For a long time I stood, uncertain how to act. In the end I put my head round the first curtain at a venture, and drew it back as quickly. There were men in that place, half-naked men, grouped about the door of a furnace whose red light flashed dazzlingly upon walls and ceiling and gave its tenants the aspect of crimson devils. What the furnace meant or why it was built, I was soon to learn; for presently one of the men gave an order, and upon this an engine started, and a whirr of fans and the sucking of a distant pump answered to the signal. "Air," said I to myself; "they are pumping air from above." The men had not seen me, so quick was I, and so soft with the leather curtain; and going tiptoe across the cave I stumbled at hazard upon a door I had not observed before. It was nothing more than a big and jagged opening in the rock, but it showed me a flight of stairs beyond it, and twinkling lamps beyond that again. This, I said, must surely be the road to the sea, for the stairs led upward, and Czerny, as common sense put it, would occupy the higher rooms. So I did not hesitate any more about it, but treading the stairway with a cat's foot I went straight on, and presently struck so fine a corridor that at any other time I might well have spent an hour in wonder. Lamps were here--scores of them, in wrought-iron chandeliers. Doors you saw with almost every step you took--aye, and more than doors--for there were figures in the light and shadow; men passing to and fro; glimpses of open rooms and tables spread for cards, and bottles by them; and wild men of all countries, some sleeping, some quarrelling, some singing, some busy in kitchen and workshop. By here and there, these men met me in the corridor, and I drew back into the dark places and let them go by. They did not remark my presence, or if they did, made nothing of it. After all, I was a seaman, dressed as other seamen were. Why should they notice me when there were a hundred such in Czerny's house? I began to see that a man might go with less risk because of their numbers than if they had been but a handful. "I shall find Czerny, after all," said I to myself, "and have it out with him. When he has spoken it will be time enough to ask, What next?"