The first flight of steps was quickly passed. The next stage was the flight of rugged, perpendicular notches with the handrail at the side. To his great joy, the tubing answered admirably. He got to the bottom of this flight of steps, and landed on the spot where he had picked up Sep’s insensible body, without having suffered the slightest inconvenience. Neither did his light go out, although he fancied that it began to burn rather dimly. Down there, in the depths of the earth though, surely his imagination was beginning to play some odd tricks with him. The ground, which was still hard and rocky, sloped down from the bottom of the steps towards what looked like the black round mouth of a cavern. It seemed to Rees that a thin mist, rising like curls of filmy smoke, came out of the blackness of this opening continually, and mounting slowly to just above his head, obscured his view of the walls. Was there some intoxicating property in this vapor, that, in spite of his precautions, perhaps began to cloud his brain? For, as he looked at the walls, he saw again the effect which had dazzled him before; on every side the rock shone like gold in the light of the lantern. He hastened to examine the walls, and found that this singular effect was merely produced by a sort of glaze which, as he could not doubt, the gases generated at this cavernous depth below the earth’s surface had, in the course of ages, deposited there. This, he thought, as, much excited by the strange sight, his eyes ran round the steep, glistening walls, might be another and very reasonable origin of the hidden gold story. Indeed, on this point he was now satisfied, and for a moment he hesitated whether, as he began to find it much more of an effort to draw breath, he should not make his way back to the upper air, and, if not relinquish further search, at least put it off for the present. One look into that cavern a few yards off, though, he must cast. His lantern, meanwhile, was certainly growing very dim. He had done everything so rapidly that only a few seconds had elapsed since he had began the descent. He now ran down the slope, but stopped short just in time, with a guttural ejaculation of horror. For the rock ended abruptly in a perpendicular cliff.