Robin and Cheeky slept next to the wall and after their sleep resumed
their search. Robin walked along the wall, looking again for some
break. He saw in the distance a jagged line of black against the
shining brown-gray of the cliff. When he reached it, it was a crack, a
break in the surface of the bubble, reaching up several hundred feet.
He came up to it.
It was wide, about ten feet wide, and dark. Robin shone his flashlight
in, but as far as its rays could reach it was a dark tunnel. "Maybe
this is what we're looking for," Robin said to Cheeky. "It seems to
slant slightly upward. Maybe it will take us to the next bubble."
Cheeky peered in, walked in slowly and out of sight. "Hey," called
Robin, "wait for me!" He followed the scampering monkey.
Now his lantern proved handy. The glow it shed could barely be noticed
in the light of the great bubble, but here in the darkness of the
cleft, the pale glow was distinct and definitely illuminated the ground
a few feet in front of him. On he walked, holding the lantern ahead of
him, watching Cheeky's long tail flick in and out of its circle of dim
light, as the monkey would dash ahead and dash back.
Soon Robin found himself walking in almost total darkness, save for
the limited glow of his lantern. The floor of the cleft occasionally
slanted sharply, sometimes breaking steeply downward, sometimes
necessitating jumps upward into the darkness. In the Moon's light
gravity, Robin was a fantastic jumper, but the darkness made the
problem very disconcerting. It was a strange thing to have to leap
upward into a black void in hopes that what seemed like a wall in front
of you would turn out to have a top and be but a giant step upward. He
soared in the darkness, not knowing how near or how far the roof of the
tunnel was, feeling strangely disembodied, the monkey clinging to his
neck in transit.
He missed several such jumps, managed to avoid being bruised severely
only by the feathery softness with which he fell afterward. When the
going was straight, Cheeky would leap down and go ahead.
Suddenly he heard a screeching from the monkey. He stopped, flashed
his flashlight. The monkey was clutching the edge of a deep break, a
pit cut sharply across the floor of the tunnel. Robin quickly reached
the spot, scooped up Cheeky. His flashlight revealed the other side of
the pit several yards away. Turning its rays downward, he could see no
bottom to this crack within the tunnel. He shuddered, thinking what
might have happened had he gone into it. Then, gathering Cheeky, Robin
leaped.
He soared lightly across the abyss and landed safely on the other side.
He went on, slowly, carefully.
A spot of light appeared before him. He stared at it and continued
moving forward. The light widened, became the end of the tunnel, became
the entrance to something new. He hastened on and burst at last into a
new cavern-world, the world of the next bubble.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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