By and by, though still going up, we were on snow level. Snow lay white as Maida's thoughts on either side of the steep road, but _le corse_ had run shrieking farther down the mountain, and was not at home in its own high house. We were less cold than we had been; and when presently the worst of the zigzags were past and a great black tunnel-mouth in sight to show we'd reached the _col_, the sun was almost warm. A few moments more, and (on our second best speed, with all five on board) we had shot into that great black mouth. I always thought that we had the longest and biggest of everything in our country, but I never heard of a tunnel like this in America. It was the queerest thing to look into I ever saw. The lamps of our automobile which Mr. Barrymore had stopped to light before plunging in, showed us a long, long, straight passage cut through the mountain, with an oval roof arched like an egg. Except for a few yards ahead, where the way was lit up and the arch of close-set stones glimmered grey, the blackness would have been unbroken had it not been for the tunnel-lights. They went on and on in a sparkling line as far as our eyes could reach; and if the most famous whale in the world had had a spine made of diamonds, Jonah would have got much the same effect that we did as he wandered about in the dark trying to get his bearings. It was only the most distant electric lamps that looked as if they were diamonds stuck close together along the roof. The near ones were balls of light under swaying umbrellas of ink-black shadow; and sometimes we would flash past great sharp stalactites, which were, as Maida said, like Titanesses' hatpins stuck through from the top of the mountain. At first the tunnel road was inches thick with white dust; then, much to our surprise, we ran into a track of greasy mud which made our car waltz as it had in the Roya valley close to the precipice. "It's the water filtering in through the holes your Titanesses' hatpins have made in their big pincushion," explained Mr. Barrymore, who had heard Maida make that remark. And the hateful creatures had so honeycombed the whole mountain over our heads, that Mamma and I put up umbrellas to save ourselves from being drenched. "What a place this would be for an accident! Or--suppose we met something that _objected_ to us!" Mamma shrieked, her voice all but drowned by the reverberation made by our motor in the hollow vault. With that, as if her words had "conjured it from the vasty deep"--to use a quotation of Sir Ralph's--something appeared, and it did object to us very much. It was a horse, and it gleamed like silver as our front lamp pointed it out to our startled eyes with a long, bright finger of light. He was coming towards us, down the narrow, arched passage, walking on his hind legs, with some one in a cart behind him, standing up and hitting him on the head with a whip.