All along the corridor, utter night lay reclined like the body of a great, black cat, asleep with its head on its heavy paws. He went softly--to his dizzy mind it seemed as if at any moment his feet might sink into dark, sleek fur and a bristling, gigantic back hump up uneasily beneath them. The corridor seemed much longer than it did in daylight--why had he blown out the candle in his room? He had come some distance and still he could see no door with a white flower before it--he must have passed it, somehow, in this place where darkness was a mask of black satin across the eyes. He turned about, as he thought, and started to grope his way back, with his hands out before him. They touched against a wall. He grew confused and stopped, trying to fix the points of the compass in his head. He turned again, walked forward and came up against another wall--the corridor was gone--he was trapped in a narrowing box of velvet and ebony whose sides shut in around him like a closing fist. The ludicrous aspect of the situation did not strike him--he had passed beyond humor--his mind was a sharpened point that had given itself entirely to the pull of a dark lodestone and now wished with all its strength to touch that lodestone and cease. He stood perfectly still for a long moment before the unreasonable wall that had so suddenly risen up in front of him, angry, ridiculous, impotent, and more than a little afraid. Ah, he had it at last. He turned to the left and moved forward--right--the wall was gone. Sparta's chamber must be farther along, on the other; side of the cross-corridor--he would find it now. A sound would have helped him greatly--but there was no sound at all in the buried world through which he moved but thunder rattling the iron roof of heaven and the creeping noise of his own shoes. No, wait a moment. There was another sound. There was another sound, faint and distant, as if it came through mufflings of black wool, but distinct enough when he listened for it, a sound made by some creature in pain. He paused and listened intently. At first he could not fix its direction. It seemed to come at once from everywhere and from nowhere, as if the encompassing and shadowy air of night itself were whispering to itself in quietness a single, monotonous word of obscure anguish. Then at last, after much time, he traced it down. The sound came from above, it was the voice of the Minorcan girl, and she was calling "Water, water, water," very slowly and weakly, as if her throat were small with pain.