The men then waited while Gil went in and lit a lanthorn, returning soon after to make a sign, when one by one they all lifted and bore in their loads, following their leader for some distance to where the dim light showed an inner cavern, whose sides and roof had evidently been roughly chiselled out by the hands of man. Here the fresh additions to the stores of the place were neatly deposited, and the sailors sat down, while Gil busied himself in examining a bale or two that seemed to have been gnawed by rats. "I wonder where the skipper shoved that spying fellow Churr--him as we searched for?" said one of the men in a low voice to his nearest comrade. "Further in, somewhere," was the reply; "I thought I could smell him just now." "That be rats," said the other; "I know them well enough. But does the place go in far?" "I believe you, my lad. I once went in ever so far with old Wat and the skipper carrying lanterns." "Did you?" said the other, eagerly; "and what be it like?" "Like this here. All the same--hole after hole, with rough stone pillars to support it all, just as it must have been dug out." "Bah! chap, this was never cut out," said the other. "It came natural like." "Never cut out? Come natural like? Look here, my lad," said the sailor, rising and pointing to marks upon the wall that seemed to have been made with some rough tool. "Yes, but anybody might have done that," said the younger man. "You can think what you like," said the other. "I'm telling you what the skipper told old Wat, and you never knew him tell a lie. He said to old Wat, `My father found the way rabbiting when a boy, and forgot all about it till he felt the want of a place to store things in unknown to other folk, and then he recollected this.' He said it was made by folks as lived underground hundreds of thousands of years ago." "Oh?" said the other. "Yes; and they dug first one and then another, as they wanted them, and grew bigger in numbers, and that it went right in farther than they'd ever been on account of the bad air." "Same as down among the bilge in the ship's hold?" "That's so. The skipper's father was most stifled by it once when he tried to go right in." "But do they go right in?" The elder sailor struck the top of an empty barrel a sharp rap with the hilt of his sword, and the other's question was answered, for the sound went echoing into the distance till it died away. "It be a queer sort of place," said the other, with a half shudder. "Hang me if I'd like to be boxed up here along with Abel Churr, if the skipper's stowed him there." "Plenty of room and good water," said the other, pointing down to where the source of the stream outside ran trickling through the interstices of the stone, and formed tiny pools of limpid clearness. "Ugh! the place smells damp and cold, and I should expect to come out, if I was shut up here, all over blue mould." "Like a bit of ship's cheese, eh? Come along: here's the skipper."