in the wake of a vessel.