That night the search began. Day after day and night after night it continued, and always without result, until the young man’s heart grew sick within him, and the elder grew fierce with disappointed longing. In the hot afternoons, when the trees that grew thickly on the high banks of the Wye seemed to dance in a heat-mist; in the cool, summer nights, when the owls peered out with gleaming eyes from the ivy bushes which hung round the broken turrets, Rees worked on. He dug deep in the beaten earth which had collected in the ruined chambers. He clave with his pickaxe old beams that had fallen to the ground to become food for the busy worms. Not a grating in the ground that he did not examine; not a blocked-up doorway into which, by long and patient labor, he did not grope. Their way of working answered admirably. If any one from the neighborhood, or a party of tourists, approached the outer gate, Rees had instant warning from the watcher outside, and on the entrance of the visitors a handsome young man would be found seated on a broken step in the outer court or on a massive window embrasure in one of the damp, cool vaults below, attentively studying a bramble or a weed by the aid of a book or a microscope. One curious discovery he made in the second week of his labors. It was that the earth on which the castle was built possessed the property of preserving, almost uninjured by damp or decay, anything which was buried at a certain depth within its bosom. For he came upon the bodies of various dead pets, a guinea-pig, a rabbit, and a white rat, to which his brothers, in their childhood, had given honorable sepulture within the castle walls; and they were all in a perfect state of preservation, except that they had become dry and shrivelled. Amos Goodhare’s information here came in to account for this. He had himself visited certain caves in the neighborhood of Bordeaux, in which the bodies of a dozen dead monks were preserved, their habits still clinging, uninjured, round the shrivelled and wasted forms. He gave Rees a scientific account of the properties of the soil which produced this effect, to which the young man was too much excited to take heed. For he had got an idea into his head that the subterranean passage, if it existed at all, by which the unlucky Lord Hugh had tried to make his escape, must start from a certain large vaulted chamber, the base of which and part of the walls were formed in the rock itself. This chamber was the lowest part of the castle, and not being so much exposed as the rest to storm and siege, was in an excellent stage of preservation. It looked out through a deep-walled window over the river, which formed at this point a beautiful bend, with trees on one side and swelling meadow ground on the other. The original level of the floor was at present not easily to be found, as the rock surface was encumbered with stones and earth.